This week marks six months since tragic wildfires in Greece killed 68 civilians, damaged 4000 homes, and charred approximately 178,000 hectares. Has there been any progress?

A week after New Democracy was re-elected, Environment and Public Works Minister George Souflias set the tone by opting out of pre-campaign talk to set up a separate Environment Ministry, stating that he saw no need and no conflict in his position in which “sustainability and development must coexist.” He vowed to stop the development of fire-ravaged beachfront property in Zacharo, though the mayor and officials later signed off with no opposition. Experienced fire chiefs were replaced with amateurs, and a new law to destroy new structures on illegally seized property was tabled, but did not include provisions to deal with established homes and has only a three-member committee to monitor the entire country, where valuable land around tourist and urban areas is confirmed to be dwindling.

A few homes have been demolished, but many projects are going forward without the compulsory presidential decree on land use. This includes a government-approved soccer stadium in Elaionas that will strain natural resources, and a two-story shopping mall with four-story car park in the largest remaining green area of Zografou in Athens, which will create pollution and put the municipality in serious debt. Mayors have also gone to court seeking the inalienable right to build on Mount Parnitha, one of the last remaining forests providing oxygen in a capital famous for its pollution. The only protests have come from local residents and environmental activists who can do little to stop the rich and powerful, as a forest official found out when he was fired after attempting to stop land grabbing in Corinth.

Lawless land grabbing started when the dictatorship ended in the 1970s, and Article 24 was written into the Constitution to stop it. It bans any alteration to forested areas apart from reasons of national interest, and automatically schedules burnt or cleared areas for reforestation. Any construction on forested areas is therefore illegal. Later in 1983, however, the 1337/83 Tritsis law granted protection to anyone willing to declare their home illegal, and those who did not still believe that paying fines legalizes their property. Many Greeks feel Article 24 encroaches on their freedom and escape punishment for building on razed land by quoting a 2003 law, which states that a home cannot legally be established as being in a forest if there is no forest registry. And Greece is one of few countries in the world without a forest registry.

There is no real priority on creating a forest registry that Souflias says will take 4 years, as it would greatly unsettle those who have grown rich from illegal property totaling an estimated 350,000 hectares with 1.7 million structures. One such beneficiary is the Church of Greece, which has inherited property from faithful parishioners over decades and seized expanses of land vacated by Ottoman nobles after the War of Independence in which priests were rulers of many villages and the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate had control of schools and courts. As recently as January, monks at Mount Athos were accused of staking illegal claims to land in a Halkidiki resort area. The Greek Orthodox Church is the second largest landowner in both Greece and Israel, though it ironically pledged only 500,000 euros to Greek citizens of which 99 percent say they are Orthodox faithful.

And what about the people? Private donations poured in to help them — initially reported to be 300 million euros in September, revised to 151 million in October, then 160 million in February — but the only money spent as of January was 2.7 million on anti-flood works built by unsupervised, untrained military troops without equipment, and emergency support for farmers. Most victims remain homeless and live in prefabricated homes because of applications mired in red tape. In addition, volunteers on the ground report that aid is not getting to those who need it most, with supplies being taken by non-victims.

The EU approved more than 2.2 billion specifically for areas affected by fires to offset the 2.1 billion in damage, though the Greek government claims to be in debt and deficit. There is also 91.6 million in unclaimed EU funds for environmental projects that have not yet started, though six coal-powered plants are being built and a national zoning plan was unveiled to pave the way for more land grabbing. EU Commissioner for the Environment Stavros Dimas publicly expressed his disapproval for the lack of progress in Greece and called for greener measures, but was accused of ingratitude to a country that made him and called unpatriotic for not sweeping his homeland’s shortcomings under the rug.

I know how he feels. No doubt I’ll be told to burn in Hellas for not doing the same.

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Written by Athena D., a Greek-American lawyer practicing in the state of Illinois, USA

Greece is not only one of few countries that does not have a forest registry, but also one of a few countries where the laws of the state make it illegal for any citizen, Greek or foreign, to live in a wooded area or land that has trees on it and often even shrubs. Many Greeks feel that this prohibition is so essential to their national identity that they have not only passed this prohibition onto a variety of laws, but have also included it as a separate article on their Constitution. Being a lawyer in America who purchased a 2-acre wooded lot in Illinois in which I built my house and now live on, just like many of my neighbors, this seems absurd.

