Angela --- rcollins at netlink.com.au
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Former Greek dictator Papadopoulos dies
ATHENS, June 27 (AFP) - Georgios Papadopoulos, who died in an Athens hospital at the age of 80 on Sunday, led the coup which installed a military junta in power for seven years in Greece.
Papadopoulos was the junta's strongman and remained the most abiding symbol of the so-called colonels' regime between 1967 and 1974, the darkest period in modern Greek history.
On Greece's return to democracy, he was arrested in October 1974 and sentenced to death for high treason and insurrection, a sentence later commuted to life imprisonment.
He never acknowledged the jurisdiction of the special military court which sentenced him and spent 24 years in Athens' Korydallos prison, stubbornly refusing to seek a pardon in the firm belief that he had nothing to reproach himself because he had saved his country from the danger of communism.
Efforts to obtain his release by right-wing and extreme-rightwing groups around the world, including France's former National Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, came to nothing.
He remained in prison until August 1996, when he was transferred for cancer treatment to Laiko hospital, where he finally died.
Born in 1919 in the Peloponnese, in southern Greece, he graduated from military academy in the 1930s. He was a second lieutenant in the artillery on the Albanian front the war between Greece and fascist Italy and joined resistance units during the Nazi occupation.
Promoted to captain, he was actively engaged in army operations against the communists during the civil war from 1947 to 1949.
After a fairly average military career according to his superiors, he was made a colonel in 1960 and put in charge of the counter-espionage service. It was from that job he and his colleagues launched their coup, toppling the government of Panayote Canellopoulos on the night of April 20-21, 1967.
One of the ruling triumvirate in the junta with colonel Nikolaos Makarezos and general Stylianos Pattakos, he was appointed minister to the prime minister's office, from which he simultaneously controlled counter-espionage, news broadcasting, propaganda, censorship and public administration.
After a failed counter-coup by royalists, Papadopoulos became prime minister in December 1967, from which position of power he installed a brutal dictatorship during which thousands of Greek dissidents were arrested, tortured, and deported, later organizing resistance to the regime from their places of exile.
King Constantine went into exile in December 1967.
In 1972 Papadopoulos added the title of regent to that of prime minister and awarded himself various important portfolios, including national defence and public order.
In 1973 he decided that Greece, still considered a monarchy, should become a "republic" and staged a referendum which appointed him president. The king was deposed and the monarchy abolished in December 1974.
Papadopoulos narrowly escaped an assassination attempt in 1967 but was finally removed from power in November 1973 after a revolt by students, brutally put down by army hard-liners led by general Dimitri Ioannadis.
Until the return of democracy on July 24, 1974, he was under house arrest.
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Papadopoulos junta: censorship, repression, torture
ATHENS, June 27 (AFP) - At first light on April 21, 1967, an obscure faction of Greek army colonels led by Georgios Papadopoulos, Nicos Makazeros and Stylianos Pattakos seized power in a lightning coup and set up a dictatorship that was to last seven years.
The putsch came just ahead of general elections set for the next day, April 28, which the Left was expected to win. The colonels said they wished to prevent a leftist takeover.
King Constantine accepted the coup, believing he could restore the status quo with the aid of military loyalists.
A state of siege was proclaimed and special military tribunals set up. More than 10,000 people were arrested in the first few days, and 6,000 were deported to Yaros, a rat-infested rock of an island in the Aegean Sea.
Repression became total, reaching into all sectors of activity. Parties were banned, censorship introduced and the secret police began torturing suspected opponents.
According to figures published later by the opposition, several thousand men and women were savagely tortured and 3,200 people sentenced to heavy prison terms.
The colonels appointed a former monarchist state attorney, Konstantin Kollas, as new prime minister but fired him after an abortive royalist coup attempt in December 1967. The king took refuge in Italy.
Papadopoulos appointed General Zoitakis as Regent and himself took over as head of government, gradually accumulating the offices of minister of defence, foreign affairs and public order.
His wild and confused speeches full of anti-communist vitriol, stressed the defence of "the Greek-Christian ideal," the Fatherland, the "pure race," and "Christian values."