Which are the large-scale geopolitical conflicts nowadays and how are they linked to the rise of nationalism? Is nationalism a temporary phenomenon? How does it affect working people (either existing workers or migrant ones)? What should the movement do?

ReInform, an anticapitalist political group of Greeks in the Netherlands, invites you to discuss together all these matters on Sunday 2 December in NieuwLand (Peter Nieuwlandstraat 93, 1098XN, Amsterdam). After our discussion we will enjoy some traditional Mediterranean and Eastern sounds and tastes.

Program:
16.30-18.30 | Short introductory talks by Manos from ReInform and Max from Internationale Socialisten
From 18.30 onwards | Culinary and music Mediterranean and Eastern exchanges with the open collective Aman Molli

Due to this issue there is currently a new outburst of nationalist rhetoric in public discourse in Greece.  The common strategy of ‘Divide & Conquer’ is being employed in Balkans turning in this way the peoples of two countries against each other. In this act of ‘Macedonian’ drama, the showcase of national interest is misleading people in Greece in demonstrating against a created external common enemy, using as frontispiece the name of Macedonia. And because of this situation, people who are now resisting or just speaking publicly against this nationalistic rhetoric are being considered non-patriots or even traitors.

On the 21st of January, various nationalist groups in Greece managed to gather approximately 90.000 people (who came with buses from every part of the country) in Thessaloniki demanding the term ‘Macedonia’ not be included in the new name of the neighboring country. Under the exacerbated nationalism that has prevailed in the country, numerous far-right and fascist groups have taken advantage of this situation by attacking political squats and collectives that fight against state nationalism.  During that demonstration, these parastatal groups attacked the libertarian social collective of ‘EKX Sxoleio’ and afterwards they set fire to the anti-authoritarian squat of ‘Libertatia’. It is worth noting that these attacks were tolerated by the nearby police forces, a fact that shows once again the collaboration of fascists with the police and unmasks a government that claims to be ‘left’ and ‘in favor of people’.

The whole issue of the name of Macedonia works also as a disorienting pseudo-dilemma hiding the continuing harsh neoliberal attack against the rights of the people of both countries. At the same time that ‘national rallies for the name of Macedonia’ are organized in Greece, omnibus bills that extend the austerity policies are being voted in the parliament, auctions of primary residences (even of poor people) have started and the workers’ right to strike has been severely restricted.

It is also worth remembering that the political forces that present themselves as ‘patriotic’ by supporting the nationalist rallies and claiming that they ‘care’ about Greece:

• are the very ones that when they were in power promoted policies that were destructive for the natural environment of the country
• have sold natural resources and public companies to domestic or foreign private companies
• have violated every possible regulation to facilitate the disastrous (from an environmental and financial perspective) investment of the Canadian company El Dorado Gold in Skouries-Chalkidiki
• have taken decisive steps to commercialize and privatize drinking water in Thessaloniki.

We promote internationalism and class solidarity with Balkan people against the rise of nationalism and continuing neoliberal policies in both countries. Our belief is that people of both countries should fight against the degradation and exploitation of our lives by the neoliberal capitalist assault instead of demonstrating against each other. In fact, this is the only way to ensure a long-lasting peace in the region.

WE CONDEMN THE FASCIST ATTACKS ON RESISTING POLITICAL COLLECTIVES

WE STRUGGLE AGAINST NATIONALISM THAT CAPITALISM PROMOTES IN ALL COUNTRIES

30 January 2018

ReINFORM

Source of featured image: ThePressProject

On 21 February 1973, law students went on strike and barricaded themselves inside the buildings of the Law School of the University in the centre of Athens demanding the cancellation of the law that imposed drafting of “subversive youths”, as 88 of their colleagues had been forcefully drafted. The regime ordered the police inside the Law School and many students suffered police brutality. The events at the Law School are often cited as the prelude to the Polytechnic uprising.

On 14 November 1973, students at the National Technical University of Athens (also known as the Athens Polytechnic or Polytechneion) went on strike and started protesting against the military regime. There was no response so the students barricaded themselves in and built a radio station (using materials from the laboratories) that repeatedly broadcasted across Athens: “This is the Polytechneion! People of Greece, the Polytechneion is the flag bearer of our struggle and your struggle, our common struggle against the dictatorship and for democracy!” (Etho Polytechneio! Lae tis Elladas to Polytechneio einai simaioforos tou agona mas, tou agona sas, tou koinou agona mas enantia sti diktatoria kai gia tin Dimokratia). Leftist, later to be politician, Maria Damanaki was one of the major speakers. Soon thousands of workers and youngsters joined them protesting inside and outside of the Athens Polytechnic.

