STATEMENT BY MANOLIS GLEZOS ON THE OCCASION OF MERKEL’S VISIT TO GREECE

Statement by Manolis Glezos on the occasion of German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s visit to Greece

On the occasion of the visit to Greece by the German Chancellor Angel Merke, we consider it our duty to remind both her and the Greek Prime Minister that:

Manolis Glezos

Manolis Glezos

Great and powerful Germany has no right to set aside her obligations and thus deprive Greece of what is due to her on the basis of international law, any more that Greece may abdicate her rights.
Violations of international law and the human principles of honour and morality carry within themselves the danger of a repetition of phenomena which brought fire and blood to Europe . Acknowedgement of Nazi crimes constitutes an elementary guarantee that such monstrosities are never repeated in future.

Our people have not forgotten, nor should they forget. Today they demand not vengeance but justice. We do not want Germans to forget either. Peoples who reject their historical memory are condemned to repeat the same mistakes. It appears that Angela Merkel is leading her country and especially that most vulnerable part of the people, the youth, onto a slippery slope when, addressing the youth section of her party, she makes no bones about stating that “aid to Greece should be linked to Greece acting responsibly”. And what about Germany ’s responsibilities?

One would have expected the Chancellor to demonstrate a similar attitude to that shown by the allies towards Germany in 1953, when they suspended the payment of the debts and offered economic aid, thus contributing to German development and reconstruction.. At the time Greece was not absent from this effort.

We have no intention of inviting the Chancellor to dinner, but we do inviter her to join us at the killing fields of Kaisariani to see that even today, 67 years after the end of the war, the grass still will not grow where so much blood was spilt. The land does not forget, nor do men have the right to forget.

It is time to join our voice to that of the president of the German Left party (Die Linke), B. Rixinger, who, as Angela Merkel arrived in Greece, asked her to listen to the voices of those resisting the brutal cuts which threaten to deepen the polarisation in the country and who warns that Greece is threatened by a humanitarian catastrophe.

We are already paying for this polarisation in my country through the emergence of Golden Dawn. Shall we wait with folded arms to see what the consequences of this humanitarian catastrophe are? By then it would be too late, not just for Greece , but for the whole of Europe .

*(90-year-old Manolis Glezos is the living embodiment of resistance to the Nazi occupation. On 30 May 1941 he was one of two yong men who took down the enormous Nazi flag fluttering over the Acropolis. Sentenced to death on several occasions during and after the civil war, M. Glezos has spent altogether 11 years in prison. Today he is an MP for SYRIZA (Radical Left Coalition.)