Greece

ATLANTIC

April 1948

on the World today

THE cold war has various methods of conquest, and in Greece the pat tern is clearly established. By guerrilla bands — trained, equipped, and indoctrinated beyond the Greek border — it is intended that the country shall remain so disheartened and impoverished that the people themselves will accept Communism. In addition, there is the probability that the guerrillas will grow strong enough to bite off and hold a chunk of Greek territory which may then be recognized by the satellite powers as the proper Greek government.

By the administering of 300 million dollars’ worth of aid, plus an approximate 40 million dollars more from a separate relief and welfare law, the American Mission for Aid to Greece (AMAG) is expected to advise and assist (he Greek government in the restoration of a healthy economy, and in the creation of a military force strong enough to crush the guerrillas. The law established the mission in May, 1947, for a year’s duration. Its head, Dwight P. Griswold, arrived in July; its staff was assembled by September; and the first effects of its work are only now being publicly seen.

American hurry and Greek delay

In the summer of 1947, Americans held strong notions against interfering with the sovereign functions of the Greek state. Therefore the law did not contemplate a separate American administrative machine in Greece which would control the spending of the money from top to bottom; rather, a skeleton group of American experts would advise and lend technical knowledge to the Greek government. The allocation of the money having been decided, it then passed into the Greek administrative machine for handling. But because Griswold possesses a veto power upon the use of the money, he holds the final authority. Nevertheless, the law recognized that the Greeks have a government and the intent of the legislation was that they should do the governing.

Limited by policy, the program also was limited by time. The job of setting Greece on its feet was to be done by June, 1948. Half a year’s operation destroys the hope of restoring Greece economically, or in any other way, by June. It was a built-in fallacy which the Greeks understood in the beginning and which we understand now. On the civil side of AMAG are nine major divisions: reconstruction, agriculture, commerce, industry, public finance, public administration, public health, relief and welfare, labor. The small force — fewer than 150 Americans —surveyed their fields, set up their objectives, and went to work. By January the major part of the aid money had been committed, contracts let, and work started.

Yet with the exception of certain high-priority assignments, much of the physical job will run well beyond June 30, and in the areas of tax revision, currency stabilization, administrative reform, public health, relief, and in the basic agricultural and industrial planning, the program is a long-range one, running from two or three years forward.

The other basic reason for the slowness of the program lies in the method of our operation with the Greeks. AMAG is to advise and recommend; the Greek government is to decide and execute. The block to AMAG’s operations and to Greek national recovery stands here; for the political complexity of the Greek government is such that firm decisions are difficult to make or to enforce, and the administrative machinery of the Greek government is now so inefficient that the execution of any plan requires enormous wastages of energy.

The Greek citizen is and always has been one of the world’s most pronounced individualists. War and occupation appear to have strengthened this feeling of individual self-sufficiency at the expense of the ability to coöperate. During the Albanian campaign, the Greeks reached a high point of national unity, but during the occupation by the Germans — when for a period a thousand people a day were executed or died of starvation — life became a lonely struggle for survival.

Greek against Greek

Some of that personal isolation is still in them; and with it there seems to be, if testimony can be believed, a more than usual amount of distrust between Greek and Greek, which arose during the occupation days when the whispers of collaboration went around. The civil war following collaboration only intensified those sharp divisions.

The effect on the people is visible. North of Athens, in the Salonika region, are 420,000 refugees from the guerrilla area; and in Greece generally, one fourth of the people are on relief—a relief so meager that, no person is eligible for it until his income has dropped to one fourth of the amount necessary to support a subsistence diet. Yet little of this hunger and war and confusion can be seen in Athens. On warm days people collect at the sidewalk tables of cafés to talk, over their coffee, and to have their comfort. As in any other European capital, a good meal can be had for t he price, and among the rich the old speculation goes on. in movement of goods too bulky to conceal. At all these vulnerable spots a tax is applied; consequently Greece has possibly the most complex and unfair system on record.

In gold we trust

The merchant has an uncertainty of his own — the bit of paper called the drachma. This is his legal currency, behind which stands the full faith and credit of Greece; but in that faith and credit neither the merchant nor anybody else in Greece has any trust. Thousands of once comfortably well-off people have in their trunks packets of a previous drachma, also supported by the full faith and credit of their country, which was wiped out by a pen stroke in 1944. The Greek believes in nothing but gold— specifically in a gold sovereign once used by the British but long since abandoned. Upon that sovereign all value is based.