By Wednesday, 14 November, 1.500 students had barricaded themselves inside the Polytechnic. Tension grew by the hour and throughout Thursday sympathizers old and young converged on the school next to the Archaeological Museum. By late Friday, 16 November, thousands of people were filling the area stretching from Panepistimiou Street all the way to the Alexandras Avenue intersection.

Witness accounts disagree as to which end of Patission Street the teargas canisters came from but the asphyxiating fumes had already started to terrify the crowd into headlong flight even before the first tanks appeared on Patission Street from the direction of Alexandras Avenue.

In the early hours of Saturday 17 November 1973, about 25 AMX 30 tanks arrived at the Polytechnic. One took position right in front of the main gate. Fifteen minutes later, a delegation of the students requested for 30 minutes to evacuate the school grounds but they were only given 15. Less than then ten minutes later the AMX 30 tank crashed through the gate of the Athens Polytechnic.

The events were filmed by the Belgian journalist Albert Coerant who worked as a correspondent for Dutch and Belgian TV in Greece during the military dictatorship. Even though the film is quite dark it is clear enough to show that the tank crashed down the main entrance of the Polytechneion while students, who had climbed on the gate earlier, were still on it.

In recordings of the “free Athens Polytechnic radio” that was transmitting from the school grounds, a young man’s voice is heard desperately asking the soldiers (who he calls brothers in arms) surrounding the building complex, to refuse to obey the military orders and not to fight ‘brothers protesting’. The voice carries on to an emotional outbreak, reciting the lyrics of the Greek national anthem. Shortly after the tank entered the school grounds, the radio station ceased to transmit.

According to a, highly contested, official investigation after the fall of the Junta, no students of the Athens Polytechnic were killed during the incident and only a few were injured by the tank. Unofficial accounts differ as to how many died in the tank invasion into the Polytechnic area but a number were killed in the immediate area of the school. A further number are estimated to have been killed in Patission Street by sniper fire from nervous military guards atop buildings and in what sounded like indiscriminate shooting that went on until the early hours of Saturday 17 November. According to unofficial accounts, at least 24 were killed (the number may be higher), hundreds were injured and almost 1.000 were arrested at the Polytechnic and at the Ministry of Public Order where students also were protesting.

Although several civilians (some of them children and even the case of an infant) are documented having been killed in the cross-fire of the Polytechnic uprising, there is no documented reference to any actual students of the Athens Polytechnic killed at the time. Despite this, in popular opinion tens (or even hundreds!) of students of the Athens Polytechnic were killed. It does not pay homage to the memory of those who were actually killed to fabricate fictitious victims.

Both on Sunday 18 and Monday 19 November 1973 a mass of soldiers and police prevented crowds from gathering in thecentre of Athens and there were tanks in strategic positions as well as surrounding the Parliament Building. All of Greece was put under martial law for one week preventing from more than four people gathering. There also was a curfew between 19:00 and 05:00 and a number of people were shot for breaking it. Around the country, 28 student organizations were dissolved and their assets were confiscated.

Every year the campus of the Polytechnic is closed on 15 November (the day the students first occupied the campus) and on 17 November, all Greek schools and universities are closed. Students and politicians lay wreaths near the monument within the Polytechnic that has the names of all Polytechnic students killed during the Greek Resistance in the 1940s inscribed (there are no names of students killed during the Polytechnic uprising). The commemoration day ends with a demonstration that begins at the campus of the Polytechnic and ends at the United States Embassy.

Source: http://greekleftreview.wordpress.com/2012/11/16/17-november-tribute-to-the-uprising-at-the-athens-polytechnic-in-1973/

Here is also a link to the blog: “A Gael in Greece” by Damian Mac Con Uladh (he lives in Greece and works at EnetEnglish, the international online edition of the Eleftherotypia) who has posted an article about the 24 victims of the 1973 Athens Polytechnic uprising: http://damomac.wordpress.com/2012/11/17/polytechnic/

Source of featured image: http://www.esos.gr/arthra/35808/41i-epeteios-toy-polytehneioy-2i-mera-eortasmoy

Source: http://www.stopracisme.nu/

On 9 October 1967, Ernesto “Che” Guevara was executed by a Bolivian army officer at the end of his ill-fated attempt to foment revolution throughout Latin America. He was executed at the behest of the CIA, who hoped his death would deal a shattering blow to the influence of the Cuban Revolution in a part of the world traditionally viewed as America’s backyard; its role to provide the cheap labor, raw materials, and markets required to maintain the huge profits of US corporations.

