Syriza has tabled a motion calling for the establishment of an interparty parliamentary committee to pursue Second World War reparations from Germany.

Signed by party leader Alexis Tsipras, the motion comes just days after a German foreign ministry statement said that there was “no issue” of reparations to Greece given the passage of time.

In a letter sent to the parliamentary speaker on Thursday, Tsipras said that in the approximately 70 years since the end of the war, successive Greek governments failed to systematically press Germany to meet its obligations to the Greek people stemming its wartime occupation of the country.

The failure to pursue repayment of the forced occupation loan, the return of looted artefacts and reparations for loss of life and infrastructure was offensive to the historical memory of the Greek people, he continued.

At an Italian-German financial conference held in Rome in 1942, the Axis powers arbitrarily decided that occupied Greece, as it had fought on the side of the Allies, was obliged to fund the country’s occupation through a “loan”. In February, a group of MPs put the value of the unpaid loan at roughly 54bn euros before interest.

Tsipras said that on March 28 a joint meeting of Parliament’s economic affairs, as well as defence and foreign affairs committees’ MPs from all parties had decided that the issue of German reparations was of extreme importance.

That meeting, he added, had called for the establishment of an interparty committee to collect and organise historical documents to back up Greece’s claims against Germany and to seek European support for them.

Earlier this month, Deputy Finance Minister Christos Staikouras told parliament that the General Accounting Office (GLK) would make a calculation for the first time on how much reparations Germany owed to Greece.

He said that his ministry had begun collecting archival material to be examined by a group of experts.
“The German reparations are a particularly complex legal issue and subject to study and settlement at an international level in accordance with the rules of international law,” Staikouras said, in comments published by Bloomberg. “The case is still outstanding, and as a country we reserve the right and the possibility to manage it to a satisfactory conclusion.”

“Greece has never resigned its rights,” Staikouras later said, warning however that a “realistic and cool-headed” approach was necessary in order not to further sour relations between the two countries.

On September 10, the ministry said a four-member working group would submit its report by the end of the year.
In May, the then Pasok finance minister Filippos Sachinidis ordered a trawl of the GLK’s archives for relevant documents.
Source: Athens News