The Press MONDAY, FEBRUARY 11, 1946. Greece

Press, Volume LXXXII, Issue 24797, 11 February 1946, Page 4

The Press MONDAY, FEBRUARY 11, 1946. Greece

Although the Russian charges against British policy in Greece were buried under the smooth statement with which, by agreement, Mr Makin closed the sometimes angry and ultimately anxious debate, it is not easy to feel sure that tile situation out of which the charges emerged has been much improved. A compromise was reached, enabling Mr Makin’s statement to dismiss this issue from the council’s table; it is by no means certain that the deeper issue, of the relations between Britain and Russia, has even been cleared, and, being clearer, will be easier to resolve. If so, it was not for want of plain speaking on Mr Bevin’s part. The Russian charge, in effect, was that the presence of British troops in Greece not only keeps up a dangerous political tension but actually endangers peace; and that it politically favours “ reactionary ” elements, which are protected by British arms. The two complaints are not really separable; for there is only one way in which international peace could conceivably be threatened by the presence of British troops, and that is through the accession to power of those monarchist and other sections of the Right which have in fact talked fiery nonsense about Greek territorial claims. It is such elements that the Russians suppose, or pretend, are. protected and favoured by British policy. There is only one scrap of evidence that appears to support this theory: it lies in the fact that, when E.A.M. withdrew from the so-called Government of National Unity and precipitated civil war, its close introduced a* period of terrorism and political victimisation for which the Plastiras Government was responsible, or which it did little or nothing to check. The appearance is entirely deceptive, however. The British Government would undoubtedly have acted with the same energy (and restraint) to counter an attempted coup d’etat by the Right as E.A.M.’s headlong action directed against the Left; and the sequel showed—for example, in Sir Charles Wickham’s transformation of the Greek police force—that Britain was resolved to tolerate neither terrorism nor political partisanship in the Greek forces of order. For the rest, though Mr Bevin told the council that his warning to Greece had been that political stability could not be reached without economic stability but told the House of Commons in November that political problems must be solved before those of economics and finance could be, the inconsistency is reconciled in the facts themselves, which are the plainest possible record of sustained and parallel efforts to harmonise and steady the country and prepare it to make its own free political decisions. If Russia does not share the task of supervising this preparation, the fault is the Kremlin’s. Those are the facts of the case, and it does not appear that Mr Vyshinsky seriously set himself to contest them. His strongest, but most confused, objection was to Mr Bevin’s countercharge—that Russian propaganda is steadily directed against Britain. The question is not whether this is true or false; the only question is, why the Russian press and radio take this line. So long as they do, it will be plain that relations between Russia and Britain are fundamentally insecure; and it will not be reassuring to say either that Russia has in the past suffered from hostile propaganda—as Mr Vyshinsky did say—or that London and Washington still sometimes blunder into giving the Kremlin and its voices an excuse.