But the CIA were wrong, just as successive US administrations have been wrong, in thinking that the ideas for which Che Guevara fought and died could ever be ended with a bullet. On the contrary, over four decades on from his death the Cuban Revolution continues as a beacon of inspiration and hope to the poor of the undeveloped world.

That a tiny island nation with a population of just over 11 million people, located 90 miles off the coast of Florida, should have the temerity to assert its right to political and economic independence from the United States and survive for so long is nothing short of immense. Indeed, many believe that not only have the ideas for which Che Guevara gave his life survived, they have never been more potent, illustrated by the left turn taken throughout the region in recent years. It is a political turn responsible for transforming a part of the world traditionally associated with military juntas, right wing autocracies, and US puppet regimes into the very opposite.

Today Latin America is a part of the world where democracy has taken root, where the tenets of the Washington neoliberal consensus have been rejected in favor of social and economic justice as the objective of government.

Undeniably, Che’s legend has not only continued unabated since his death it has grown. In every town and every city, from Los Angeles to London, Beirut to Bethlehem, from Nairobi to New Delhi, the iconic image of him carrying that expression of burning defiance, captured by Alberto Korda in 1960, is as ubiquitous as it is powerful, found on everything from T-shirts to coffee mugs, rugs, posters and a myriad other items. For many it represents something transcendent in the human experience, an idea that stands in opposition to the values of individualism and materialism which are drummed into us every minute of every day in the West.

A read through Che’s writings brings home the fierce determination of a man who burned with anger at the injustice, oppression and exploitation suffered by the world’s poor. In his address to the United Nations General Assembly in1964, he said:

“All free men of the world must be prepared to avenge the crime of the Congo. Perhaps many of those soldiers, who were turned into sub-humans by imperialist machinery, believe in good faith that they are defending the rights of a superior race. In this assembly, however, those peoples whose skins are darkened by a different sun, colored by different pigments, constitute the majority. And they fully and clearly understand that the difference between men does not lie in the color of their skin, but in the forms of ownership of the means of production, in the relations of production.”

Not satisfied with merely delivering such a powerful affirmation of solidarity with the poor and oppressed of another land, Che embarked for the Congo in an attempt to give meaning to them, in the process abandoning the relative comfort and status earned him by the success of the Cuban Revolution to risk his life in a mission to spread the revolution throughout the developing world.

In a later speech to the Afro-Asian Conference in February 1965, he offered this admonition:

“There are no borders in this struggle to the death. We cannot be indifferent to what happens anywhere in the world, because a victory by any country over imperialism is our victory, just as any country’s defeat is a defeat for all of us.”

For Che Guevara the struggle against imperialism and exploitation could only be won gun in hand, utilizing in his view the same kind of violence used without compunction by the oppressor. Not for him non-violence and peaceful protest. His experience, his observation of the poverty and truncated lives suffered by millions throughout Latin America and Africa instilled in him a rage and a desire to visit retribution on the system he considered responsible.

In this he was very much a product of his time, when people of the developing world were locked out of the democratic process in parts of the world where right-wing dictatorships made recourse to violence inevitable.

Despite the myriad articles, analysis, and commentary produced on Che Guevara and his life, much of it hostile and withering, one incident sums up more than any article ever could the enduring force of the Cuban Revolution whose ideas he died trying to spread.

In 2006 Mario Teran, an old man living in Bolivia, was treated by Cuban doctors volunteering their services free of charge to Bolivia’s poor, just as they have and do to the poor in every corner of the developing world in medical missions that have transformed the lives of millions. They performed an operation to remove cataracts from Mario’s eyes, which succeeded in restoring his sight.

Mario Teran is not just any old man, however. He is the Bolivian army officer who executed Ernesto “Che” Guevara in 1967.

