July 18, 2011
Minos Kleidis is the Greek the world’s television cameras don’t see.
When police and protesters clashed in central Athens on June 28, Kleidis and half a dozen of his workers rushed to pack up chairs and tables and lock themselves into the restaurant they manage on Syntagma Square. Kleidis says the 48 hours of rioting caused 20,000 euros ($28,224) of damage, including smashed marble, broken pipes and burnt umbrellas.
“It takes a week to make that sort of money,” Kleidis, 33, said. “The exasperation, disappointment and worry about our country are justified. The violence isn’t.”
Thirty years after Greece became a member of what’s now the European Union and more than a decade after it swapped the drachma, one of the world’s oldest currencies, for the euro, Greeks like Kleidis are on the frontline of the government’s attempts to prevent the region’s first debt default.
As Athenians tally the cost of last month’s riots, most Greeks acknowledge financial stability and the cost of keeping the euro comes with more sacrifice for a country where parents and grandparents endured occupation by the Nazis, famine, hyperinflation, civil war and then a military dictatorship.
“The challenge is to create a healthy and more productive economy,” said Riccardo Barbieri, the London-based chief European economist at Mizuho International Plc, who wrote research reports on Greece in the four years before the nation adopted the euro in 2001. “This is about a country changing its skin. No one can be happy with paying more taxes, having their salary cut, losing their jobs or risking losing their jobs.”
More
No comments:
Post a Comment