GREECE: New Migrant Law Tough March 11, 2010
Posted by Yilan in EU, European Union, Human rights abuses, Yunanistan.Tags: Greece, Migrant Law, PASOK
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The Pan-Hellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK) government’s plans to move legislation, that will greatly affect migrants and refugees, have been both welcomed and criticised by rights organisations and activists.
The interior ministry is ready with legislation that will allow migrants to apply for citizenship as long as they have maintained legal status for more than five years.
Other requirements include a clean criminal record, reference letters from Greek citizens and clearance of language, history and politics tests. Second generation migrants and minors who have attended six years of schooling in Greece will be also entitled.
Foreigners arriving in the country after the law is enforced will require seven years of legal residence before applying which, together with consideration procedures, may stretch to a decade. Foreigners acquiring citizenship will also be given the right, for the first time in Greece’s history, to get involved in municipal election.
The ministry’s declaration has outraged extreme right-wing organisations, including the populist parliamentary party, Popular Orthodox Alarm, which has demanded a referendum on what it has described as a mistake that will damage the national character of the electorate. A referendum is not provided for in the Greek constitution for amending legislation on citizenship and political rights.
More than anything the new law is expected to address injustice to second generation migrants living in Greece.
Migrants’ children born or present since very early age in the country have so far faced an unfriendly citizenship law with restricted access. Such children, on reaching 18 years of age, have had to live as foreigners under regulations governing the residence of aliens in the country and without the rights due to ordinary citizens.
The new law is far from perfect. It will only help some of the more than 200,000 second generation migrants estimated to be living in Greece, lawyer Aggeliki Serafim told IPS.
A member of the ‘Group of lawyers for the rights of refugees and migrants,’ she said the main issue is that that the new law ”connects children to the legal status of parents without even including a provision for appreciating the reasons why the parents are considered irregular.”
“On top of that, it is very well known that since 2008 we have been facing a major wave of people who, for various administrative and legal reasons, are pushed into irregular status,” Serafim said. ”Without considering the status and fate of the thousands of irregulars in Greece, this legislation will be a selective law providing for a few while, I am afraid, while excluding many others.”
Concerns have also been raised by the local office of Amnesty International (AI) regarding plans for establishing a new body authorised to research and report on abuses and human rights violations committed by uniformed authorities.
Amnesty repeated its concerns in a public statement last month regarding the “failure of authorities to guarantee that policemen respect and protect human rights” and cautioned that the mandate of the new office, as currently formulated, will not be adequate for pursuing independent investigations.
Greek police and the coastal guard have been denounced multiple times for their gross record of human rights violations during the last few years during which the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture and European Commission Against Racism and Intolerance have called for the introduction of an investigative body.
The government has also undertaken an initiative to invite civil society actors to a full-scale debate about the reorganisation of the asylum system and the replacement of the notorious ‘’detention’’ centres with new “screening” and “registration” facilities.
Asylum procedures collapsed last year while the previous right-wing New Democracy government pursued a rather xenophobic policy that totally curbed access to asylum, rejecting even people in serious need of international protection.
“As a result we are left with a 90,000-application backlog which needs to be assessed while we move on to the new system. The previous situation has helped people in power to understand the real nature of the issue and accept a more pragmatic approach this time. The new system will facilitate access to asylum to those in real need while reducing its abusive use,” Afroditi Al Saleh, a special advisor to the ministry, told IPS.
“The target is that by next May we will have prepared a totally new structure staffed by specialised civilian personnel with departments dispersed around the country that will undertake asylum interviews and administrative procedures,’’ Al Saleh said.
The new asylum system will play a central role in boosting border management in the Aegean Sea through which most aliens gained entry into the European Community over the last few years. This is already being pursued with the serious involvement of FRONTEX, the European body created to coordinate operational cooperation at EU borders.
“Support given to Greek authorities focuses on surveillance capacities, identification of migrants who crossed the border in an illegal way and assistance in obtaining travel documents for those persons who are supposed to be repatriated,’’ said FRONTEX spokesman Michal Parzyszek.
Effectively, the operation is integrating Greek border management into a wider European Border Surveillance System prescribed in the Stockholm Programme, a key text on freedom and security endorsed by the Community at the end of last year, as a mechanism supervised by FRONTEX and enhanced by new surveillance technologies and improved methods of establishing the nationality of third-country nationals and deportation.
