December
30, 2013
The New
York Times
By LIZ
ALDERMAN
Assailants
raked the German ambassador’s residence in Athens with gunfire early on Monday in an
attack that caused no injuries, Greek police officials said.
The police
found 60 spent bullet casings at the scene and detained six people in
connection with the incident, which occurred around 3:30 a.m. in an affluent
suburb north of Athens.
The bullet casings came from two Kalashnikov assault rifles, according to the
police.
No one
claimed responsibility for the attack, in which four bullets hit a security
gate. But anti-German sentiment has been festering among many Greeks struggling
with record unemployment and reduced salaries under a harsh austerity plan
required for Greece’s
international bailout, which Germany
had a major role in selecting the terms of.
“Nothing,
but really nothing, can justify such an attack on a representative of our
country,” the German foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, said in a
statement in Berlin.
He said Germany took the
attack seriously, and a Foreign Ministry spokesman said that the Greek
authorities had reacted swiftly and assured Germany
they would strengthen security in Athens.
Chancellor
Angela Merkel of Germany
received a phone call from Prime Minister Antonis Samaras of Greece,
according to a spokesman for the German government, Steffen Seibert. He added
that Greece, which on
Wednesday will take over the rotating presidency of the European Union, can
count on Germany’s
full support.
“The Greek
government expresses its abhorrence and utter condemnation of today’s cowardly
act of terrorism, the sole and obvious target of which was Greece’s image
abroad just a few days before the start of the Hellenic presidency of the
Council of the E.U.,” the Greek Foreign Ministry said in a statement.
Germany is the largest contributor to Greece’s 240
billion euro, or roughly $330 billion, bailout. Recently, Mr. Samaras has been
pressing Germany to reduce and renegotiate Athens’s delinquent debts as it
grapples with a wrenching five-year recession — something Germany has refused
to do.
That has
also fed a persistent low-grade anger over hundreds of billions of euros in
reparations that Greeks say Germany
owes the country from World War II, money that some say should go toward
helping to forgive Greece’s
debt bill. Greek newspapers regularly run articles on how much money Germany owes Greece.
Greece has made some progress in improving
its finances to meet the terms of the bailout — so much so that it is forecast
to have a primary surplus before debt payments in 2014 for the first time in
five years. But Greece still
faces a mountain of debt that economists say is all but unpayable unless some
new form of debt forgiveness is extended to Athens.
Over the
weekend, Jens Weidmann, the chairman of the German Bundesbank and a member of
the European Central Bank’s Governing Council, ruled out another reduction in Greece’s state debt, saying in a German
newspaper interview that Athens
still needed to press ahead with a number of reforms as required by the terms
of its bailout.
While
financial markets have calmed recently, he told the newspaper Bild, “this could
be some misleading safety. The crisis could be fanned again like a fire.”
His remarks
echoed those of the German finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, who is widely
reviled in Greece.
During a visit to Athens
this summer, the police locked down the center of the city to pedestrian and
car traffic as helicopters flew overhead, leaving the streets in a ghostly
state of quiet. The scenes were reminiscent of when Ms. Merkel visited Greece in 2012.
Representatives
of the so-called troika of lenders — the European Central Bank, the
International Monetary Fund and the European Commission — are scheduled to
return to Athens in January to resume talks over a fresh 4.9 billion euro
tranche of aid.
The same
building as the one struck on Monday was targeted in a rocket attack in May
1999 claimed by the terrorist group November 17, which has since been
dismantled.
Although no
group has claimed responsibility for the attack on Monday, the incident follows
an apparent rise in violent episodes by both far-right and far-left groups in Greece.
Niki
Kitsantonis contributed reporting from Athens,
and Alison Smale from Berlin.
