When there are disputes on territorial details, solutions are provided by third parties charged with the task.
It is a national shame to buy weapons that we do not need over an imaginary danger that can be resolved politically.
Theodoros Pangalos
Deputy prime minister of Greece during the Erdogan visit to Athens, May 14-15, 2010
One of the oldest principles of negotiation is to never sit at the table when in want and weakness.
On May 5 a gang of hooded perpetrators used firebombs and a canister of petrol to set a bank in downtown Athens alight. In plain view of throngs of demonstrators rallying against the government's merciless budget cuts, the gang, comprising four or five individuals, first smashed the bank's front window with ax and sledgehammer and then tossed the can full of petrol inside. The hooded assassins followed up with several Molotov cocktails. None of the onlookers, although outnumbering the gang 100 to 1, attempted to stop the crime.
There is an almost eerie silence these days in Greece, only punctuated by sharp, angry demonstrations in the streets of Athens and Thessaloniki.
Greeks are numbed by the vicious austerity measures, and the apparent determination of their government to sink them and keep them in the worst economic plight since the end of World War II for an undetermined number of years, all of course in the name of "saving" the country.
This page is not prone to conspiracy theories. Neither is it inclined to entertain the usual wild accusations leveled against the current government of Greece that it is being "manipulated" by foreign powers. Such charges have been launched against almost every government that has seen the light of day in this country ever since the War of Independence against the Ottomans, so the issue has become trite and worn out.
Yet, there are signs that various "arrangements," not all necessarily in favor of this Nation, which could not have been initiated without the presence of our current head of government in place and the outbreak of the fiscal crisis, may be under way.
Greek authorities, benefiting from an incident similar to the one that led police to discover the 17 November terrorist gang in 2002, have swiftly rounded up six suspects who belong, police say, to the "new generation" of Greek terrorists.
The arrests came in the wake of a shootout in early March which resulted in the killing by police of a suspected terrorist, Lambros Foundas. An investigation of Foundas's unobtrusive but, as it turned out, quite busy underground past and present did yield enough leads to guide the anti-terrorist squad, authorities claim, directly to 17 November's successor terror gang, Revolutionary Struggle.
Increasingly, some among the avalanche of reports on Greece are touching on the central question underlying the country's devastating fiscal crisis: can Greece survive this trial by fire intact -- i.e. with its current system more or less unchanged -- or would there be deep and lasting change in the way Greeks do things?