Rezan, Maria. 2006. “Oute oi Germanoi den Ektelousan Kyriake” (Even the Germans Did Not Carry Out Executions on Sunday). In Martyries gia ton Emphýlio kai ten Hellēnikê Aristerá (Witness Accounts of the Civil War and the Greek Left), ed. Stelios Kouloglou, 281-85. Athens: Estia.
The restoration of the Constitution did not bring with it the expected end of executions. That came only in the wake of international outcry over the execution of Nikos Beloyiannis. Beloyiannis, known as the “man with the carnation” after a portrait of him done by Picasso, was a lawyer and member of the KKE (Kommounistiko Komma Ellados; Communist Party of Greece), who had been in and out of prison and exile since the Metaxas dictatorship and had participated in the civil war. Beloyiannis was accused of treason and executed, along with Nikos Kaloumenos, Demetres Batses, and Elias Argyriades. The execution, the last political execution in Greece, took place on Sunday, March 30, 1952. “Not even the Germans carried out executions on Sundays,” wrote Maria Rezan, a journalist and wife of the undersecretary to the prime minister, Andreas Iosef, who was the only member of the government to resign on account of the executions Rezan 2006: 282). To judge from political accounts at the time, later political analyses, and small talk recorded during interviews that I conducted in 2004, the general feeling was and still is that the execution took place because “the Americans” (an entity not as spectral and phantasmatic as such an invocation might initially appear wanted to replace Prime Minister Plasteras with Field Marshal Alexandros Papagos. The replacement was successful. The Plasteras government fell, and Papagos became the new prime minister. Two days before the execution, Iosef mentions, there was a meeting of the small council of ministers, among whom were Iosef and Minister of the Interior Konstantinos Rendis. By Iosef's account (2006: 286), the discussion concerned the outcome of the trial and what course of action ought to be taken. Rendis, according to Iosef, posed the question of executions by asking, “How many should we send to the firing squad? Four or six?” Iosef responded that these were executions that they were discussing, human lives, only to receive a “murderous [foniko]” look from Rendis. Iosef resolved to resign if the executions were to take place, and he did so when they did.
The executions apparently took everyone by surprise, not least of all the government itself, with a handful of exceptions. The minister of justice must have known about it, and officials at the American embassy, especially Ambassador John Peurifoy, must have known, as well. At the last moment, King Paul rejected the granting of a stay of execution, but since it was Saturday, everyone was expecting that the weekend might produce something positive. But the executions did take place, despite the fact that it was a Sunday, despite the government's promises that there would be no more executions, and despite assurances given to the lawyers for the defendants that the executions would be stayed. Moreover, there had been an international outcry about the staged and prearranged trial, convictions, and sentences, and for Demetres Batses a morally hefty bribe had been paid. According to Iosef, the information about the bribe came from an independent source: a well-respected journalist, Kostas Triantafyllides, had telephoned him and said that he had a message from Papagos to be transmitted immediately to Prime Minister Plasteras. When Iosef and Triantafyllides met later in the day, the latter revealed that the previous day Minister of the Interior Rendis had violated (viase: meaning “raped”) Batses's wife Lilian, while a high-ranking policeman named Panopoulos photographed the whole incident from behind a glass closet. Iosef says that he did not believe Triantafyllides's account (and for good reason, probably, since it was coming from Papagos to Plasteras) but Batses's wife confirmed it the day before the execution, saying that despite the fact that she had kept the terms that Minister Rendis had made with her in exchange for saving her husband, Rendis would still have her husband executed (Iosef 2006: 287).
Iosef, Andreas. 2006. “Den Skotôneis Anthrōpo gia tis Politikés tou Pepoithêseis” (You Don't Kill a Human for His Political Beliefs). In Martyries gia ton Emphýlio kai ten Hellēnikê Aristerá (Witness Accounts of the Civil War and the Greek Left), ed. Stelios Kouloglou, 285-89. Athens: Estia.
This assessment is explicitly mentioned by Andreas Iosef, a person who was as far away from Communism and the Left as one could be, having been a Chites (by his own account). His article entitled “You Don't Kill a Human for His Political Beliefs,” in Kouloglou, ed. 2006, is a testament to his political and personal integrity. The American Ambassador to Greece, John Peurifoy, participated at that time in the sessions of the Greek National Security Council.
In 1950, Kevin Andrews described John Peurifoy as “one of the architects of the hard-line policy toward Greece gradually formulating in the State Department, that was soon to see the establishment of Marshal Alexander Papagos as Prime Minister at the head of a strong Right-wing government” (Andrews, 1980: 294). Constantine Tsoucalas mentions that in March 1952 Peurifoy intervened in the Greek parliament's discussion concerning the electoral system that would be used for the upcoming elections. Most politicians favored proportional representation. Prime Minister Plasteras (“either through senile miscalculation or in a gesture of throwing down the gauntlet,” Tsoucalas comments) favored a majority system. Peurifoy then publicly declared, “'The US Government believes that the re-establishment of the simple proportional system, with its unavoidable consequences of the continuation of governmental instability, would have destructive results upon the effective utilization of U.S. aid to Greece. The US Embassy feels itself obliged to make its support publicly known for the patriotic position of Prime Minister Plasteras on this subject.' Lest this should not prove to be enough, he also threatened behind the scenes to suspend US aid if the proportional system were accepted” (Tsoucalas 1969: 125).
An interesting and disturbing set of meanings needs to be interrogated here. First, one might ask whether the violation of Lilian Batses by Rendis was indeed a “rape,” since she had agreed in advance to the sexual encounter in exchange for her husband's life. Such a question, however, would be misplaced. Rendis was on multiple levels in a position of power over Batses: he was the minister of the interior and held in his hand (potentially, if he and his government had not been under the thumb of the American Embassy) the power to stay Batses's execution; he was considerably older than Lilian Batses; and he was a man, in 1952, when rape had a less inclusive reference, if it was recognized at all. To question whether this was a case of rape would do injustice both to Lilian Batses's desperation and to the structures of gender, class, and power inequalities securely in place at that particular time. But there is also a violation of a different order: Rendis did not keep his word. He violated his own word as he was engaging in the violation of Batses (not to mention the more general violation of the ideas of justice and national sovereignty.)