Source: http://rt.com/op-edge/194384-che-guevara-anniversary-revolution/

Following the end of World War II, the Italian workers’ movement was rapidly gaining strength. In some towns the fascists had been kicked out by Resistance forces (as before the war, these were usually led by socialists and anarchists), and embryonic workers’ councils were governing. The Communist Party in particular won mass support for its involvement in this movement.

When Allied forces swept across the country, destroying this fledging power of ordinary people was next on the agenda after finishing Mussolini’s regime.

When the liberal Italian state was reconstructed, mechanisms were put in place to make sure that workers did not take power. In addition to the already-existing powerful secret society, P2 which was heavily involved in the anti-working class Strategy of Tension in the 1960s and 70s the covert and yet official organisation ‘Gladio’ (‘sword’ – its logo is pictured, above) was set up.

http://libcom.org/history/operation-gladio-italy

 

Anne, who lived in hiding between 1942 and 1944, was eventually discovered by the occupiers, becoming yet another Jewish victim of the Nazi onslaught after she succumbed to typhus at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. She was 15 when she died, yet her diary, discovered by her father after the war, has become one of the most celebrated works of the 20th century, documenting two years of the teenagers life under the persecution of National Socialism.

© NIOD / Anne Frank House

© NIOD / Anne Frank House

© NIOD / Anne Frank House

© NIOD / Anne Frank House

© NIOD / Anne Frank House

© NIOD / Anne Frank House

© NIOD / Anne Frank House

“The consciousness of a worker is not a curve that rises and falls with wages and prices; it is the accumulation of a lifetime of experience and socialization, inherited traditions, struggles successful and defeated . . . It is this weighty baggage that goes into the making of a worker’s consciousness and provides the basis for his behavior when conditions ripen . . . and the moment comes.”

– E. P. Thompson

In talking about the working class as of late I feel like Solomon “Sol” Roth in the futuristic movie, Soylent Green (1973): “There was a world, once, you punk.” Det. Thorn: “Yes, so you keep telling me.” Sol: “I was there. I can prove it.” Det. Thorn: “I know, I know. When you were young, people were better.” Sol: “Aw, nuts. People were always rotten. But the world ‘was’ beautiful.”

History is about feelings, and in order to understand it, you have to understand people. British historian E.P. Thompson had a love affair with the working class (not classes); he believed it was the motivating force behind most economic and social progress. Thompson could have easily been Sol except for the fact that his love affair was with the English working class.

In my case, I try not to romanticize the working class; at the same time, I consider many workers my teachers. I was very fortunate in the 1980s to have been part of the Keep GM Van Nuys Open campaign.

I will never forget an auto worker who told me that the thing that he would miss most if the plant shutdown was the feeling that he got after his shift was done and thousands of workers would pour into the parking lot. He felt overwhelmed, he was powerful, and he had a union.

During the GM struggle, I attended many meetings where I mostly listened. At one meeting at the International Association of Machinists Union Hall in Burbank, I sat next to my friend, Eloy Salazar, who was a member of the Machinists. He was proud of his hall and how Mexican Americans had played a leading role in the union. After the meeting he asked me, “Rudy, you got a minute?  I want to show you something.”

We went out into the lot where his new car was parked. It was a Cadillac, which he pointed out was an American made car, white with white leather seats. It kind of took me aback because in my world of so-called “cultural” workers there would have been instant criticism such “bourgie”. I reflected how Eloy who had worked hard as a machinist was proud of the product of his labor, and how in contrast I was apologetic for my Ray-Ban sunglasses. My world was one of theory; Eloy’s was one of the praxis.

My research put me into contact with labor leaders. Exploring the Great San Joaquin Valley Cotton Strike of 1933, the name that kept popping up was that of Pat Chambers, the lead organizer for the strike. Pat had done oral interviews for the Bancroft Library, but if he was alive I wanted to see him.  It was forty years after the fact so I sent out numerous emails.

One day he showed up at the Cal State Northridge campus and asked for me. When I heard he was there I was excited. Pat was a short man, 5” 6”, rotund and balding. He apologized for taking so long but he had to check me out, and it was important to him that I was an activist. In the next several years he would just show up, and was clearly emotional to see so many Chicanas/os in college.

Chambers was a pseudonym; he was a communist who at the time were hounded. Pat did not like the party leadership, saying that they caused too many problems and cost resources to hide them. It was clear that he was not an ideologue; he got into the party because he admired the Wobblies.

