Year Zero (15 page)

The leftist impetus, however, was curbed, just as it was in southern Korea, in France, in southern Vietnam, in Japan, and in Greece, where Wilson arrived in the summer of 1945. He stayed in Athens at the Hotel Grande Bretagne on Constitution Square. The service was surly, to the point of hostility, and Wilson noticed bullet holes in the walls of his room. There was a reason for the surliness, for there was a stink hanging over Athens too, the stink of another betrayal.

The bullet holes need some explaining. There had been a large demonstration the previous December held by supporters of the National Liberation Front, or EAM, the partisan organization controlled by communists. The British Army was formally in charge of liberated Greece. Athens was held by a Greek provisional Government of National Unity which contained conservatives and royalists, as well as some leftists. Much
of the rest of the country was still in the hands of the EAM, and its armed forces, ELAS. Having fought the Germans, EAM/ELAS had expected to take over the government and revolutionize Greece. Conservatives, backed by the British, wanted to stop this at all costs, and this is what sparked the demonstration of December 3, 1944, the day, according to Harold Macmillan, when “the civil war began.”
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Actually, as Macmillan surely must have known, the civil war had already started a long time before. Greece was deeply split during World War I, when the prime minister, Eleftherios Venizelos, wanted to back the Allies, while King Constantine I and his military commander, Ioannis Metaxas, did not. Years of bitter opposition between royalists and “Venizelists” followed. In 1936, Metaxas became a dictator with the face of a banker and the brutality of a fascist caudillo. An admirer of Hitler's Third Reich, Metaxas “united” Greece, as the Father of the Nation, by banning all political parties, and throwing communists and other opponents of his regime in jail. To the relief of most Greeks, Metaxas died in 1941.

Then the Germans invaded. Supporters of the old Metaxas regime mostly collaborated, and the resistance was led by communists who had emerged from Metaxas's jails. Greek fascist battalions, egged on by the Germans, fought left-wing guerrillas who were helped initially by the Allies. There was much brutality on both sides. Many of the victims were innocent people caught in the crossfire.

But Macmillan was right: as far as the British were concerned, the real action began only in 1944, when British soldiers, reinforced by extra troops from Italy, fought the left-wing partisans who had fought the Germans just months before. Edmund Wilson's disapproval of this was widely shared, especially in the United States, where it was seen as another typically British imperialist intervention. But many people in Britain felt the same way; Churchill, though revered for his leadership against the Germans, was distrusted for his bellicosity against the communist partisans.

Harold Macmillan noted that in Greece, as in other places, “the resistance movements had been presented by our propaganda as bodies of
romantic idealists fighting with Byronic devotion for the freedom of their country.”
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The most Byronic hero was a man named Aris Velouchiotis. Aris rode through the mountains with his black band of partisans—black berets, black jackets, black beards. The romantic hero, who broke with the communists in 1945, was also a killer. Mass graves have subsequently been dug up in his areas of operation and have been found to contain the scattered bones of his political enemies.

The real issue after liberation, as in Italy (and China, and many other places), was the monopoly on the use of force. The National Liberation Front (EAM/ELAS) in Greece had agreed, after much negotiation, to lay down their arms, as long as right-wing armed militias such as the notorious Security Battalions, set up under Nazi occupation, did the same. The government's aim was to incorporate the best elements from both sides in a national army. According to EAM/ELAS, the government failed to stick to its bargain; even as the left demobilized (up to a point), the right was allowed to retain its firepower. Quite understandably, this is remembered by many former ELAS fighters as a rank betrayal. One partisan recalled rounding up a group of collaborators in 1944. Instead of killing them, however, they were handed over to the police. A bad move, as the police proceeded to give them guns and let them go. For the partisans, defeated in 1945, the moral was clear: “Those who had said ‘kill them' were able to point out that the second round of fighting, the Civil War, wouldn't have happened if we had killed all the fascists.”
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This, then, was the febrile atmosphere in Athens, whose traces Edmund Wilson still noticed in his hotel room in 1945. On December 3, 1944, crowds on Constitution Square, with women and children marching in front, approached the Hotel Grande Bretagne, where the provisional government was holed up. It is claimed that they were about to storm the hotel. The view Wilson received from left-wing sympathizers, shared by most Greeks at the time, is that the majority of peaceful protesters kept marching on while the royalist police opened fire and killed and wounded about a hundred people. The next day, when the protesters filed past the hotel again, in a funeral procession this time, royalists killed up
to two hundred more unarmed citizens by firing guns from the hotel windows.