Beyond practical proceedings the spirit of Stockholm supports ’an intelligence gathering and co-coordinative mechanism between member states that ‘’serves a closed borders policy,” says Natassa Straxini, a human rights activist and acknowledged defender of asylum seekers.
“European migration policy in the future will be based on the fact that we accept whoever we cannot expel on a legal basis while nobody else stands a hope of getting in and staying. In the future economic migrants and environmental refugees will find it increasingly difficult to take the trip to the West, no matter the reasons forcing them to do so,’’ she said.
Lesbos villa called Freedom where migrants wait in search for haven March 10, 2010
Posted by Yilan in EU, European Union, Human rights abuses, Yunanistan.Tags: Greece, Lesbos, Migrants
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Many of the children take shelter in Lesbos. Belongings litter the route as immigrants rush to avoid capture. Children used to be held at the Pagani centre, below
This stretch of rocky Greek sand is the new bridgehead into the European Union for tens of thousands of illegal immigrants a year. Many of them, like Aziz, are children from Afghanistan. They arrive wet and shoeless, having been passed from smuggler to smuggler, and they already know that it does not do to dawdle on Lesbos.
The beach is scattered with the flotsam and jetsam of a million-euro criminal enterprise: punctured dinghies weighed down with stones, abandoned life vests, nappies and baby-care products discarded in the rush to move deeper into the island and the European Union before they can be caught and expelled.
Lesbos and the neighbouring east Aegean island of Samos have become the favoured destination of people-traffickers. The other sea routes into the EU have become less significant. Tighter patrolling has cut down numbers on the West African route, where corpses used to wash up on the Canary Islands; North African smugglers targeting Spain, Gibraltar and Italy have become more cautious. For Afghans these routes were, in any case, the long way round.
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“The only sensible route for an Afghan refugee,” said Greg Kavarnos, the chief social worker in a team of 30 interpreters, doctors, lawyers and teachers looking after Afghan children on Lesbos, “is through Iran and into Turkey and then over the strait to Greece.”
At its narrowest point, barely 6km (3.7 miles) separates Turkey from Greece. Yet there is nothing simple about the journey.
Like many of the Afghans at the island’s old tuberculosis sanatorium, Aziz, 17, is a hazara from a minority Shia Muslim community. With broad, open features, the hazaras look different from Afghan pashtuns and are often bullied and treated as inferior, at best a servant class.
Aziz’s family fled to Iran when he was 1. He worked in the family bicycle shop after he was forced to leave school. His brother had cerebral palsy and so his father decided to send Aziz to the West in the hope that he would earn enough to pay the medical bills. A smuggler was found to take him from Tehran to Istanbul for £1,000.
Mr Kavarnos shows the route on a set of maps pinned to his office door. The Afghan children in the centre, aged from 9 to 18, often come to stare at the maps to understand how far they have come — and how far they have yet to travel. It is this that fascinates them, not Aziz’s tale. His story is theirs. They prefer to go outside to play football.
Some of the children at the Villa Azadi (Azadi being the Farsi word for freedom) started their journey from Herat in western Afghanistan. After the smugglers took them to Iran they followed the same route taken by Aziz.
The old smugglers’ routes are used for heroin as well as people: car from Tehran to Qãsim; a pause in a safehouse; car to Urumia; a week undercover to wait for other refugees to join the group and make the crossing profitable; then by foot over the frontier to the Turkish town of Gowar; onwards to Van; Dubyazidn — and a bus to Istanbul.
“The smugglers run a kind of prison there,” Mr Kavarnos said. “They keep the Afghans there until they get another $1,500 (£960) for the trip to Greece. If the families don’t fork up the refugees are put to work in a clothes sewing factory until they have earned not only their keep, but also the cash needed for the trip.”
One of the rooms in Villa Azadi has become a sewing centre to make use of the skills that they were forced to learn by Turkish gangs. Old clothes donated by the people of Lesbos are converted into cloth bags, which are sold to tourists.
Aziz’s family found the extra money and he was taken to Skala Sykaminias beach in a dinghy with an outboard motor. It was not pleasant but he was later to find that he had been lucky: refugees who pay less find themselves paddling to Greece — and become easy prey for the coast guard services of Greece and Turkey.
The refugee rights group Pro Asyl has interviewed Afghan children and adults who found themselves circled by Greek coast guard vessels, forcing their dinghy to capsize. They were taken on board, searched, and then put out to sea again — after their dinghy had been punctured with a knife and the paddles confiscated.