The strike involved 18,000 cotton pickers and their families; 80 percent were Mexicans.  It was a violent strike that saw three Mexican workers assassinated on picket lines at Pixley and Arvin. He described the Mexican women as the warriors who picketed and kept worker camps such as the one at Corcoran operating. The growers in collusion with the American Farm Bureau and the Chamber of Commerce kept the sheriffs and the elected officials pro-grower. To break the strike county and state officials denied workers relief and pressured the women to go back to work. Growers purposely starved at least nine infants to death.

There were few organizers other than Chambers and 4’ 8” Caroline Decker who was in her late teens or early 20s. Caroline was from a middle-class Jewish family; she dropped out of school to help organize oppressed workers. She was a communist because she was anti-fascist, and the Party was the only organization doing something about it, according to her. Years later when interviewing strikers, they would ask about Caroline Decker.

The strike drew celebrities such as Ella Winters and Langston Hughes. John Steinbeck interviewed Chambers and others about the bitter Taugus Ranch and the Cotton strike. Steinbeck modeled the protagonist after Pat.

Yet although the overwhelming majority of the strikers were Mexican and a minority black, Steinbeck decided much as in The Grapes of Wrath to whiten the characters and make them White Oklahomans because he did not believe that his readers would be sympathetic to Mexicans or blacks.

In 1934-5, the growers and their minions finally broke the union. Chambers and Decker among others were charged and tried for Criminal Syndicalism: “Any doctrine or precept advocating, teaching, or aiding and abetting the commission of crime, sabotage or unlawful acts of force and violence or unlawful methods of terrorism as a means of accomplishing a change in industrial ownership or control, or effecting any political change.”

Chambers and Decker along with other union organizers were convicted. Chambers spent two years in San Quentin, and Decker two at Tehachapi Women’s Prison before the convictions were reversed on appeal.

After this point Chambers dropped out of the Party and he went to work as a laborer. His last years were in the Local 51, San Pedro, California, of the International Pile Drivers Union.

Pat thought he had been forgotten. He was excited about the gains made by the farmworkers under César Chávez. In summer 1971, as Marc Grossman, a Chávez aide, tells it, Chambers went to the UFW’s headquarters just outside Delano. Chávez’s secretary informed Chávez that “an old guy” was in the lobby, asking to speak to someone about times past, Chávez answered, “I’m busy, have him talk to one of the organizers.”

About three hours later the secretary said the old man hadn’t left. “What’s his name?” Chávez asked. “Pat Chambers.” Chávez’s face lit up. Chambers, Chavez, and the UFW driver spent the rest of the afternoon driving around Delano.

Chambers had avoided visiting Delano during the five-year grape strike out of fear Chávez would be redbaited because of CAWIU’s Communist ties.

The Moment had arrived for workers in the 1930s. This was especially true of Mexican women who produced outstanding leaders such as Emma Tenayuca who I met at an activist reunion in San Antonio in 1989. At the age of 16, she began organizing workers. Emma was the lead organizer in the San Antonio Pecan Shellers’ Strike.  Jailed and hounded, “when conditions ripen . . . and the moment” came she rose to the occasion, and we learned from her “struggles successful and defeated . . .” form our consciousness.

RODOLFO ACUÑA, a professor emeritus at California State University Northridge, has published 20 books and over 200 public and scholarly articles. He is the founding chair of the first Chicano Studies Dept which today offers 166 sections per semester in Chicano Studies. His history book Occupied America has been banned in Arizona. In solidarity with Mexican Americans in Tucson, he has organized fundraisers and support groups to ground zero and written over two dozen articles exposing efforts there to nullify the U.S. Constitution.

Source: http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/10/11/lessons-from-the-working-class/

This year, September 11 marks the 40th anniversary of the US-organised military coup that overthrew the elected left-wing government of Salvador Allende and installed a brutal dictatorship headed by General Augusto Pinochet.

The day was the start of a nightmare for Chileans, as a reign of terror crushed left-wing groups, trade unions and popular organisations.

Left-wing activists and government supporters were hunted down and killed. The entire staff of Punto Final, the newspaper of the revolutionary socialist Movement for the Revolutionary Left (MIR), were gunned down in their offices.

Santiago’s national football stadium was turned into a concentration camp by the military, where many were executed.

