Greek protests against ecological destruction

Submitted by AWL on 3 December, 2013 - 6:39

A caravan of protest against the development of a new gold mine on the mountain of Skouries, on the Halkidiki peninsula in north-east Greece (near Thessaloniki), made its way to Athens on 25 November.

At a time of relative lull in other battles (participation was low in the general strike at the beginning of November), this movement has mobilised thousands of people on the street (not restricted to the “usual suspects”).

On 9 November, a demonstration in Thessaloniki drew 10,000 people. There were small children on bikes with t-shirts reading “SOS Halkidiki”. Students holding banners and shouting slogans, against the effects of capitalism on the environment and on their future. Grandmothers. Many families. And all the major trade unions that have been in the forefront of struggle.

Also present were Green organisations and the whole of the left (Syriza, KKE, Antarsya, Plan B, Xekinima, the rest of the revolutionary left, and various anarchists). This sort of broad unity does not happen very often. Despite difficulties and repression, despite the attempts by the government to equate them with “illegality” and one of “the two extremes”, the protests showed passion and fighting spirit.

The protests include people who had not previously participated in a march. People who were not familiar with holding banners and megaphones, or dealing with tear gas, are being brought into activity, and not only on the issue of Halkidiki.

The demonstration ended outside the Thessaloniki office of the public broadcaster ERT, shut down by the government and then occupied by the workers, and anti-fascist slogans were heard along the way.

There were slogans against the destruction of the region, slogans against the multi-national monopolies, slogans against repression, slogans against fascism, slogans against the memorandum policies (imposed by the EU, the European Central Bank, and the IMF), slogans against the privatisation of utilities, slogans against capitalism...
Listening to a new generation of young protesters chanting: “the mountains are ours, the water is ours”, one cannot but think that the future is ours too.

The Canadian-based multinational Eldorado Gold operates in Greece under its subsidiaries: Hellenic Gold and Thracean Gold Mining. In the Halkidiki Peninsula, Hellenic Gold operates Stratoni, an underground, silver-lead-zinc mine, and is “developing” Olympias, a replacement mixed sulfide deposit, and Skouries, a gold-copper mine.

In 2003 the Greek government granted Hellenic Gold an area of 317,000 acres, calculated to hold gold and copper worth about $ 12 billion. A primeval forest has been “nibbled away” for private greed, leaving craters and toxic waste ponds, and risking the irreparable contamination of the area’s underground water table.

It was officially announced in August that in the Neohori area the water is unfit for use because of a high arsenic arsenic concentration, but the state has not investigated the connection between water contamination and the activities of mining companies drilling a short distance from the source of the village’s water. The European Court of Justice has condemned Greece for illicit financial aid of millions of euros for the mining companies in Halkidiki.

The residents of Halkidiki have stated at every opportunity their opposition to the project (with the sad exception of the direct employees of the company, whom the company are trying to turn into a private army to defend their interests).

Halkidiki is a place of great natural beauty, which is flooded each year by tourists from around the world. The movement of against the gold mining includes fishermen, farmers, ranchers, beekeepers, scientists, workers, unemployed, pensioners, students.

They have demanded from the authorities information and public consultation that have never happened. The residents then turned to scientific bodies, and asked them to ascertain the potential impact of mining.

Each time the residents of Halkidiki have protested, the riot police have intervened as an occupying army in the region, tear-gassing the protesters and arresting many. When the local beekeepers attempt to go into the forest of Skouries to gather the bees, they are met by armed men from Eldorado Gold who control the movement in the forest.

The residents’ attitude is not the “rejection of progress and development”, or the artefact of “extreme leftists who want to put a brake on investment”, which the coalition government and its media acolytes say it is.

The mining activities in Halkidiki threaten to destroy a primeval forest of hundreds of thousands of acres, and to transform the area into a toxic swamp (since gold mining requires the use of cyanide chemicals). The company says that it will restore the topsoil, but scientists doubt it can do that at all adequately. Even if a few hundred jobs are temporarily created, the mining will destroy countless others, those associated with tourism, agriculture, animal husbandry, fisheries, etc.

Scientific bodies such as the Technical Chamber of Greece, the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and the Arnaia Forestry Department have taken a position against the gold mining in Halkidiki.

Hellenic Gold has shown that its assurances on observance of the required security measures should not convince anyone. On 12 Seotember, a leak from a truck left arsenopyrite in the area of Rentina. On 5 October, a ship’s captain of the ship MSC refused to load a cargo container from the company because toxic lead was found.

Toxic and hazardous materials are transported from the areas of Stratonio and Olymbiada without any precautions and dealt with by workers who are not made aware of the hazardous and toxic nature of the materials. The materials are then transferred to the company Balkan Logistics, in the Industrial Area Sindos of Thessaloniki, and loaded in containers onto ships to China. The consignments are declared just as iron, and not as arsenopyrite, and sent to China to detach the precious metal. In this way the company is winning around €121 million without paying taxes to the Greek state of about €30 million.

The answer to the propaganda for Hellenic Gold and the government about job creation and investment must be: We want a massive program of public investment to create permanent jobs based on social needs. We do not want investments that destroy the livelihoods of tens of thousands, destroy the environment, and devastate entire regions forever.

The money for investments can be found from those who have speculated so many years against us — bankers, shipowners, industrialists and big business in general. It can be found by utilising the wealth produced by us, by nationalising the monopolies and big business under social and workers’ control and management.

It can be found by stopping repayments on the debt to moneylenders — debts for the creation of which we bear no responsibility.

That can only be done by a government of the Left, which is ready and determined to confront powerful interests and the status quo. Which aims to radically overthrow the system and implement a socialist program for recovery of our damaged economy.

With such proposals we need to reach the workers in the company and to invite them to fight with us for a better future for all of us, and convince at least a part of them. Otherwise there is scope for intervention by the fascist Golden Dawn movement, which, under the guise of “supporting the metalworkers”, sides with the government.

The last word belong to the residents of Halkidiki: “We are the residents of Halkidiki and those who solidarise with them from all over Greece.

“For three years we have come out on the streets to fight for our area. We are not protesting just for our rights, but for our very lives and the future of our children. We stand in solidarity with every activist who fights for life, equality, freedom, dignity. The criminalization and repression of social movements and struggles supporting fundamental rights is the only response of a power system in a state of panic.

“Our obligation is to protect with our voice and our continuous struggle all those who resist the arbitrariness of power.”

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