Greece by Roderick Beaton

Author:Roderick Beaton [Beaton, Roderick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780241312858
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2019-03-07T00:00:00+00:00

RETRIBUTION

In Greece, at the time, the response was swift and deadly. The ashes of Smyrna had barely had time to cool before army officers among the troops evacuated to the nearby islands of Chios and Lesbos formed a Revolutionary Committee on 26 September. The Committee demanded the resignation of the entire government and the immediate abdication of King Constantine, as collectively responsible for the disaster. Before the ships carrying the revolutionaries had even reached Piraeus, a panic-stricken government had conceded all their demands. King Constantine left the country on the last day of the month, this time for good. His eldest son inherited the throne as George II. Some twelve thousand of the troops that had been so recently defeated outside Smyrna now marched into Athens. The Revolutionary Committee took over the government. The opportunity for a catharsis that might have swept away the vicious divisions of the last few years seemed quickly to fade. Within weeks the dominant forces behind the new military government emerged as loyal to Venizelos. The former prime minister himself kept his distance from Greece, but agreed to represent the regime abroad.

In the meantime, and in the face of horrified pleas from foreign governments and their representatives in Athens, a show trial was set up to convict the five politicians and one military commander deemed the most to blame for the disaster. The ‘Six’, as they have been remembered ever since, were shot by firing squad on the hilltop of Goudi, where the whole cycle of triumph and disaster had begun with the putsch back in 1909 that had first brought Venizelos to power. So ended the careers of former prime minister Dimitrios Gounaris; Foreign Minister Georgios Baltatzis; Minister for War Georgios Theotokis; Petros Protopapadakis, who had had the misfortune to be prime minister at the time; Nikolaos Stratos, a bitter personal enemy of Venizelos who had just had the portfolio for foreign affairs thrust upon him; and the army Chief of Staff, Georgios Chatzianestis.

The charge of high treason on which the ‘Six’ were convicted by a court martial was of course absurd. Nobody, the condemned men included, had ever had the slightest desire or intention to damage, let alone destroy, their country and its interests. But both the charge and the savagery of the sentence reflected exactly the language of accusations and counter-accusations that had been flying between Venizelists and their opponents since the early years of the First World War. ‘Treason’ had come to stand for the wrong interpretation of where the country’s interests truly lay. The ‘Six’ were obvious scapegoats, judicially murdered in a paroxysm of collective humiliation and revenge for failure. And, as has been observed, this bloodletting would only serve to leave the question of real blame for the catastrophe festering below the surface – for generations afterwards.20

This opens up the question of Venizelos’s own share of responsibility. For those who had feared and loathed his policies and his influence from the beginning, or been victimized during the years of the ‘Venizelist terror’, it was axiomatic that the arch-culprit had to be Venizelos himself.

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