Shock therapy and the gold mine

From switching off the national broadcaster, to the Skouries protests, the Greek government is unable to silence public anger at its handling of the crisis.

You are invited to read this free preview of this week's New Statesman, out now. To purchase the full magazine - with our  signature mix of opinion, longreads and arts coverage - please visit our subscription page. 

 

***

“So, you’ve come to talk to terrorists,” says Maria Christianou as I step off the bus, after a two-hour journey through rolling hills east of Thessaloníki. Christianou, an environmentalist, makes it sound like a well-worn phrase, but it’s no less incongruous for all that: Ierissos, a remote village on the Chalkidiki Peninsula – the “three fingers” that stick out from the northern Greek mainland into the Aegean – is little more than a cluster of streets around a crossroads, surrounded by mountains on one side and sea on the other. One road out of the village leads back to Thessaloníki, the other to the sacred Orthodox site of Mount Athos, famed for its men-only entry policy. At first glance, this hardly seems to be a seat of insurrection.

Yet for the past three years Ierissos has been at the centre of an increasingly bitter dispute. Its inhabitants, hitherto more accustomed to farming, or fishing, or running hotels, have been condemned as subversives at the highest level of government, and they have learned how to stem the effects of tear gas, how to build a roadblock and how to carry out basic first aid. At the village school, Christianou says, “Teachers say the kids have changed their drawings. Now they’re about their parents being arrested.”

The reason for the dispute is the gold that lies in the ground beneath Skouries, an ancient mountain forest just outside Ierissos. Small-scale mining has taken place in the region since the days of Aristotle, who was born here near the village of Stagira. In modern times, various companies have operated concessions, but plans to expand them collapsed after running into local opposition. Now, however, Skouries is one of several sites in Chalkidiki earmarked for a vast expansion of gold mining which will extract roughly 380 million tonnes of ore, far in excess of the 33 million tonnes that have been mined in the past two millennia. Opponents say the project – an open-cast pit, supported by chemical and distribution plants – will destroy the surrounding environment, and that the jobs created won’t replace the livelihoods lost that depend on soil, sea or tourism. The government says the scheme must go ahead: Greece’s profound economic crisis allows it no alternative. Since 2010, when ministers approved the expansion – ignoring the conclusions, campaigners say, of an environmental impact assessment report – protests against the mines have grown into a movement of thousands.

At a café in the heart of the village, Christianou introduces me to some of the people with whom she has worked to build the campaign. Thomasis Kromidas, a carpenter in his fifties who carries a bulging folder of scientific documents in his backpack, tells me how, from late 2010, they began to hold public meetings in neighbouring villages, “just transmitting the scientists’ message, not our own views”.

In March 2011 came the first unrest: 3,000 people descended on the streets of Ierissos, a village with a population of only 4,000, to make their objections heard. The anti-mining campaigners formed themselves into organising committees, holding regular protests and monitoring the development of the Skouries site.

In December that year, the Canada-based conglomerate Eldorado Gold bought a 95 per cent stake in Hellas Gold – a private company set up by the Greek government to run mines in Chalkidiki. The following March, the government conceded 4.1 square kilometres of the publicly owned Skouries forest to the company so that it could begin work. Eldorado, which also operates mines in Brazil, China and Turkey and has a site under dev­elopment in Romania, has said that it will protect the environment, but the protests have continued. On 20 March 2012, there was an angry stand-off at Skouries when hundreds of mineworkers from another site confronted 30 local campaigners. On 25 March – a national holiday in Greece – protesters rallied in the surrounding villages and prepared to march to Skouries. On the road into the forest, they encountered a line of riot police who drove them back with tear gas and stun grenades. “People were totally unprepared,” says Maria Kadoglou, a blogger from Ierissos. “There were families, old people. Women were wearing high heels because they’d come straight from church.”

This was just the beginning. Mobilisations suffe