Macmillan had a somewhat different take, as one might expect. The “so-called civilian crowd,” he recalled, “contained many fully-armed ELAS guerillas,” and the fatal shots were probably fired by a communist agent provocateur.
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Even if the truth of the tragic event remains elusive, two things are hard to dispute. The communist-led partisans were very ruthless operators who had already killed a large number of real or alleged collaborators and “class enemies” before Greece was freed from the Germans in October 1944, and continued to purge and kill for some time after that. The second truth is that the Greek left had ample reason to feel betrayed.

Communists and leftists were the backbone of anti-Nazi and antifascist resistance in many countries. In Greece they monopolized the resistance by violently purging everyone else. In the countryside, EAM/ELAS had set up a kind of guerrilla state, with people's courts to deal with all enemies of the revolution. A British officer stationed in Greece in September 1944 wrote about the communist “reign of terror” in Attica and Boeotia. “Over 500 have been executed in the last few weeks. Owing to the stench of rotting corpses, it is impossible to pass near a place by my camp. Lying unburied on the ground are naked corpses with their heads severed. Owing to strong reactionary elements among the people [ELAS has] picked on this area.”
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So there was a good reason to fear the consequences of a revolution in Greece. Bringing back King George II, a pet project of Churchill, whose monarchist lectures irritated even some Greek conservatives, was not the best idea. George II's short reign in the late 1930s coincided with the brutal right-wing dictatorship of Ioannis Metaxas, and there was little popular nostalgia for that.

But given the fear of communism, the British felt that they had no choice but to help the government in Athens fight the leftist partisans. The fighting lasted five weeks at the beginning of 1945. Up to twenty thousand “class enemies” were deported by ELAS, and often murdered
after forced marches into the mountains. On the other side, many suspected leftists were deported by the British to camps in Africa. The fighting was so vicious on all sides that a negotiated peace in February was greeted with great public relief. Churchill appeared on the balcony of the Hotel Grande Bretagne, with the archbishop of the Orthodox Church, and spoke to a huge, cheering crowd: “Greece for ever! Greece for all!”
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It was but a lull in the action. The Greek civil war would resume the following year and last for another three years. But even before that, almost as soon as Churchill had finished his rousing speech, another form of revenge began, a counter-revenge, this time against the left. Right-wing paramilitary forces and gendarmes went on a rampage. Communists, or suspected leftists, were arrested without warrants, beaten up, and murdered or locked up in huge numbers. The National Liberation Front issued an appeal drawing the world's attention to “a regime of terror even more hideous than that of the Metaxas dictatorship.”
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By the end of 1945, almost sixty thousand EAM supporters were in prison. These included women and children, so many indeed that special detention camps for women had to be built. The common charge was crimes committed during the occupation. But crimes committed by former Nazi collaborators, or the right-wing security battalions, went largely unpunished.

Harold Macmillan and Edmund Wilson came to Greece from very different perspectives, one as the British minister resident, the other as an American literary journalist, but on one thing they agreed. Greater efforts should have been made to split the democratic left from the communist revolutionaries. Macmillan thought that “a moderate, reasonable, progressive policy” could have peeled off “the vague, radical element from the hard, Communist core.”
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In Wilson's view, England should have “helped the leaders of EAM to detach themselves from the Soviet entanglement and keep in order those wilder elements whose fierceness, in the days of the Resistance, the British had been only too glad to abet.”
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The pity is that any such efforts, even if the will had been there, were quickly smothered in a thirst for vengeance, encouraged by political forces seeking their advantage in stirring it up.

•   •   •

LIBERATION IS PERHAPS
not the right word to describe the end of the war in colonial societies. Most Asians were more than happy to be rid of the Japanese, whose “Asian liberation” had turned out to be worse than the Western imperialism it temporarily replaced. But liberation is not quite what the Dutch had in mind for the Dutch East Indies in 1945, or the French for Indochina, or the British for Malaya.

