THE BALKANS: The Road from Marsovia

To operetta-goers, the word for the Balkans had been “romantic”: in Marsovia, the Merry Widow’s imaginary country, the people waltzed in boots and dainty slippers, drank plum brandy and intrigued their way through ballrooms and bedrooms. To diplomats, the word had been “obscure”: ephemeral dynasties, parvenu politicians and illiterate courtesans played at running governments. To newspaper readers, the word was “confusing”: barely pronounceable, barely distinguishable lands constantly seemed to be staging wars, revolutions and political assassinations for reasons too involved for correspondents to explain.

In 1946, the Balkans were neither romantic nor obscure nor confusing. The situation last week was hideous, crystal-clear and simple. The Balkans formed a sharply contoured pattern of forces representing all that was worst in postwar Europe.

The Reds. Behind the Iron Curtain (into which a few peepholes had been drilled) the force was Communism.

In Bulgaria, the Fatherland Front’s Georgi Dimitroff continued his ruthless campaign against the opposition, checked slightly by the presence of U.S. political representative Maynard Barnes and by the fact that Bulgaria needs U.S. economic aid. For the second time, Moscow urged the Bulgarian Government to throw out Barnes; for the second time, the Government regretfully refused (and Dimitroff was promptly summoned to Moscow). On other issues, Sofia has been more obedient; it has dropped its old territorial claims against Comrade Tito’s Yugoslavia (for Mother Russia wants a united satellite family), has instead joined the general Balkan campaign for hunks of Greek territory.

In Rumania, Premier Peter Groza postponed elections until fall (by then he hopes to have liquidated the opposition). Despite vigorous U.S. protest, Reuben H. Markham, the Christian Science Monitor’s veteran Balkan correspondent, was expelled last week for “misrepresenting the situation in Rumania and spreading provocative rumors prejudicial to the cause of unity among the great powers.” Markham reluctantly crossed into Greece, retaliated by bitterly telling of concentration camps, political murders, meetings broken up by Red Army troops and Communists. Said he: “The worst that any tyrant ever did in the way of violence . . . is now being matched by the Communist-dominated Government in Bulgaria and Rumania.”

And the Black. Greece was the only Balkan country outside the Iron Curtain, and there the most dangerous force was the extreme and corrupted Right. The Government of Premier Constantin Tsaldaris was drifting closer & closer toward dictatorship, different only in color from Groza & Co.; a new “emergency decree” abolished habeas corpus, deprived all political “suspects” of the right of assembly, vested sweeping life & death powers in special summary courts. Tsaldaris ruled that the impending plebiscite, originally intended to decide the issue of monarchy v. republic, was to determine only whether King George or some other regent should take over Greece. (Last week, Foreign Secretary Bevin hotly protested against this maneuver.) In charge of the polls will be notorious Minister of the Interior John Theotokis, who has a way with elections; he organized the 1935 plebiscite on the monarchy, produced a 97.5% majority for the King. Reported one of his colleagues at that time: “Your Majesty, the results are really faked. The real percentage is somewhere about 25%. Nevertheless, we want you back.”

The Greek people saw that their cupboards were bare and that their jails were full. They saw that the British were apparently either unable or unwilling to stop the growing threat of civil war between Right and Left. The center parties were growing weaker, the Communists were gaining strength, and some British on the spot obviously thought it might be better to oppose the Communists with dubious allies than not to oppose them at all. The British themselves were at least partly responsible for this dilemma by failing to remedy economic misery (on which the Communist germ feeds) and by trying in 1946 to fight Communism with royalists and reactionary extremists. Such men and methods might have succeeded in Marsovia, but they we’re hopelessly archaic in the hideous, clear and simple 1946 Balkan political picture.