EU - Observer -- Greek prime minister Alexis Tsipras has put the painful question of
German war reparations back on the table, saying his country was never paid for
the infrastructural damage inflicted in World War II. In a highly emotive speech before parliament
on Tuesday (10 March), peppered with references to Nazism, the Third Reich, and
the Holocaust, Tsipras said Berlin had an "unfulfilled moral, as well as
material historic debt". He
acknowledged that Germany paid 115 million deutschmarks (€59 million) to Greece
in 1960, but said this went only to individual victims of Nazis and did not
compensate for the "destruction" of the country. "This agreement, however, provided
compensation only for the victims of the Nazis in Greece and not for the
damages inflicted on the country itself," he said. "And of course it did not relate either
to the obligatory occupational loan or the claims for damages due to war crimes
as a consequence of the nearly total destruction of the country’s
infrastructure and the economy’s disintegration during the war and the
occupation". He accused Berlin,
which has long said it has honored its war obligations, of using "legal
technicalities" to get around paying.
"They see the mote in their brother's eye but not the beam in their
own," he added, quoting a passage from the Bible, and speaking of a
"moralistic tone" in Europe in an apparent allusion to Berlin's
statements on Greece. He also said that
a parliament committee on "claiming the German debts owed to Greece"
is to be reconstituted and upgraded and that his government will offer
"political and legal assistance" so that its efforts "bear
fruit". The motion to re-establish the committee was then backed
unanimously by parliament late on Tuesday.
For his part, Nikos Paraskevopoulos, the Greek justice minister took the
rhetoric a stage further on Wednesday by saying that German property in Greece
could be seized as compensation. He said
he is "ready to approve" a Greek Supreme Court ruling in 2000, which
ordered Germany to pay around €28 million to the relatives of 218 civilians in
the village of Distomo, massacred by Nazi forces in 1944. The ruling said that
assets such as property could be seized as compensation. "The law states that the minister must
give the order for the Supreme Court ruling to be carried out ... I am ready to
give that order," he told Antenna TV, reports AFP. The Greek statements come after weeks of
uneasy relations between Berlin and Athens since the Greek far-left/nationalist
coalition government came to power in late January. Tsipras' first move as PM was to vist a
memorial honoring Greek resistance
fighters killed by the Nazis in 1944 - a symbolic gesture that did not go
unnoticed in Berlin. Since then, the
Greek government has sought to make good on its election promises to
restructure its debt and to end EU-imposed austerity. But tough negotiations with its creditors
have seen it win only small concessions, such as renaming the hated Troika
(representing its three international creditors) as "the
institutions". Contrary to what it
wanted, the government was forced to extend an existing bailout - by four
months - and is currently trying to reach a deal on which reforms it needs to
carry out to get the next tranche of cash.
Germany is at the forefront of those saying Athens must stick to its
prior commitments on reforms. Rhetoric between the two countries has turned
nasty on several occasions since Athens' first bailout in 2010, with Greece -
wracked by high unemployment and low growth - viewing Germany as too single-minded
on austerity and with Germany seeing Greece as slow to undertake major changes. The current talk from Athens is much harder
than anything before, however. It comes
amid criticism of Tsipras by his own, hardline backbenchers, who expect him to
deliver more of his campaign pledges. Tsipras'
defense minister Panos Kammenos, from the nationalist party in the coalition,
also recently threatened to "flood" Europe with migrants if Greece
does not get a debt deal. "If they
[the Eurogroup, a body which oversees eurozone governance] strike us, we will
strike them. We will give to migrants from everywhere the documents they need
to travel in the Schengen area [the EU's passport free zone], so that the human
wave could go straight to Berlin."
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