“There were two lines,” Adam Schesch, a survivor of the coup who was held at the stadium by the military for 10 days, was quoted by a 1998 Independent article as saying. “We called them the line of life and the line of death. One line led out, away from the stadium, the other led inside.”

The Independent said that, “in the 10 days he was held, Mr Schesch believes that between 400 and 600 people were executed by firing squads just yards from where he sat, hunched and terrified with his wife”.

Schesch concluded: “[Pinochet] was trying to wipe out the leadership of a whole generation of the working class.”

The official death toll of Pinochet’s terror is about 3200. Many thousands more were jailed and tortured.

The popular reforms of Allende’s government, which nationalised key sectors of the economy and raised wages for many workers, were reversed. With the workers’ and democratic movements destroyed, Pinochet’s regime turned Chile into a neoliberal laboratory.

A US-backed program of deregulation, privatisation and a huge shift of wealth to the rich was implemented, becoming a template for the rest of Latin America.

Allende was elected in 1970 as the candidate for Popular Unity, an alliance of five parties including Allende’s Socialist Party and the Chilean Communist Party.

Fearing the threat to corporate interests and the growing confidence Chile’s working class, US authorities and Chilean capitalists worked from the start to undermine and sabotage the government.

In fact, in an irony of history, Green Left Weekly reported on October 17 that just two days before before the September 11, 2001 attacks, “the CBS television network’s 60 Minutes presented evidence showing how deeply the US government … was involved in a 1970 plot to prevent Salvador Allende becoming Chile’s president”.

“Researcher Peter Kornbluh, an analyst at the National Security Archive, an independent research institute which studies declassified secret US documents, told the CBS program that in 1970 the CIA sent a cable to its office in Chile instructing agents there to continue to foment a military coup.”

That coup never eventuated, but as soon as Allende took office, US-organised subversion that culminated in Pinochet’s bloody coup was underway. US national security advisor Henry Kissinger famously said: “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people.”

President Richard Nixon’s advised the CIA to sabotage Chile’s economy, urging the body to “make the economy scream”. The US imposed economic sanctions and the CIA helped fund anti-government strikes.

This destablisation paved the way for the coup. In 2000, declassified documents revealed the CIA “actively supported” the coup and the Pinochet’s regime.

Although Pinochet’s rule ended in 1990, the legacy of the brutal class war is still felt today — with ordinary Chileans facing neoliberal policies and state repression. However, the huge student protests that broke out last year, challenging the anti-poor neoliberal education system, shows that a new generation is emerging no longer cowered but willing to fight.

The coup was part of US imperialism’s struggle to keep control over a continent that it, as Secretary of State John Kerry shamelessly said this year, views as its “backyard”.

However, despite the horror the US imposed with the help of local elites in Chile and elsewhere in Latin America, the people of Latin America have not been defeated. In recent years, a continent-wide movement against US domination and corporate exploitation has grown.

In its most advanced sectors — in Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador — governments have come to power backed by mass movements determined to challenge Western corporate power, redistribute wealth and move to empower the poor.

Unsurprisingly, each of these governments have faced coups by US-backed forces. But in each, the horrific events of September 11, 1973, have been turned on their heads — the people defeated them and the process of change deepened.

It was in Venezuela, emboldened by a mass mobilisation of the poor that defeated repeated attempts by the US-funded opposition to destroy their government, that then-president Hugo Chavez declared the goal of these rebellions to be “socialism of the 21st century”. The ghosts of Chile’s dead would have cheered.

September 11, 1973, shows the brutality of the Empire — willing to trample on democracy and impose its interests through terror. But recent developments show it is possible to change these interests — and win.

- See more at: http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/54901#sthash.vMHs6sIe.dpuf

Source: http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/54901

The ongoing petition at www.greece.org/blogs/wwii/ is receiving support and solidarity from people around the world (over 188,000 signatures by now), which proves the clamor for justice by the global community.

To preempt skeptics and critics, although presently Greece is suffering a temporary economic crisis, she should not relinquish her right to demand settlement and shouldn’t be asked to resign from her obligation to seek justice for her people.

On October 1940, North-west Greece was attacked by Germany’s ally, Italy, which was repelled by the Greek army. In April 1941, Germany came to Italy’s rescue, invaded and occupied Greece for four years committing massive crimes against the people of Greece and total destruction of Greece’s infrastructure.

