These three squares happened to be the places Human Rights Watch later described as “particularly dangerous areas for anyone who does not look Greek.” The organization documented fifty-one “serious attacks” on migrants that took place from August 2009 through May 2012, more than half of them occurring on or near Agios Panteleimonas Square. Indeed, just before the municipal election of 2010, Ilias Panagiotaros, the bald Golden Dawn leader who helped orchestrate the yogurt attack on Alavanos, told a reporter from the Greek newspaper Ta Nea that if Golden Dawn won a seat on the city council, “there’ll be a pogrom.” The party seemed to be making good on this promise, unleashing “assault battalions”—knife- and baton-wielding men on motorcycles—to terrorize and attack migrants. The attacks only accelerated as Golden Dawn’s support grew, and the Greek police and judiciary allowed them to go on with remarkable impunity.
One Afghan mother, Razia Sharife, described to Human Rights Watch how, at the beginning of 2012, her ground-floor apartment in the neighborhood of Agios Panteleimonas had been attacked repeatedly. Once, while she was inside the apartment with her three-year-old and her eleven-year-old twins, a group of men entered and broke beer bottles over the furniture, she told the organization. She’d complained to the police three times, she said, and wondered why, when she could identify some of her attackers frequenting a café on the square, the police did nothing to stop them. At one point, while a Human Rights Watch researcher was visiting Sharife in her apartment, a group of people outside started beating the glass front door with some kind of blunt object. For three minutes, the researcher said, everyone inside watched as the thick glass was cracking. After the banging stopped, the researcher said, they called the police, who arrived and took statements, but they did not find the attackers. The next day, the researcher and Sharife went to file an official complaint at the Agios Panteleimonas police station. There, an officer initially informed them there was a 100-euro fee in order to file a complaint, though the officer eventually processed one without a charge, according to the report. The following day, Sharife said, a neighbor broke her front window and sprayed tear gas inside the apartment. Police came twice to take her statement, Sharife said, and both times they urged her to relocate.
One Afghan man, Safar Haidari, told Human Rights Watch he was punched, kicked, and beaten with clubs by a group of ten to fifteen men wearing helmets and hoods roughly two hundred meters away from the Agios Panteleimonas police precinct. Afterward, Haidari said, he called the police, and about fifteen or twenty minutes later, two motorcycle cops rolled by and asked for his papers. The officers, he said, then told him to go to the police station. There, other officers told him they were busy, Haidari said, despite the fact that he could see five policemen sitting in an office drinking coffee and chatting. Haidari said he waited for twenty minutes and then left.
Mina Ahmad, a twenty-year-old Somali woman, was six months pregnant and walking near the Agios Panteleimonas church with her infant daughter near the end of 2011 when a group of men in black stopped her and asked where she was from, she told Human Rights Watch. They then hit her on the head with a wooden club and ran away, telling her to “get out of the country.” She said she fell down bleeding, thinking only of the well-being of the baby inside her, and of her infant daughter, who was crying beside her. No one in the neighborhood helped her, she said; rather, she called friends who came to her assistance, but with no documents at the time, she didn’t go to the hospital.
The UNHCR and other human rights organizations documented hundreds more such attacks. The attackers often targeted squares and bus stops, and were sometimes accompanied by children. On a few of my visits to the neighborhood of Agios Panteleimonas, I met people who told me they’d in fact seen children participating. One woman with an apartment directly overlooking the square—she asked me not to publish her name, out of fear of making enemies in the neighborhood—told me she witnessed a man being kicked and smacked around by a group of adults who had brought their children as if to teach them how this sort of thing was done. Another woman told me she once saw several children near Attica Square wielding wooden clubs and chasing a South Asian–looking man. The children returned from the chase laughing with a group of men on the square—presumably their tutors. “It was like a game,” the woman said. In both cases, the women told me they felt they couldn’t do anything to stop the attacks. Though there was a police precinct a few blocks away, the thought of calling it seemed like a bad joke.
Of course, all of this raised a question that, while many Greek media outlets were reporting on the unspeakable criminality suffered by the residents of Agios Panteleimonas, not enough Greeks had considered: Who were the real criminals?
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Golden Dawn’s involvement in the defense of Agios Panteleimonas came to a dramatic apogee on a Saturday afternoon in January 2011. It was a sunny, cool day, and leftist groups planned a march to the square. Indignant residents weren’t going to allow this, and planned their own counter-rally. Riot police once again arrived to separate the two groups, keeping the leftists from getting too close. The events that followed were captured on video by one apparent supporter of Golden Dawn, who referred to the happenings as a “defense of Greek territory against the mercenary anti-Greek battalions.” As indignant residents took turns speaking into a microphone on the square that day, Michaloliakos arrived surrounded by his entourage of bodyguards and took the microphone. “One comment only,” Michaloliakos began, as a large portion of the crowd applauded. Pumping his right arm in a manner reminiscent of the fascist orators of yore, he praised his fellow Golden Dawn fighters, who in defense of Athenians were being “stabbed by the Afghans” as other political parties were voting for the bailout program “so they could enslave you to the foreigners.” Most people in the crowd cheered and applauded louder. Greek flags were waved. “Blood, honor, Golden Dawn!” the crowd chanted. “Foreigners out of Greece!”
