Some Unhappy Anniversaries

With bunting and chants, Greece last week observed the seventh anniversary of the military coup that overthrew its democracy. This year there was an added fillip, resulting from last November's ouster of George Papadopoulos--the colonel who led the 1967 coup, eliminated the monarchy of King Constantine and became President of Greece--by even sterner, more authoritarian military men. Awkwardly linking the latest coup with the traditional day for celebrating military rule, some banners carried the message APRIL 21

AND NOVEMBER 25! THESE ARE YOUR CREATIONS!

For Greeks outside the army, there was not much to celebrate, and few civilians would want to admit any responsibility for the creations of the past seven years. General Phaedon Gizikis, 56, is the current President, but the real power is Brigadier Dimitrios loannidis, 52, an austere bachelor who heads the military police. loannidis is widely suspected of plotting the coup against Papadopoulos, mainly because the general believed that the country was drifting away from tight central control.

Under loannidis' cold eye, life has become even more repressive than under the harshest days of Papadopoulos' rule. Students are harassed by police, who constantly loiter on campuses and are suspected of having informers in the classrooms. The right-wing newspaper Vradyni, Athens' major evening journal, has been shut down for criticizing the government. Koumkan, a rummylike game adored by Greek housewives, is forbidden as degenerate; after a brief revival under Papadopoulos, the music of Marxist Composer Mikis Theodorakis is once more discouraged, as singers are told, "for your own good." The possibility that elections may be held some day is no longer seriously discussed.

The most ominous sign of the new repression is the reopening of the ancient prison on Yiaros, a bleak Aegean island 75 miles from Athens that has been used as a penal colony since Roman days. The island is legendary for its monstrous rats and vipers and a unique torture: jailers tossing a naked prisoner into a sack with a frightened cat and then dumping them into the chilly waters of the Aegean. Many a Greek has borne the scars produced by that experience. The hundred prisoners now held on the island are a mixed lot of political dissidents, including former Cabinet Ministers. The best known is George Mavros, 65, leader of the pre-Papadopoulos Center Union Party and a minister in six Cabinets. He was sent to Yiaros for publicly applauding cancellation of a courtesy visit to Greece by two British warships soon after Harold Wilson's election.

New Jingo. Papadopoulos himself no longer is under strict house arrest but lives quietly in a seaside villa rented from Aristotle Onassis. The suburban Athens house that Papadopoulos formerly occupied was recently rented by the bureau chief of the New York Times.

Along with their loss of freedoms, Greeks under the new regime continue to suffer from the economic decline that started while Papadopoulos was in power. Inflation is running at an annual rate of 35%; the price of gasoline ($2.50 per gal.) is the highest in Europe, and olive oil, a Greek staple, costs nearly twice ($2 a liter) what it did last year.

To distract the populace from such hardships, the regime has jingoistically renewed the ancient feud with Turkey. The Cyprus dispute has been revived, and there is a new argument over Turkish rights to drill for oil in the Aegean. Relations with the U.S. are also clouded. Last year, aware that the mood of the U.S. Congress was to cut off the 1973 grant of $15 million in military aid, the Greek government on its own eliminated it. Junta leaders, who have given up their American limousines in favor of Mercedes-Benzes, have blocked the U.S. Navy's plans to home-port a Sixth Fleet aircraft carrier in Greece. The Navy had already shifted other ships there, but the Greeks protested further moves. Defense Secretary James Schlesinger, in a masterpiece of bureaucratese, recently said that home-port negotiations would resume when there was "greater harmony in our mutual perceptions."

Harmony is not likely to come soon.

Neither the U.S. nor any other outside force appears able--or eager--to pressure the regime into giving its people more freedom. Internally, the only potential threat to the junta lies in the army's supernationalistic younger officers, who are known as Gaddafists in honor of Firebrand Libyan Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. The Gaddafists now support loannidis, but they could shift, as he did against Papadopoulos. Even if they do, however, the likely outcome would be tighter rule, and the Greeks would be no nearer democracy than they have been since 1967. For the foreseeable future, democracy has been effectively throttled in the land where it was born.

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