The Shock Doctrine

November 9, 2007

"The fires that ravaged Greece this summer killed 67 people and destroyed some 642,000 acres of forest and farmland, thousands of houses and barns, and countless people's hopes and livelihoods. One tenth of Greece's forest cover is gone; large tracts of countryside are at risk of depopulation. 'These wounds will never heal,' Poulis mourns. 'There are a few young men in the village, but I'm 70. Am I going to plant my olives all over again?'

"For others, though - such as the two men at breakfast in my hotel who asked the names of the burned villages and wouldn't say what they were doing there - catastrophe means opportunity. 'You wait and see,' says a local magistrate. 'Lots of people will get rich from this disaster.'

"Now that the world's eyes have turned away, the Peloponnese is facing its own moment of what Naomi Klein has called "disaster capitalism". She has documented how big business turns disaster to its advantage - whether in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, Sri Lanka after the tsunami or Iraq since the occupation. In Greece, the scale may be smaller but the pattern is familiar: an inept government, which is slow to respond to the disaster; private initiatives rushing in to fill the gap; local officials seizing the chance to push forward pet schemes, and a resident population too bewildered to do anything about it. 'We're all in shock still,' says Maria Pothou, in the village of Makistos. 'And yet we have to try to organise ourselves and try to make decisions.'"
-Maria Margaronis, The Guardian

September 19, 2007
The Greek government is facing a major embarrassment within days of its re-election after it gave property developers the green light to build on an environmentally sensitive area next to forests ravaged by this summer's deadly fires.

Documents leaked to the Greek press show the finance ministry pushed through an agreement allowing building activity to begin in a protected area in the Southern Peloponnese, the region hardest hit by last month's blazes that killed 67 people and destroyed nearly half a million acres of forest and farmland.

Under heavy criticism for their handling of the inferno, the ruling conservatives blamed the inferno on unscrupulous property developers looking to exploit protected areas. Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis vowed to avoid past mistakes where building permits were handed out in fire-affected areas and land was rezoned for construction.

The agreement, revealed this week, covers a valuable coastal zone in Zaharo, the area that accounted for nearly half of the deaths during last month's "national emergency".
-Elinda Labropoulou, The Independent