2023-08-25 12:02:40
The video made the rounds on Greek social networks. Under a sky heavy with smoke from the fires that have been ravaging Greece for several days, a man films his 4×4 on a small forest road. He goes around the vehicle, arrives at the level of the imposing trailer at the back, opens the door to proudly show the 25 migrants who are piled up there. The ones he probably just caught somewhere in the forest stare at him, scared. “I loaded 25 pieces… They are going to burn us”, strikes the author of the video, inviting his compatriots to organize themselves to do like him. He has since been arrested.
In Greece, as everywhere where the fires wreaked havoc this summer, the population is looking for a person responsible. At the center of the migratory routes between the Middle East and Western Europe, the country is a transit zone for thousands of exiles who, on their way, sometimes camp in forests and natural areas. They also hide there, to escape the violence of the Greek border guards. On Monday August 21, 18 charred bodies, including those of two children, were found in a forest near the Turkish border, most likely migrants trapped in the flames.
Ideal culprits
For part of Greek public opinion and the political world, the explanation is clear: it is the migrants who light, sometimes voluntarily, the virulent forest fires. On August 23, the Greek Supreme Court opened two investigations. One to determine the existence or not of a “organized plan” aimed at starting the fires in the region of Alexandroupolis (north-east of the country), the largest that the European Union has known. The second on “the alarming phenomenon of violence” towards migrants, as well as incitement to “racist pogroms”.
The phenomenon is not new in Greece. In June 2022, the national daily Ekathimerini headlined the endemic nature of conspiracy theories on forest fires in the country. The previous summer it was the American magazine Foreign Policy which went back in detail to the political and social ferment that is pushing some Greeks to lose confidence in official speeches. Already in 2007, a report in Greece from the daily The country described the anger of residents accusing them of being the cause of the fires earlier “the Islamists who have declared war on the West”sometimes “property developers who want to be able to build on devastated land”.
“Only criminal hands…”
During the deadly fires of July in Algeria, it was the music of the plot hatched for a political, even “genocidal” purpose that resonated on social networks. A simple search for the subject on X (formerly Twitter) leads to dozens of posts accusing “the Algerian army to set fire to Kabylia”. The goal? Weaken this mountainous and Berber-speaking region perceived as disruptive by Algiers. For its part, the government accuses the Islamist movements and the Kabyle separatists. Nothing really new: in August 2021, Kamel Beldjoud, then Minister of the Interior, declared that “only criminal hands” could be at the origin of the wave of fires which had killed almost 100 people in the country.
This summer in Canada, many theories accuse the government of having deliberately started the fires that have ravaged the country from east to west. The leader of a far-right party even went so far as to invent “green terrorists” wishing “to give a boost to their climate change campaign”. Images taken out of their contexts feed these theories. One of them, widely shared in Canada but also in other countries, shows a helicopter flying low over a forest and setting it ablaze with a flamethrower. Ultimate proof of the intentional or planned nature of these fires? It is, in reality, a “controlled burning”, in other words the lighting of a fire, supervised and controlled by the firefighters, aimed at preventing the spread of another.
#wildfires #mist #plot