The drachma is AM AG’s primary economic problem. When the Mission arrived in Greece the drachma sold at 135,000 to the gold sovereign; by December, 1947, its value had shrunk to 200,000 to the sovereign. The present plan is so to stimulate t he entry of necessary goods through a controlled import certificate plan that inflation w’ill be checked.

Another major problem of AMAG is the creation of a dynamic Greek government. In its present form it lacks unity; it is touched with the same indirection which affects the rest of Greece. To give it order and motion is a most desperate need, for without a decent administrative system Greece can have neither economic health nor military success.

The individual fight to stay alive and get ahead is seen in the aggressive youngster, evading an ineffectual school system, who darts around with his shoe-shining box; it can be seen in the swarm of pushcart vendors selling the remnant of UNRRA foodstuffs, and in the merchant standing at the doorway of a store which often is scarcely more than an indentation in the building wall.

Guerrilla warfare has made a truly representative election in Greece a present impossibility. Therefore the existing coalition government of the Liberal and Populist (Royalist) Parties, under Prime Minister Sofoulis, probably has the broadest practical political base. Moreover, it does represent the honest wishes of both parties to furnish an instrument by which American aid can be made effective.

For Greece is a country of one-man operators — the farmer with his seven acres and the merchant with his little shop. There are almost no accountants in Greece, since books are seldom kept. The merchant scribbles his transactions on a slip of paper, not for the tax collector but for himself, and he holds his extra merchandise out of sight. Unable to collect from this source, the government bides its time until money must come momentarily above ground in transactions that cannot be cloaked and

Yet since it is a coalition government it cannot have the positive authority of a single-party administration. Its very composition — the ministerial posts carefully weighed out on political scales — makes a strong policy impossible. Within such a government the leaders of both parties feel themselves imprisoned, free neither to operate openly nor to resist openly. The result is slowmotion government and an increase of undercover political maneuvering. Whether a single-party government could do better at this time is another question. Greeks seem to doubt it.

The Communists ride the Trojan horse

It is supposed that about 20,000 guerrillas lie back in the mountain country of Greece, young Greeks who have left the villages willingly or by force. To fight this group, Greece has 180,000 men in the army and the National Guard plus 27,000 in the civilian National Defense Corps. With such advantage, why hasn’t the army stepped out?

It must be said that this is not an orthodox war. The guerrillas seldom defend fixed positions, seldom make last-ditch stands anywhere. They have surprise on their side. They creep out of the hills in small bands, strike the valley villages, kill, capture, and run. They have no problem of supply, for they live off the villages and they take their recruits an occasional woman along with the men — at the point of a gun. They are gone by the time the army comes up.

Neither is this a war with a common enemy that all Greeks can unreservedly hate. It is a civil war, Greek against Greek and neighbor against neighbor. There’s gunfire in front, but there are also spies and sudden bullets behind. It is a difficult thing to know who is loyal and who is not; and it is also a difficult thing for a Greek drawing his sights on another Greek not to remember that the man he’s shooting comes from the next village and was really not a bad man in former times.

The preservation of his country ought to be the stiffening factor in the army, yet it is possible that the issue is not so clear-cut to some of these young men in uniform. No doubt more than one man, looking upon the economics of the country and the political confusion of Athens, has some question concerning his own future, both his physical future if the guerrillas win, and his financial future if the government wins. Whatever the motives, the will to fighl is ev idently diluted.

All Greeks wish for a solution short of a bitterend fight. Nearly every Greek leader speaks of a conciliation policy which will draw back those guerrillas who are not paid-up Communists, and much hope was placed in an amnesty law which encouraged ihe erring brethren to return. But those guerrillas who might want to come back are impeded by two highly practical fears. They might be shot while surrendering; if they survived that first ordeal and returned to their v illages, they might be killed by secret local agents or by loyal natives who could not endure their original sin.

Civil or military, the story is the same. Here are wonderfully courageous and extraordinarily able people who through many misfortunes have lost their sense of security, who drift and know they are drifting, yet cannot fee! that sudden sea-change of spirit which will invigorate them and carry them forward. It is the Greek problem. It is also the problem of AMAG.