Also, in the spirit of Greece’s so-called “forest laws” and the Constitution I mentioned previously, Greeks also universally practice what the U.S. would call “regulatory taking,”

that is, the confiscation of private land without paying compensation to the individual by explicitly claiming that a land has trees on it and the owner is prohibited from using his land in any way. Thus, the land is rendered useless to the owner by a forest service decree and only serves the public purpose of providing a natural view for neighbors, travelers, hikers and city dwellers who live at a density of 19,000 inhabitants per square kilometer of land, which ironically was also once forest.

This law not only enjoys considerable public support, but is also currently undergoing considerable expansion to impose “regulatory taking” concerning not just land with trees, but any land that the public deems as having natural beauty or another desirable feature. And the public is being represented by the zoning bureaucrats, an emerging breed of public employees in Greece with their own union.

This is a typical case of what can happen to any land owner in Greece. Somebody — a Greek or foreigner — inherits a piece of land from his parents or purchases a piece of land to someday build a house for himself or his children. At any arbitrary point in time, say close to the time when the owner has finally collected enough money to put his building plans into action, the state (that is, the public) comes and declares the land “a zone of natural beauty,” a designation that prohibits any construction on the land, as well as most other uses, except perhaps occasionally allowing it as pasture for goats. The owner is given no compensation and has no recourse, since this is now a land protected by law. Even if the owner is not hit by zoning condemnation, he must first have his land examined/surveyed by the forest service when he is prepared to eventually build on it. The forest service comes out, and if there are trees on it (sometimes even shrubs are enough) or if trees were grown on it in the past century based on aerial photos, then deems the land as forest land without the possibility to build or use it another way. In this case, goats are not even allowed inhabit it as pasture – I’

m serious! There is a law preventing the use of land where trees grow from being used as pasture, including the owner. In this case also, the owner is given no compensation and has no legal recourse against the state or against the whim of the public.

I must stress that I am not speaking about a few isolated cases. This is a routine, ongoing practice of the state. The individual has no recourse against the state if he loses land in this fashion. There are currently more than 400,000 appeals against the state for land confiscated because trees are growing or grew at some point, and thus the public demands that these owners surrender the land as it’s too precious to be left in private hands.

To be fair, in this “steal what you can”

environment, many individuals do the opposite and frivolously stake claim and often acquire title to public land, especially land adjacent to large urban areas where prime property is valuable. However, what is the bigger problem? The few individuals that behave like thieves or a state that has the authority to behave like a thief with impunity? How can individuals be expected to follow the law when the state itself (that is, the public) acts collectively as thieves by taking private land without offering compensation?

National Parks in Greece, for example, are not created by the government buying private land and turning it into a park, as many reading these pages may imagine. National parks in Greece are drawn on a map by a bureaucrat, who represents the public interest, will and whim somewhere in a government office and then publishes it in the Government Gazette as a decree. Basically the decree says, “We have formed a new national park enclosed by the polygon defined by the following GPS coordinates (table follows), and any owner who has land within this area becomes part of the national park and is prevented from using his land in any way…”

Those who have already developed their land must forfeit any future development (i.e. If you want to add a garage to your house on 10 acres, you no longer can).

In a democracy — and Greece is a democracy — the laws of the state normally represent the will of the collective, which would be the public or at least a majority of the public. So when the state operates in a land raiding fashion by confiscating private land, it means that a majority of the public has the same mentality.

There is enough land in Greece for all families to be able to live on one acre or more of land and still keep 95% of the Greek landscape uninhabited; a simple arithmetic calculation shows that. However, Greeks insist on living at a density of 19,000 inhabitants per square kilometer and are adamant about preventing a farmer with 10,000 square meters of forested land from building a 120 square meter house for his son. No wonder so many people are sitting with match in hand, waiting for the right combination of heat, drought and wind.

I wrote this because many hearing this summer’

s news about wildfires in Greece and reading these pages, may get the impression that the issue is about a general environmental insensitivity of Greeks. Far from it, it is mostly an issue of property rights and their violation.

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or “Environment” or “Politics.”
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All views and rights reserved by the author. Text was copy edited by Kat for grammar, spelling and flow only.

