VICTORY OVER GUERRILLAS

Press, Volume LXXXIV, Issue 25580, 23 August 1948, Page 7

VICTORY OVER GUERRILLAS

GREEK ARMY’S CLAIM SOME FIGHTING STILL EXPECTED (N.Z. Press Association—Copyright) (Rec. 8 p.m.) LONDON, Aug. 21. “The Greek General Staff has announced that the campaign against General Markos’s rebels has ended,” says the British United Press correspondent in Athens. “No more military objectives remained to be taken, said the announcement, and operations were reduced to mopping up.” “According to a Greek General Staff spokesman, the Greek Army has reduced General Markos’s ‘Free Greece’ to 20 square kilometres along the Albanian border,” says the Associated Press correspondent in Athens.. “This area is being pounded by aircraft and artillery. The spokesman claimed that captured guerrilla equipment in the Purges area would be sufficient to equip two battalions, but the latest successes did not mark the end of the Greek civil war. “Nationalist authorities believe that General Markos may strike in the Vitsi sector with men reorganised and equipped in Albania and Jugoslavia, while manf pockets of Communist resistance remain elsewhere in Greece. Fifteen hundred guerrillas fled into Albania and later re-entered Greece near Vitsi.

“A General Staff communique reported' that guerrillas had started several strong diversionary actions in Macedonia and in central Greece, where guerrillas overpowered local garrisons. “Eight of General Markos’s supEorters who were sentenced to death y a military court ip Salonika, were executed to-day.” The Prime Minister of Greece (Mr Constantin Tsaldaris) announced that Greece would lodge a strong protest with the United Nations, alleging that Albania had allowed guerrilla forces to regroup in Albania after their defeat in the Grammos mountains.