The Unmentionable Issue

When the 18-nation Council of Europe meets in Paris this week to consider whether to suspend Greece from the company of Europe's democratic nations, the issue that is certain to be uppermost in the minds of the foreign ministers is one that they cannot even mention in the debate. It is the torture of political prisoners in Greece. For the past three weeks, a 1,200-page report prepared by a special committee of the Council of Europe's Human Rights Commission has been in the hands of the member governments. After two years of investigations, the commission charged that torture and ill treatment of political prisoners amounted to an "administrative practice" that has been "officially tolerated" by Greek government authorities.

Since the Greeks have until Feb. 18 to appeal the report's findings, the Council's members must officially ignore the charges for the time being. As a result, they will confine this week's discussions to a less volatile, though related issue: Did the military-backed regime have any justification for denying basic human liberties to its citizens? The Athens government of Premier George Papadopoulos and his fellow colonels is fearful that suspension from the Council, a powerless but prestigious European mini-U.N., would tarnish Greece's already marred image. Junta officials have threatened some European nations with trade reprisals if they voted against Greece. Even so, at week's end as many as eight nations were in favor of suspending Greece from participation in the Council until the colonels either step down or reform. But two crucial votes (those of West Germany and Ireland) were still uncommitted, and it was uncertain whether the suspension motion would carry.

Police Terror. Since they seized power in a lightning coup nearly 32 months ago, the colonels, who have pledged to restore Greece's ancient moral values, have reacted with outraged indignation to isolated reports of mistreatment of any of the 6,000 or so political prisoners who have passed through their jails. To be sure, no international agency had been able to establish that a pattern of police terror existed in Greece. At the insistence of the Scandinavian countries, however, the Council's Human Rights Commission set up an eight-man subcommittee in early 1968 to investigate charges that Greece was violating the rights of prisoners.

The subcommittee was headed by Giuseppe Sperduti, a professor of international law at the University of Naples. The British representative was Dr. James E. S. Fawcett, a former naval intelligence officer and onetime Foreign Office legal adviser who is now director of studies at the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London. The German member was Adolf Susterhenn, a former Christian Democratic delegate in the Bundestag.

At first, the Greek regime took part in the proceedings and produced officials who claimed the torture charges were either fabrications or Communist lies. One of the investigating sessions was held in Athens, and subcommittee members inspected police jails and questioned several prisoners. Last spring, however, after the regime refused to produce 21 prisoners and former prisoners who reportedly still bore marks of torture, the subcommittee broke off its investigations in Greece and shifted its hearings to Strasbourg.

After studying affidavits and interviewing 87 witnesses, the commission reported that it had turned up evidence of 213 cases of torture. In the 30 cases that the investigators were able to study thoroughly, they found conclusive evidence of torture in eleven and strong indications of mistreatment in 17. In its report, the commission took note of the sheer volume of complaints about torture. At one stage, for example, the International Red Cross reported that out of a group of 131 prisoners, 46 complained either of torture or ill treatment. Witnesses told of cruel treatment in many places throughout Greece, including Crete and Salonica. Most of the torture took place at the dingy headquarters of the Athens secret police on Bouboulinas Street (see box).

The Greek junta branded the charges as "calumnious" and referred to witnesses as "Communists who told Communist lies fabricated in Moscow." Referring to the 30 cases that the commission investigated thoroughly, the regime said that they had not involved "torture proper" but simply "brutality and ill treatment by police subordinates such as is reported daily in the most liberal democracies."

The commission disagreed. It rejected "the possibility that accounts of torture might be fabricated as part of Communist or antigovernment propaganda." It also rejected the junta's claim that its 1967 coup and subsequent rule by martial law were justified by the threat of a Communist takeover, noting that there was "only very slender evidence" of such a threat. In one document submitted by the junta, describing an allegedly Communist arms cache, the commission found that the words "wholly unserviceable" had been deleted. The guns that the colonels had dug up and submitted as evidence of a Moscow-sponsored threat had in fact been rusting in the ground ever since the end of the Greek civil war two decades ago.

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