In some cases, the Pro Asyl foundation said, the dinghy — with the refugees using their shoes as paddles — was nudged back into Turkish waters. The head of the Lesbos coast guard, Antonis Sofiadelis, denied that his men had been endangering refugees. “On the contrary,” Mr Sofiadelis, 40, said. “We have been saving people — the boats are overcrowded, the water at this time of year, very choppy.”
Several refugees drowned in stormy seas off Samos three days ago; their nationality was unknown. Mr Sofiadelis may have a point: Greece has been trying to clean up its act after international criticism of its treatment of refugees.
The bureaucratic machinery has been overwhelmed by the surge of illegal immigrants: 146,000 arrived in Greece in 2008 and when the 2009 figures are released they will show an increase. Under the Dublin II agreement, reached by EU Interior Ministers in December 2002, refugees can claim asylum only in the first EU country they set foot in. The refugees use various tricks — destroying their identity papers, slipping across borders until they find a society with a good asylum approval rate — but countries such as Germany, without a significant external EU border, are shielded by Greece from a mass immigrant influx from Afghanistan.
Even before its financial crisis it could barely cope. “We cannot leave Greece alone,” Karl Kopp, the European director of Pro Asyl, said. “And we can no longer ignore the plight of these refugee kids.”
We — The Times photographer Paul Rogers and myself — decided to retrace the steps taken by illegal immigrants when they first enter EU territory. Lesbos, an island thick with olive groves, is no longer just the birthplace of the poet Sappho: it is becoming a testing ground for EU immigration policy.
The first shock was four bedraggled Somalis stumbling in daylight from the beach to Mytilini, the capital of Lesbos. It is a 40km walk and they were still wet and exhausted from the crossing. Their aim was to slip on to one of the ferries to Athens, evade the police, find the local Somali community and join the queue to lodge an asylum application.
The office is open once a week; the queue is often made up of more than 1,000 people; the chances of approval close to zero. When the doors close for the day there is a howl of despair. Fighting breaks out.
The second shock was the Pagani holding centre. This was where, until recently, Afghan children were kept along with several hundred adults. The four interlocking warehouses are surrounded by a wall and looped barbed wire. Officially the place has been closed down.
The police were at breakfast so The Times managed to slip in — and find three Somali men. But Pagani is still as it was when it housed the children: the blankets tangled on bunkbeds, scrawled appeals for information about missing families written in Farsi, an overflowing latrine, stray cats and dogs moving between the beds. It smelt like a zoo. Will it be cleaned and reopened, a brightly painted dungeon in Fortress Europe?
“Greece has no process for assessing the individual needs and best interests of these children,” Andrej Mahecic, of the UN High Commission for Refugees, said.
Greece, hard up and managed poorly, cannot handle this. Experts have called for a quota system on Europe so that the burden is shared. This was the option rejected by the richer EU countries in 2002.
As for Aziz, he has left Villa Azadi several times in an effort to stow away on ferries to Italy. He believes that he can find a better life there; if not asylum, then at least work. All of his attempts have failed. He is back in the Villa called Freedom. Not persecuted in Iran, far from the fighting in Afghanistan, not beaten by Turkish smugglers, but on a beautiful island in the Aegean Sea — and still not at the end of his journey.
Border pressure
The Dublin Regulation was set up to stop “asylum shopping” — refugees who apply for asylum in several EU states. Refugees can seek asylum only in the EU country where they first set foot. If immigrants apply in a second state they can be arrested and sent back to the EU point of entry without appeal
Critics at the UN say that this puts unacceptable pressure on the EU states of Spain, Italy and Greece, which have to bear the brunt of applications. The UN argues that it leads to inadequate refugee protection, especially of unaccompanied children
The EU rejected 204,800 asylum applications in 2008, the most recent year for which data is available, and accepted 76,380 — an acceptance rate of 27 per cent
The most successful claims came from Iraq, Somalia, Afghanistan, Russia and Eritrea
The countries that approved the most asylum applications were France, Germany, Britain, Italy and Sweden
About 15,300 arrived in Greece by sea in 2008
The Pagani Detention Center in Mytilini, the capital of Lesbos, the largest island in the Aegean
A group of migrants from Somalia walk the long road toward Mytilini
An empty bottle of baby lotion and a rubber dinghy lie on the beach at Skala Sykaminias on the north coast of Lesbos
Declining Greek Economy Fuels Anti-Immigrant Mood March 10, 2010
Posted by Yilan in EU, European Union, Human rights abuses, Yunanistan.Tags: Economy, EU, Greece, Immigrant
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Seventy percent of migrants entering the European Union arrive through the Greek archipelago. With job opportunities vanishing in northern Europe, more and more immigrants are staying in Greece, even as a weak economy prompts a rising intolerance of foreigners.
