Russia sends in firefighters as Greek minister says sorry for losing the
battle against 3,000 forest fires*

Helena Smith in Athens
Tuesday July 31, 2007
The Guardian

Two giant water bombing aircraft from Russia yesterday weighed into the
fight against scores of fires raging across Greece as Athens'
conservative government, fending off claims of ineptitude, apologised
for its handling of the disaster.

As President Vladimir Putin stepped in at the request of the prime
minister, Costas Karamanlis, dispatching two amphibian planes and
several helicopters to Greece, the scale of the crisis became ever more
apparent with fires ravaging villages, farmland and forests for a third
week.

"I must say sorry to all those who have suffered [loss as a result of
the fires]," said the interior minister, Prokopis Pavlopoulos, on a tour
of Corinth where large areas of land resemble a war zone. "No government
could be satisfied with this. It is the responsibility of the state to
ensure this doesn't happen."

An estimated 25,000 acres (10,000 hectares) of land have been destroyed
in some 3,000 wildfires across Greece since June. Last week,
panic-stricken British tourists told how they had only minutes to pack
up and flee as giant flames raced towards hotels in Skala on the
southernmost tip of Cephalonia.

"One minute the fire was in the distance, the next it seemed to be very
near and all hell broke out," said Clive Baker from Birmingham, who was
among 4,000 holidaymakers evacuated from the resort. "I grabbed my wife
and boy and said 'We're out of here.' It was like pure cold fear,
terrifying."

Record-breaking temperatures, which last Thursday soared to 45C (113F)
in Athens, are believed to have sparked some of the fires but the Greek
media said there was growing evidence that arsonists in the pay of
developers were also behind them.

Yesterday, a 26-year-old man was jailed for setting fire to a forest,
while police believe an 87-year-old woman was also behind an arson
attack in northern Greece.

"[We are in] a war against land grabbers and developers, as well as
citizens who decide to build their homes on forestland," wrote the
commentator Marianna Tziantzi in the authoritative centre-right daily
Kathimerini.

Despite EU funds and repeated pleas from Brussels, Greece still lacks a
land registry nearly 180 years after it proclaimed independence from the
Ottoman empire. In recent weeks, as illegal construction has mushroomed
in areas cleared by fires, environmentalists have blamed the mayhem on
the legal void.

"We don't have the appropriate laws to protect forests and are the only
country among the European Union's original 15 members that, as yet,
doesn't even have proper forest maps," Achilles Plitharas at Greece's
WWF (formerly the World Wide Fund for Nature) branch told the Guardian:
"In such circumstances, it's very hard to determine where a forest
begins and ends and all too often corrupt officials turn a blind eye
when arson is involved."

The fires had laid waste to vast tracts of hardy oak and fir forests
that would take decades to re-grow, Mr Plitharas said. "In ecological
terms this is a disaster. Greece's biodiversity has suffered
tremendously and the summer is not even over."

Eight people, including three firefighters, have died in the fires. Last
night, as the country braced for its third heatwave in six weeks, blazes
were raging from Crete in the south to the heavily wooded Kastoria area
in the north.

Large areas of Mount Grammos, close to the once verdant border with
Albania, were also ablaze triggering fears that brown bears could soon
begin invading nearby towns if forced to descend from its slopes.