At the end of WWII Greece had lost 13 percent of its population, more than 1700 villages and towns had been burned, most of their inhabitants had been executed by the German occupiers, and the country virtually resembled a pile of debris. (Doxiadis p 38, Illiadakis p 137).

On top of that, while the occupied Greeks were dying by the thousands from starvation, Germany forced Greece to provide an onerous US $3.5 billion loan which still remains unpaid. Moreover, from the US $14 billion well documented claim for war damages presented by Greece at the Paris Conference in 1946, only US $7.1 billion were officially accepted, which remain unsettled until today. (Blytas p. 344, Doxiadis p.37, Mazower p.23)

Italy’s Mussolini complained to his minister of foreign affairs Count Ciano “The Germans have taken from the Greeks even their shoelaces.” (Ciano p.387)

In the presence of the indefensible massive evidence, Germany has never denied or disputed the damages, but is systematically using artificial legal obstacles to delay settlement. On the other hand, the international legal system has failed to seal legal loopholes and has allowed injustice to be perpetuated.

A clear example is the case of Distomo (a town in central Greece) where on June 10, 1944 the German occupiers following their policy of brutal collective punishment, executed 218 civilians (men, women and children) as retribution for the killing of three Germans by the local guerrillas, even though the villagers had no relation with the resistance movements.

Decades later, a Greek court awarded restitution to Greek victims, but the German government pressed Greece politically to nullify that decision.

To enforce the decision by the Greek court, this case was brought before an Italian court where the judges awarded to the families of the victims the Villa Vigoni in Menaggio, Italy, a German government-sponsored non-profit foundation but the German government appealed the decision of the Italian supreme civil court at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) claiming State immunity.

After 15 years of trials, the ICJ slammed the relatives of the 232 Distomo victims in this case with the following catastrophic verdict: “Distomo victims cannot seize German property in Italy.”

Unfortunately, the case of Distomo underscores the very serious defects in the fairness of the international justice system. With this verdict, the ICJ has set a scandalous discriminatory precedent contradicting its own rulings and moral authority when it prosecutes individuals for crimes they have committed in other countries, proven by the granting of state immunity to Germany for such massive crimes.

Clearly in the case of Germany the Court has used double standards. Observing the justifiable eagerness for prosecution of wrongdoers like Slobodan Milosevic, Radovan Karadzic, Ratko Mladic, Omar al-Bashir, Charles Taylor, Uhuru Kenyatta and others, further demonstrates of how unfairly the Distomo and the rest of the Greek cases are treated by the international legal system.

Loosening the rigidity of the law and bending it to accommodate Germany’s baseless arguments, it is equivalent to allowing a powerful nation to remove the blindfold from “Themis,” the ancient Greek goddess, founder of justice, and replace her balanced scales of justice with a tilted one. In effect, the ICJ converted itself into a safe harbor for a powerful nation.

The just resolution of the case of Distomo presented a legacy-setting opportunity to the international legal system to demonstrate the essence of justice by removing Germany’s obstructionist technicalities in her effort to evade her responsibility for the war crimes committed against the people of Greece.

Only few months ago, three Mau-Mau Kenyan tribesmen, tortured by their British colonizers during the early 1950′s, won a landmark case for compensations in English courts, while the Greek victims of Germany, despite the incontestable proofs of the damages, for the last sixty years are failing to obtain justice not only in the German courts, but also in the International Court of Justice.

Fundamental questions: Do we allow Germany to invoke immunity for horrible massive crimes and stain the history books of our global legal system, or we unite our fight for fairness and justice?

For more information click here.

Bibliography:
1. Blytas, George C., The First Victory, Greece in the Second World War. Athens: Cosmos Publishing, 2009.
2. Ciano, Galeazzo, The Ciano Diaries, 1939-1943, Hugh Gibson Editor. New York: Doubleday & Co, 1946.
3. Doxiadis, Konstantinos, Oi Thysies tis Ellados ston Deftero Pangosmio Polemo [The Sacrifices of Greece in the Second World War]. Athens: Ministry of Reconstruction, 1946.
4. Iliadakis, Tasos, M., Oi Epanorthosis kai to Germaniko Katohiko Danio [The Reparations, and te German Occupation Loan]. Athens: Ekdoseis Detoraki 1997.
5. Mazower, Marc. Inside Hitler’s Greece , The Experience of the Occupation 1941-1944. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993.