Was this humiliation of Greeks really necessary?

It will take years for my adopted country to get over this crisis. Its people have faced the prospect of overnight impoverishment and wept at the indignity.

After a rollercoaster ride of cliffhanger votes, extraordinary summits and a rhetoric rarely heard beyond the confines of war, the deed, we were told, had finally been done. The prime minister, Alexis Tsipras, Europe’s anti-austerian par excellence, had, at one minute to 12, accepted the deal that would save the country from economic Armageddon.

In this thriller of a drama that, among Greeks at least, has involved every family, every home, relief at long last could be the order of the day. A valiant war had been waged, with battles lost and battles won, but now it was almost over.

The nation had regained some dignity. In its battle to stay in the eurozone, all was not lost.

On the great Greek crisis train, truth has never been that easy to identify. The first casualty of this war has been veracity, for what Greeks, and indeed everyone outside Greece, have been subjected to for the past six months is a battle of impressions waged by the masterful propaganda machine of the ruling radical-left Syriza party.

After seeing my adopted country in freefall, after watching friends fret at the prospect of overnight impoverishment and weep at the indignity of bank closures and capital controls, it is impossible not to ask whether all – or any – of this was necessary. Did Greece need to get to this place? Did the economy need to die before our eyes for the government to declare that “honourable compromise” had been reached? In recent weeks, the spectre of chaos has haunted Greece. As Tsipras has pondered, primitive instincts have not been far away.

For truth, five years on, has arrived in the form of a €13bn package of savings – the key to further financial assistance – that is so severe, so bitter-sweet in the wake of the hardship that this “war” has already caused, it is unclear what will follow.

In return for a third bailout – this time staggered over three years and amounting to €53bn – Greeks essentially have been told to walk through the valley of the shadow of death. And that is the good scenario. The alternative – Grexit – would have bypassed purgatory but taken crisis train passengers straight to hell.

Greeks know that the next 48 hours will define them and Europe, too. But whatever happens, they also know the choice is one between a complete march into the unknown or a conscious decision to take measures that – for a time, at least – will inflict further damage on a country already hollowed out by the eviscerating effects of austerity. Either way, the future is bleak.

In this, Tsipras’s brinkmanship has not helped: trust is so eroded between the leadership in Athens and creditors abroad that aid, if given, will not be handed magnanimously. Almost everyone I know now fears that Greece will be left to rot in the eurozone.

Politically, there is tumult on the horizon. That, in the early hours of Saturday, so many government MPs refused to give their vote to the proposed package of pension and budget cuts, tax rises and administrative reform does not portend well.

Many Greeks may now credit Tsipras for convincing Europe’s fiscally obsessed creditors that the country’s debt burden remains the cause of its woes (as indeed it does), but that will not cut much ice with hardliners in his party.

Events have moved at such giddying speed that ironically most Greeks do not appear to blame Tsipras for ignoring the resounding rejection that he himself had urged when the economic demands of lenders were put to popular vote last weekend. The referendum, like so much else, has become part of the blanket of crisis. That the measures were less severe than the ones the government ultimately accepted has, in a further irony, been similarly played down.

Greece, in truth, has skated so close to the edge – apocalyptic scenarios more real than ever before – that Tsipras’s spectacular U-turn has come as a welcome relief. Across an ever-fractious political spectrum, he has been applauded for putting his country before his party.

In the event of financial rescue, the hope is that Tsipras finally tackles the maladies that have so pervasively held back the country’s potential. Like no other party in power, Syriza is well placed to tackle the age-old malignancies of tax evasion, cronyism and corruption.

But the leader will also face conflict on the streets. In the back alleys of Athens, where activists work in dark offices stacked with freshly painted placards and banners – the ammunition of the war against austerity – the battle is already on. “There will be demonstrations every day,” vowed Petros Papakonstantinou of the anti-capitalist bloc Antarsya. “And we will press for a general strike. That won’t be easy when the left is in power.”

The stench of compromise will not only be resisted by the far left. The power of No will almost certainly be reinvigorated by unions. “All my life I have been saying Oxi,” Grigoris Kalomiris, general secretary of the civil servants’ union Adedy told me. “And now I am going to do whatever I can to oppose policies that have already resulted in wretchedness.”

A large man, with a thick grey moustache and balding pate, Kalomiris is important, not least because he sits on Syriza’s central committee.

“When you fight, you can lose,” he said, “but if you don’t fight, you have already lost and that would never make you proud.”

Greek pride has run through this crisis, the force behind the resistance that has periodically marked the country’s epic struggle to keep bankruptcy at bay. But pride is also the flipside of humiliation. And in a week that has seen them stare perilously into the abyss, it is humiliation that is haunting Greeks most.

Never before has the Greek crisis train crossed terrain of such national division. As securities have dissipated, as the stockpiling of food and medicines has mounted, as the financial system has collapsed, the gulf between those opposing austerity and those advocating reform has widened dramatically. So, too, has the sense of victimhood among a people now firmly in the spell of anti-German sentiment.

It will take years – decades perhaps – for Greeks to get over this crisis. Catastrophe may have been averted, but it comes at the expense of conscious national failure: an overriding recognition that the state formed after the fall of military rule provided 40 years of peace and stability, but has ended in extraordinary ignominy. The promise of unending progress did not occur.

Of all the truths that Greeks must now confront, that will be the hardest.

Source: Guardian.com

By: Helena Smith

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