An estimated 100,000 people from Asia, Africa and the Middle East pass though Greece to reach the European Union every year. But anti-immigrant sentiment is growing with Greece in the throes of a major economic crisis.
Hundreds of immigrants from many different continents staged a protest against this mounting discrimination in Athens last month.
Many of them, fleeing conflicts in their homelands, paid $4,000 to smugglers to get them into the European Union.
Tanzanian house cleaner Salum Mbundi has been living in Greece legally for 12 years. He is one of many immigrants demanding permanent residence papers.
“We need stable papers,” Mbundi said. “We need rights in working place, because we don’t get same rights as the Greeks.”
Immigrants are also calling on the government to make good on its promise to offer citizenship to children of immigrants born in Greece, and to those who have been living here legally for more than five years.
But the proposal, introduced by the new socialist government of Prime Minister George Papandreou, has caused widespread indignation. Comments on the government Web site reflect a sudden surge in xenophobia. One commenter wrote that “the motherland is endangered”.
A poll taken last week for an Athens newspaper showed that nearly 60 percent of Greeks believe immigration is harmful to the country and is tainting national identity. Nearly 50 percent believe immigrants are taking Greek jobs.
An Anti-Immigrant Response
Days after immigrants filled the streets of Athens in protest, the nationalist group Golden Dawn held a rally in the same city. Militants waved flags with the Celtic cross, a fascist symbol throughout Europe. Muscular young men wielding baseball bats discouraged photographers from doing their job.
A speaker exhorted the crowd to rise up like a flame against the idea of a multiethnic Greece. As nationalist songs played in the background, demonstrator Pavlos Benakis said that immigrants should not have the same rights as Greeks.
“Not to go to elections, to be in the parliament, to be a minister; we don’t want this,” Benakis said. “We don’t want a mayor from Pakistan to take a decision about my city. You are born Greek, you can’t be Greek.”
Seventy percent of migrants entering the European Union every year arrive through the Greek archipelago.
Most of the hundreds of thousands who came in recent years moved on to other European countries. But now with the economic downturn, jobs in the richer countries of northern Europe are scarce, and many new arrivals stay in their first port of entry.
Micky van Gerven, mission chief of Doctors Without Borders, says the Papandreou government has shown a willingness to extend certain benefits and rights to immigrants, but the economic crisis is an obstacle.
“The country is nearly bankrupt,” van Gerven says. “For Greek authorities to tackle the problem is difficult; there is hardly any money available.”
But van Gerven does not believe Greeks are particularly racist.
“I don’t think it is worse here than anywhere else, but it is increasing,” she says. “And it is very, very worrying, obviously.”
Many Greek commentators say that, as a front-line state, the immigration issue is too big for Greece to tackle alone. They call on the European Union to stop looking the other way and finally seek a common solution. Copyright 2010 National Public Radio. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.
Immigrants in Greece March 10, 2010
Posted by Yilan in EU, European Union, Yunanistan.Tags: EU, Migrants
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Immigrants that had entered Greece illegally and are struggling hard. The story of young Waqas Ahmed, who hails from a small village of Gujrat, is typical. He had paid Rs 700,000 to the agent in Gujrat to get to Unaan
Socrates used to talk to young men in the narrow lanes of ancient Athens. He did not preach but raised questions, which led the interlocutors to think about the virtues of Sparta and the shortcomings of their rulers. He had to give his life to what he thought was the truth.
Today in the same lanes, some two-and-a-half-millenniums down the history lane, young men from Gujrat are seen hiding at the sight of Athens’ police. They fear arrest and deportation. These young men have risked their lives to come to the dreamland of prosperity and security. There is no Socrates back home to raise questions in their minds that may dissuade our young men from taking this dangerous route.
My interest in the young Pakistani economic immigrants to Greece started right from the moment I overheard two Punjabi gentlemen in the overcrowded passenger lounge of Abu Dhabi. A hefty man in his early 40s was telling his young friend, “I went to Unaan (Greece) illegally 20 years ago by ship. May God bless Bhatti sahib who helped many people from my village to go to Europe!”
