Greece: Barbs of Defiance

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It was a blazing Athens morning, but the shades were tightly drawn in the modest second-story apartment in the residential section of Kolonaki. With urgent, hurried gestures, Panayotis Kanellopoulos, 64, ushered 15 visitors into his darkened living room. "We have only five minutes," he said. "Let us not stay here too long." Then the last constitutionally appointed Premier of Greece, who was overthrown, imprisoned and later released after the April 21 army coup, broke his long silence with a direct, head-on attack on Greece's military rulers.

"Today's authoritarian regime must cede its place to free political life," he told the foreign correspondents he had summoned. "The country will be exposed to dangers that will undermine and may even destroy everything if freedom is not quickly restored." The junta, he said, "underestimates the Greek people, and especially the youth, if they imagine that it is possible to intimidate them with arrests and sentences." Thus, unintimidated but clearly courting arrest, Kanellopoulos openly challenged the authority of the junta led by Colonel George Papadopoulos.

Afraid of the Dentist. Kanellopoulos' remarks, while by far the most significantly defiant to date, were not the most scathing. That honor was left to Helen Vlachos, 55, the acid-tongued Athens publisher who closed down her two newspapers to protest the junta-imposed censorship. In an interview with the Italian daily La Stampa, she was asked whether she was afraid of the consequences of her defiance. Replied Helen: "I'm more afraid of the dentist than I am of Colonel Papadopoulos." She then called the members of the ruling junta "simple people, a bit ignorant. All in all they are mediocre and colorless, except of course Pattakos"—the general who heads the Ministry of the Interior. As for him: "He is a mediocre man who acts like a clown." Moreover, said Helen, newly appointed Information Minister Theophylactos Papaconstantinou had told her when he was still an Athens columnist that "I feel like vomiting" in the presence of the colonels—and she had the tape recording to prove it.

The junta could not take the gibes, and Helen Vlachos was arrested. She was charged with insulting the authorities and disobeying military orders, for which she could get a maximum of eight years in prison, and released pending a trial before a military tribune, probably later this month. Nothing was known of the fate of Information Minister Papaconstantinou.

Not Too Bothered. The junta is feeling increasing opposition both at home and abroad—and in places it is beginning to hurt. Athens rocked with three separate explosions of plastic bombs in one evening. The largest group of Greek nationals abroad—155,000 workers and students in West Germany—are so anti-junta that they have applied an economic squeeze by refusing to send home their paychecks. From the safety of Denmark, Prince Peter, the cousin of King Constantine, recently called for the overthrow of the military government. The Council of Europe last week condemned the junta for its disregard of human rights, and the European Economic Community blocked a $10 million loan to Greece.