Some in Greece tie wildfires to developers

MOUNT PENTELI, Greece - If history is any guide, vast acres blackened in Greece's deadly wildfires will eventually sprout anew - with luxury villas, fancy hotels, and expensive vacation homes.

The fires, which killed at least 64 people across the country and threaten to topple the government, have forced Greeks to ask painful questions about what caused the blazes and how they were able to spread such destruction.

Among the most insidious triggers, according to officials and environmentalists, is a practice by builders of torching forests to render the land available for development.

Greece is the only country in the European Union that does not have a forest registry. Once a forest burns down, the legal status of the land also goes up in smoke. Without records, designating the land for reforestation is too difficult, and the land is often up for grabs.

In some cases, developers have moved in with the help of corrupt officials.

"Historically, this is a very big problem," said Dmitri Karavellas, chief executive of the Greek branch of the World Wildlife Fund. "There is no doubt that at least some of the fires this week were due to arson linked to property development."

Firefighters battled their last major blaze in southern Greece yesterday after a week of fires that wiped out at least 1,500 homes and cost the country at least $1.6 billion.

Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis, who faces a close race for reelection in fewer than three weeks, promised to rebuild all homes destroyed by the fires through a disaster relief fund made up of state and private contributions. He said homeless families would initially get prefabricated homes.

Yesterday, Greece's one major remaining fire swept through the hamlet of Kato Kotyli, near Karytaina in the Peloponnese. Residents and firefighters prevented it from destroying the 30 or so homes.

As an investigation into the suspected arsons continues, authorities said six people have been charged with deliberately setting fires.

The arson trend has been especially damaging on Mount Penteli, once a thick-forested hill 15 miles north of Athens and now an overbuilt affluent suburban enclave, where four fires in the last decade have been blamed on arsonists.

Flames that stalked the mountain last week topped the ridge and spread down through the northern edge of the community, incinerating homes and forcing hundreds of well-to-do Greeks to flee.

Resident George Papageorgeou, a retired Air Force officer, was surveying the damage Wednesday and said he was convinced that this fire, like ones in the past, could be blamed on a scheme to grab the land.

"Houses here are very expensive," he said, adding that he has watched dozens of homes spring up around him, including on land cleared by fire.

His place was spared this time due to the quick work of volunteer firefighters, he said.

But a block away, the scene was different: The gutted hulks of million-dollar homes loomed on a hillside scarred with spindly, burned tree trunks and a sea of ash. A swing set could be seen standing amid the wasteland.

It was unclear how many of the hundreds of fires that have swept Greece in the past six days were caused by deliberate action and how many were the result of negligence, combined with a severe drought, enduring heat wave, and high winds.

Officials say almost a half-million acres have been destroyed by the fires, which razed entire villages, consumed farmlands, killed livestock and deer, and singed priceless antiquities. While some of the wildfires raged through beachfront olive groves and pine stands on the Peloponnese peninsula and other valuable property, others were on land that is not coveted by developers.

What is clear is that a terrible fire season was easily predictable, and the government is coming under criticism that it failed to take adequate precautions and to fight the disaster effectively.

In scores of villages, residents had to fight fires themselves when no help arrived. Many of the dead were trapped in their cars or fields as they tried to flee.

The state appeared to be in shambles: Greeks had to turn to television, phoning in to recount their harrowing ordeal and plea for rescue while TV commentators gave out advice on how to survive. Among many mistakes, the crisis was put in the hands of an inexperienced official.

The conservative Karamanlis government was quick to blame arsonists - in part, some commentators said, to deflect blame from its own missteps.

Greece holds a national election on Sept. 16, and Karamanlis and his New Democracy Party have begun to slip in polls that they were leading until now. Many pollsters say the fire debacle could cost Karamanlis the election, and his opposition is eager to exploit the public anger.

"The state could not protect lives," Socialist Party leader George Papandreou said. "We are humiliated by the inability of the government to save the lives of our fellow citizens."

However, the same public outrage being directed at the government could also tarnish the opposition, pollsters said. The Socialist Party ruled for more than a decade until 2004.