Most Pakistani immigrants I talked to were honest and forthright. They all admitted that they had entered Greece illegally and are struggling hard. The story of young Waqas Ahmed, who hails from a small village of Gujrat, is typical. He is now vending do number ka Chinese maal at the Flea Market in the Plaka area of Athens. He says: “I make around 300 euros a month by selling these cheap Chinese electronic things. Those who are lucky to get a job make 600-800 euros per month and have been able to send money back home to pay back their debts.” Waqas had paid Rs 700,000 to the agent in Gujrat to get to Unaan. To raise the money, his family sold some land and his brother had to borrow from friends and relatives. “God bless the agent, he took five of us from our village to the Iran border, where 20 other people joined us. We were then handed over to the Iranian agent, who made us walk and ride dunkeys (donkeys) through the mountainous terrain and passed us on to the Turkish agent. Again we walked in the night through the mountains and rested in the morning. Eventually, after travelling for two months over the mountains, we were delivered to the Greek agent, who took money and left us to fend for ourselves.” “But sir,” he added, “once you are here, your own people take care of you.”
Waqas agreed with me that with the money he gave to the agents (human traffickers), he could have started his own business. “I was crazy about going abroad,” he confessed, “all the young men who were with me have either followed this course or are planning to do so.” Another immigrant says that in many villages of Gujrat and Sialkot each household has at least one young man in Europe and all have come through illegal means. Once in Athens, I found out that there are about one million immigrants in Greece and half of them are from Albania, Romania and Poland. A recent survey says that 45 percent Greeks are against immigrants. This resentment is increasing because of the serious economic crisis in the country. But the good news is that Pakistani immigrants are considered to be “good people”. Reason: the Greeks hate the pushy Albanians who run the Mafia. They do not resent Pakistanis and Indians because they do the hard factory (or other) jobs not liked by the Greeks.
Though on a holiday, I could not resist the thought of finding out more about these economic immigrants. At the understaffed Embassy of Pakistan in Athens, I saw a large number of young Pakistanis, mostly from Gujrat and Sialkot villages. They all waited in a long queue patiently. All of them had the same story that we came to Greece illegally and are now trying to get our passport and National Identity Card for Overseas Pakistanis (NICOP). One young lad complained that the embassy sends the papers for verification, which takes a long time. But the majority said that they get their papers within three months. Inside, the burly Head of Chancery Faisal Kakar was drowned in applications and registers. According to him, there are around 45,000 illegal Pakistanis in Greece. Unofficial figures are twice that number. One embassy employee complained that when the total number of Pakistanis in Greece was not more than a few hundred, we had a sanctioned staff strength of three and now, despite the fact that it is over 45,000, the number of staff has not been increased. Why blame Waqas who comes from the large family of a small farmer and is hardly a matriculate from a low quality government school?
A good majority of low-income immigrants had taken the illegal route. Gujrat, Gujranwala and Sialkot are notorious for this among the Western diplomats in Islamabad. It is no wonder that we are now getting close to $ 8 billion in foreign remittances, something that is proudly announced by every government. Even our beggars migrate illegally to Saudi Arabia in search of generous alms, the courtesy of some Umra agents.
The Richie Riches of Pakistan have mostly bought a second passport. Most of them are not honest enough like their poor Gujrati cousins to admit that they have a second passport. Those who do, rationalise it: “One has to have a fall-back arrangement.” This speaks volumes about their faith in the future of Pakistan. At the risk of being labelled unpatriotic by over-zealous nationalists, I have to concede that no political and security analyst at present can take on a bet that our security situation is going improve in the near future. There are many who invested first in Dubai and are now doing so in Malaysia just to get the residential permit, which clearly prohibits such people from undertaking any work in these countries. Contrary to the reverse brain drain trend in India, our qualified younger lot has either migrated or is trying to do so. Their argument is that the country’s law and order situation is not conducive to bringing up their children. Middle class boys talk against migration only till they get the opportunity to jump ship.
Economic migration is understandable as, according to a large international survey conducted by Gallup, almost 700 million people said that they would like to move to another country. The interesting thing was that a majority of respondents from the developed countries also expressed an urge to migrate. The tragedy is that our disadvantaged are economic migrants and upper-middle class are security migrants. Where does it leave my country that is now faced with both the brain and brawn drain?
Greek tragedy unfolds March 10, 2010
Posted by Yilan in EU, European Union, Yunanistan.Tags: EU, Greece
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Neither the Greek crisis nor the drama of the euro currency have been settled by the summit of EU leaders and their vague and grudging pledge of support. As a result, the saliva will soon start dripping from the ruthless jaws of the markets. They already smell blood and soon they will taste it.