American plans for the Philippines were more accommodating, and Lord Louis Mountbatten, Supreme Allied Commander in Southeast Asia, had some sympathy for Asian aspirations towards national independence. But the Dutch and the French wanted to restore the prewar colonial order as soon as possible. Even Dutch socialists, who were not unsympathetic to the Indonesian desire for independence, were afraid that the Dutch economy, badly damaged by the German occupation, would collapse without the Asian colonies. In the popular slogan of the time, “Disaster will be our cost, if the Indies are lost” (“
Indië verloren, rampspoed geboren”
). The most the relatively progressive Dutch government would concede to the Indonesian nationalists was a degree of autonomy under the Dutch crown. And there could be no truck with Indonesians who worked with the Japanese.

This made the question of collaboration and revenge rather complicated, for there had been considerable enthusiasm among Southeast Asians, at least in the early years of the war, for the Japanese propaganda of “Asia for the Asians.” To activists such as Sukarno in Indonesia, working with the Japanese was the best way to get rid of the Dutch colonial masters. But in Dutch eyes, this made Sukarno a collaborator with the enemy. There was no question of negotiating Indonesian independence with him after the war; on the contrary, the Dutch were convinced that he should be punished as a traitor.

Asians, too, were consumed by a rage for vengeance in 1945, but this was not always directed at the European colonialists. Vengeance was often more indirect, aimed at other forms of collaboration that preceded the
Japanese occupation. As was the case in parts of Europe, the victims of Asian vengeance were often unpopular minorities, especially if they were thought to be privileged, richer, and in league with the Western colonial powers.

The Chinese, often called “the Jews of Asia,” took the brunt of Japanese ferocity in Southeast Asia. In Malaya, for example, the Malays were preferred to the Chinese, whom the Japanese distrusted. Chinese merchants benefited from Western colonialism, or so it was thought. And so the Chinese had to be crushed, while the Malay elites were promoted in the civil service and the police. Not that Malay or Indonesian peasants and workers were necessarily well treated; Indonesians forced to work on Japanese military projects died in huge numbers in even more miserable circumstances than most Western POWs. The countryside was often ravaged, leaving millions of peasants destitute; the cities were plundered, deprived of minimal services, the streets ruled by criminal gangs.

Japanese rule in Southeast Asia was brutal, and yet a new assertive spirit had seeped into people who had tended to adopt an attitude of surly colonial submission before. Western powers had been humbled by Japan and shown to be vulnerable. Hundreds of thousands of young Malays and Indonesians were trained by the Japanese as soldiers in auxiliary forces, militias, and various militant youth organizations. This gave them a quite unaccustomed sense of pride. Exploiting the common sense of humiliation and inferiority among colonized peoples, the Japanese deliberately stirred up anti-Western, as well as anti-Chinese, feeling.

Much of the anti-Japanese resistance in Malaya during the war came from the Chinese. Inspired by the Communist Party in China, but also perhaps by the internationalism that made communism attractive to minorities elsewhere, resistance was led by the Malayan Communist Party. Although the MCP was not particularly anti-Malay, almost all its members were Chinese. Its military arm was the Malayan People's Anti-Japanese Army (MPAJA) which, in August 1945, had about ten thousand men under arms who controlled much of the countryside, forming a state
within a state, with its own rules and laws and given to widespread purges of unsympathetic officials, rather like the communist guerrillas in Greece.

After the war, revenge was swiftly taken by members of the Anti-Japanese Army on local collaborators with the Japanese, most of whom were Indians and Malays; mayors, policemen, journalists, informers, former mistresses of Japanese officials, and other “traitors and running dogs” were dragged through the streets, displayed in cages, summarily tried in “people's courts,” and publicly executed. This put the fear into many Malays. And when the British colonial government, which had worked closely with the MPAJA against the Japanese, decided in October that Chinese should be granted equal citizenship, Malays, understandably, were frightened of losing control over their own country, a fear that has been exploited by Malay politicians to this day.