Greeks against GE trees

greece / turkey / cyprus | environment | news report Sunday October 15, 2006 11:53 by Somewhat Miffed info at stopgetrees dot org

A demonstration in Athens

Last Saturday a different kind of demostration took place in the heart of Athens, targeting the 3rd biotech conference that was being held in Athens.

Last Saturday a different kind of demostration took place in the heart of Athens, targeting the 3rd biotech conference that was being held in Athens. «Chilean President Michelle Bachelet continues to use oppressive laws enacted by former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet to expand industrial plantations at the expense of Chile’s native forests and indigenous Mapuche people,» said Kim Marks, field organizer at ForestEthics.

And we say different as the antagonistic and anarchist movement in greece is not very familiar with such matters.

«Against biotechnology, against dominance»

In greece the cultivation of GM crops is not a common thing as it is not widespread as in other european countries and for that reason people are completly uninformed of what is this new «fruit». Moreover all this talk about the alteration of DNA and the improvement of human characteristics via this intervention, is just sience fiction for most of the people. But the last years Bionova as a representative of EuropaBio is propagandizing via this international conference and other means( a journal named «BIO» and many lectures in univeristies) the agenda of the international coorporations that are involved in the production, widespreading and paternizing of GMOs.

Year by year more people are becoming consious of the seriousness and the importance of GMOs as part of the control of the dominants in everyday life. As well as the importance of these conferences in the widespreading and propaganding of the GMOs.

At this years conference some 600 people marched towards the conference center to demonstrate their opposition to the role of this meeting. Unfortunatly it wasn’t planned well and we couldn’t managed to make a more serious statement (and comittement) of our opposition. People showed up without being very serious about what we were doing there, and moreover about what was going in inside that conference. A definate point in the evolution of this struggle was at a similar demo last year when the police clashed with the demostrators when they tended to move over the conference center. The brutality of the police was phenomenal to what many people thought at that point as «another ecological antimobilazation against something» (meaning that has to do with things that are not serious to be evolved with). At that point many people within the movement rethought the seriousness of this struggle and more people got involved. In conclusion we could say that this kind of stuggle is pretty immature in Greece but is evolving, hopefully until the point where it would be understood (fully ant trully) as another point of the dominance in our everyday life that needs to be confronted with the same rage as others.