Only a few days after the most recent wave of fires, remaining forests fell prey to yet more of them, once again set by arsonists. The country is heading to a snap election and the government's proclamations of de-commissioning forest areas (thus allowing for building construction to take place) gave a golden opportunity to private capital and its arsonists to burn whole areas down to the last leaf.

This frenzy of burned forests has already left 62 dead, tens injured, missing, homeless; hundreds of thousands of burnt acres of land in the Peloponnese, Western Greece alone. The prefectures of Ilia, Arkadia and Messinia are still being destroyed by the fire. Up to this moment there are many still raging fires in the prefectures of Korinthia, Lakonia and Evoia.

The already extremely limited and hence priceless patches of green of Attica did not escape these "accidental" fires (including the neighborhoods of Cholargos, Papagou and Galatsi). Satellite image by NASA.

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The whole state apparatus has long abandoned whatever pre-emptive forest protection there ever was. In March, PM Karamanlis falsely claimed that his government was prepared to deal with forests during the summer. With their consciously extremely few resources they limit themselves to the role of a spectator - simply documenting the disaster.

In between debris, citizens burned alive, people abandoned and trapped between fire fronts, the PM has one meeting after the other looking to cover up the crime by making outrageous scenarios linking the country's anti-authoritarian scene (!) to the disaster.

Yet nothing surprises us any longer: It is, after all, this very same state apparatus that has been long specialised in methods of control, surveillance and repression. The chance of finding some political integrity within it sounds very much like a science fiction scenario...

[ Athens IMC archive on environmental destruction ]

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