The first reason for this is that the EU pledge was less than wholehearted and thus less than convincing. The EU leaders promised “determined and coordinated action, if needed, to safeguard the stability of the eurozone.” That was hardly the ringing endorsement of the Greek government and its deficit-reduction plan that was needed.
There are no specifics, either of the nature of the support on offer, nor of the price Greece will have to pay in setting its financial house in order. Most likely, the European Union will agree to guarantee or to buy Greek government bonds to get the country through this year’s crisis, when $50 billion in debts have to be rolled over.
But that will not happen, German officials explained, until and unless the Greek government comes up with an agreed and credible austerity package, with guarantees and intrusive checks to ensure it is carried out.
“Greece has to help itself,” German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schauble told the Frankfurter Rundschau newspaper Saturday. “We want to support Greece to do that.”
Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou was outraged by the EU statement and in a televised address to his Cabinet a day after the meeting in Brussels complained that his EU partners “have created a psychology of looming collapse that could be self-fulfilling.”
Moreover, Papandreou went on, the EU was itself partly to blame for having facilitated the “criminal record” of Greece’s previous government in concocting economic statistics that were little more than a pack of lies. They claimed the deficit was running at 6 percent when in fact it was more than double that amount.
So Greece and the EU have between them come up with the worst of all worlds. They have made a vague political promise that they will later tackle an immediate and concrete economic problem. And in Germany, the biggest EU economy and thus the one that will have to do most for Greece (and probably Portugal and Spain as the pressure on the euro builds) the political costs of bailing out Greek profligacy with hard-earned German money look daunting.
“This is not the way the euro was sold to the Germans,” commented economist Holger Steltzner in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. “Before the deutschemark was abandoned, the Maastricht Treaty was solemnly signed, expressly forbidding a member of the monetary union from underwriting another member’s debts.”
German opposition is likely to stiffen as the realities of the Greek economic system begin to emerge. The Greek defense budget, for example, at almost 4.5 percent of gross domestic product is three times larger (proportionately) than that of Germany, because of the traditional hostility to Turkey. Why should Germans subsidize this ancient enmity between two NATO allies? Or why should they subsidize the early retirement of Greek civil servants, who are so incompetent at collecting taxes that the “black” economy accounts for around almost one-third of Greek GDP.
Other Europeans, who have privatized most of their former state-owned industries, will ask why the Greek state cannot sell off some of its vast holdings, which include hotels, yacht marinas, airports, banks, insurance firms, ski resorts, airports and oil refineries as well as utilities for water, gas and electricity.
“The state’s stake in listed companies on the Athens Stock Exchange is worth more than $12 billion. Real estate holdings in major state property-management companies are conservatively valued at more than $400 billion and yet yield next to nothing,” notes Michael Massourakis, chief economist at Alpha Bank.
Germany is relatively prosperous because its voters and workers acquiesced in keeping real wages static for more than 10 years, in order to ensure that German industry remained competitive. Meanwhile, the Greeks and Italians and Spaniards exercised no such discipline and saw their competitiveness decline against Germany by 30 percent over the same period. So German voters and politicians are in no mood to bail out bankrupt Mediterranean countries now.
But the German government knows that its banks, along with the French, Dutch and British banks between them have more than $800 billion invested in the bonds and banks of these “Club Med” countries and thus a default would be very costly indeed. So eventually they will pay up but they will first insist on their pound of flesh.
Greece has been living at about 20 percent beyond its means. So wages and pensions must come down and taxes and the retirement age must go up. This will cause demonstrations, angry riots and a government crisis that will probably provoke new elections, followed by a government of national unity to impose this bitter medicine. In the process, the office and home of the EU representative in Athens may well be burned. That is the price the markets will demand to be persuaded that Greece and the EU are serious about tackling this crisis.
As a trained economist Papandreou understands that there is bigger game afoot and that — as he told his Cabinet — his country had become “a laboratory animal in the battle between Europe and the markets.” The hedge funds and the short-sellers are gathering and licking their lips at what is starting to look like a one-way bet against Greek bonds and the euro in the credit default swap markets.
Ironically, the Germans might not mind that at all. A falling euro is just what German exporters need to boom again. So what we are watching is Germany’s favored outcome, which is for a solution to the Greek and euro crises, but not quite yet.
Turkey & Macedonia 