Monday, Feb. 14, 1949

Hole in the Head?

COMMUNISTS

The news from northern Greece was the best that gloomy Athens had heard for a long time. It was not a military victory for the government; it was a political crisis in the camp of the enemy. The rebel radio announced that General Markos Vafiades (TIME, April 5), the wiry, hairy soldier who had long commanded the northern Communists, had been "seriously ill" for months and had been relieved of his duties.

A government intelligence officer remarked that Markos' affliction was, no doubt, "a small round hole in the head." Although it seemed most probable that he had been executed by his fellow Communists, there was a slight possibility that he might have escaped into Yugoslavia. It made no difference. In one way or another, Markos had been removed from the scene.

The implications were bigger than the mere loss to the Communists of a valuable commander. Markos, it appeared, had run afoul of Moscow, and of the Moscow-liners in his own councils, by maintaining close contacts with Yugoslavia after Tito's break with the Cominform. Like Tito, Markos had fought his own battle for power, and having achieved it, he liked to run things his own way. As a soldier, he believed that his army needed the crossing points on the Yugoslav border, and the training and supply bases behind it. For a while, he made this view prevail. The Cominform, however, had a blindly loyal follower in Moscow-trained Nicholas Zachariades, secretary general of the Greek Communist Party. At a recent meeting of Cominform leaders in Sofia, Politician Zachariades was told to get rid of Soldier Markos. It was reported that several of Markos' loyal lieutenants had been purged along with him.*

Athens had long suspected that something was going to happen to headstrong Markos. Nearly a year ago, government intelligence officers got hold of a letter purported to have been written by Markos to Zachariades, in which he criticized not only the Balkan satellites but Moscow itself.

Last month the Yugoslavs began putting up a barbed-wire barrier along the border, across which men, arms and supplies had once freely flowed. If Markos was right--that the Albanian and Bulgarian backstops were not enough for Communist victory in Greece--then the tide of battle, which lately has gone against Athens, may soon turn the other way.

* Last autumn, Yugoslavia's noisy Deputy Foreign Minister Alfes Bebler said to TIME Correspondent Robert Low: "There's a difference between those of us who have fought for power and those who have had it handed to them on a platter by the Red army. If you have fought, you have different ideas and feelings about your rights. I think the Soviets will have to face this same problem with Mao Tse-tung in China, and perhaps with Markos in Greece."

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