Most of the country is caught up in costumes and recovering from consuming vast quantities of charred meat on Tsiknopempti.

But how many of you remember that this week is the 6-month anniversary of the earth in Greece being charred?

“You let Greece turn to ashes…why?”

One of the busiest days of the year for Greek police is November 17, a historical day commemorated with protest marches in Thessaloniki and Athens, ending at the American Embassy in both cities.

It is a day to remember an uprising by Athens Polytechnic students against the military junta’s dictatorship, which ended in the early morning of November 17 when a tank plowed down the university’s steel gate to silence those barricaded inside.

It is a day to remember those left dead or injured by snipers in its bloody aftermath.

It is a day to remember how the impassioned efforts of a few can effect change for the greater good of a nation.

What followed

Indignant junta hardliner Dimitrios Ioannides staged a counter-coup just days after the uprising was quashed, deposed the president in power and reinstated military law. He followed this with another coup that overthrew the president of Cyprus and left the island vulnerable to attack by the Turkish army, which divided and has occupied it since 1974.

The regime would eventually fall, thus restoring democracy and Parliament with Constantine Karamanlis as prime minister.

Alleged role of the USA

Protest marches end at the American Embassy because it is a long-held belief that the USA instigated, embraced, conspired with and/or funded the military junta. Anti-Americanism is fueled as a result.

While Henry Kissinger admitted a geopolitical interest in keeping Andreas Papandreou from taking power and was conflicted over the Cyprus issue, the evidence presented in declassified documents from the Nixon presidency is circumstantial at best.

Certainly, the USA had political and military motive, but no intent or malice. America was trying to avert a coup, not facilitate one — at most, it is guilty of inaction and acquiescing instead of using its intelligence and resources to intervene.

Modern day

November 17 is a holiday for all universities and schools.

Athens Polytechnic is now National Metsovion Polytechnic, named after the city in which its benefactors hail, and closes on November 15 to commemorate the day students first occupied the university in 1973. Wreaths are laid on a monument dedicated to students killed during the Greek Resistance in 1941-1945.

Thousands of police and MAT (riot police) officers are dispatched to manage protest marches, which sometimes turn violent and have in the past seen anarchists take hostages and firebomb banks.

“The Polytechnic uprising, as all other significant historic events, was the result of a coincidence of circumstances. One thing led to another, culminating in three spectacular days in November 1973…

An entire population of 9 million, which wants to show that it stood up to those who deprived it of its freedom, is actually indebted to the youthful boldness of just a few…

The anniversary of the Polytechnic uprising has gone the way of all traditions. It has become a senseless litany of ambitions, a celebration that only has relevance to the past and not the present, much less the future. Unfortunately, the Polytechnic died many years ago. We simply carry its corpse around the streets of Athens every November. May it rest in peace.” — Kathimerini

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Sources

- “Were the eagle and the phoenix birds of a feather in the junta?” — Louis Klarevas
- “American Duplicity: How America created the junta“
- “The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House” — Seymour M. Hersh
- “Are the Greeks anti-American?” — Southeast Europe Project
- “Easy myths about November 1973” — Kathimerini
- “Arxizoyn oi ekdhlwseis gia to Polytexneio” — ANA-MPA
- “End of a political tradition” — Kathimerini

Photos from Milos Bicanski, Getty Images and Keystone/Getty Images

It was the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month when an armistice — or end of war — was reached between Allied forces and Germany in 1918, thus putting a halt to fighting on the western front during World War I, a war that tallied a worldwide total of 19.7 million casualties.

After World War II and another 72.6 million dead, President Dwight Eisenhower changed the name of Armistice Day to Veterans Day to honor American veterans of all wars and the British Commonwealth of Nations changed it to Remembrance Day. In South Africa and Malta, it is known as Poppy Day.

Red poppies originate from “In Flanders Fields,” a poem by Canadian military physician John McCrae, illustrating their resilience to bloom in battlefields of Flanders, Belgium during WWI.

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved, and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

On a day that has become more about retail sales in the U.S. and debates about the war in Iraq, let’s put aside our differences and turn attention back to the real reason and real people who served with pride and love of country. Many veterans in America also need help in the face of homelessness, unemployment and medical care.

Take pause, show gratitude, honor their sacrifice.

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Photo from brighterexpressions.com