Amid the crowd that day, in his flowing black vestments, was the man that had replaced Prokopios as the head priest of the Agios Panteleimonas church, Father Maximos, a younger man than his predecessor, with a still-black beard. Maximos was born in the late ’60s in Leverkusen, Germany, the son of Greek immigrants, and was by this point a rising star of the church. He would soon after this event become deputy to the highest-ranking cleric in Greece, the archbishop of Athens. I later met with Maximos twice, once at the Agios Panteleimonas church, and once in his large office at the archiepiscopate of Athens, an all-white building close to the Acropolis, beside the ruins of the Roman market. The indignant residents had a far more favorable opinion of Maximos than they did of his forerunner, and it was not hard to see why. The conditions in the neighborhood were nightmarish, Maximos told me, and he verified for me the Committee of Residents’ account of the playground. It had been a “source of contamination,” he said, “a place of defecation.” I asked him how he knew this, because by the time he came to Agios Panteleimonas in 2009, the playground had already been closed. “The residents told me,” he said. He assured me that the Committee of Residents was a trustworthy source of information. I wanted to ask him if he was sure about this, and I tried to recite to him the content of the committee’s 2008 letter—the one that alleged the immigrants were having sex with animals—in order to see if he found it credible. But he interrupted me, and told me the letter did not concern him because he could vouch for the fact that the neighborhood had been blighted by drugs, theft, prostitution, and a “health bomb” of unsanitary conditions. Of course, that did not justify acts of cruelty, he told me. “It’s one thing to express your rage at something and to express a demand that a problem be faced in a proper way, and another thing to take it out on poor people, to chase them, to treat them badly, to hit them and the rest.” Maximos, during our conversations, expressed frustration that Agios Panteleimonas had become associated with Golden Dawn. This, he said, was a stereotype. Yes, Golden Dawn had tried to exploit the residents’ plight for their own political aims, but
then again, he said, so had leftist groups from outside the neighborhood that came to stage antiracist protests. They, too, had imposed their presence, he said, provoking and insulting the residents by calling them racists.
On the day of the gathering at Agios Panteleimonas, Maximos walked amid the crowd, speaking in his typically composed, neutral manner and trying to instill a sense of calm, though it did not seem to have much effect. Riot police wanted to clear the square and began to close in. A police helicopter hovered above. A feeling of tension began to set in, and a big part of the crowd began to leave. About a hundred or so men, many of them hoisting Greek flags, remained, however. They lined up in four rows and banged their flagpoles on the tiled square. One man paced up and down as if riling the men for combat. “What do you want?” he screamed. “Blood!” replied the men in formation. They repeated this a few times and began to chant: “Blood, honor, Golden Dawn.” Riot police with tear-gas masks drew closer. It was unclear why they were doing so. The police were known for their very accommodative stance toward Golden Dawn, and generally saw them as an ally in their perpetual street fight against the anarchists. Also, as would later be shown, the police were among Golden Dawn’s most ardent political supporters. Golden Dawn, in any case, was enthusiastic for the chance to fight. Men in the square donned motorcycle helmets and carried black shields decorated with the white Celtic cross—a symbol that is popular with neo-Nazis and white supremacists. Then the fighting began. Flagpoles and truncheons met helmets and limbs in a frenzy of beating. The riot police dispersed their supply of stun grenades, tear gas, and chemical spray, which resulted in the prompt retreat of the combatants from the square, and many of them sought refuge in the church.
As tear gas wafted into the heavens, a brief silence governed the square and people began to trickle back out of the church. Standing amid the combatants on the steps was Spiros Giannatos of the Committee of Residents, holding a Greek flag over his shoulder and surveying the scene, though not taking part in the fighting. Further away from the church, a man with a shaved head, a Greek flag, and a napkin placed over his nose to allay the effect of the tear gas, stood over the slogans that had long been prominently painted on the square in patriotic blue and white: GREECE, MY COUNTRY!!! and FOREIGNERS OUT OF GREECE. The man stood there, heroically keeping the flag aloft like he was the last man defending the fort. Then fighting broke out again.
Amid the smoke and combat, a cluster of future parliamentarians of Golden Dawn could be seen, avoiding direct fighting but seemingly in command of the troops. There was Ioannis Lagos, an excessively brawny man with a handlebar mustache who perpetually maintained the erect, ready-to-pounce posture of a bouncer and frequently wore a tight-fitting white T-shirt in order to stress the presence of his muscles. Lagos walked up to the riot police and challenged individual officers to fight mano a mano. “Is any one of you a man? Hand to hand? Any of you? Are there any men here?” No one took him up on the offer.
Also strutting calmly among the combatants, in a black leather jacket and black shades, was Ilias Kasidiaris, a man with a large swastika tattooed on his left shoulder. His existence later became known to the wider world when he slapped a parliamentarian of the Communist Party of Greece, a middle-aged woman, on the face on live, national television. Kasidiaris hit her with a wide, exaggerated swing of his right arm, and then followed with two more swings. When I heard about this, I thought his political career was over. But I was naive. In Greece, a lot of people—even women—seemed to admire him for putting the communist in her place, and Kasidiaris went on to become one of the party’s most prominent figures.
On the steps of the church, the combatants, moved by patriotic sentiment, began to sing the national anthem. Their voices, as they sang of Hellenes arisen, were deep and not particularly harmonious. Then, at a loss for what to do next as a lull in the fighting set in, they sang it again. As riot police approached them on the steps, the combatants sang the anthem a third time. Among them stood Maximos, appearing at one point to try to calm Lagos, the beefy future parliamentarian, from seeking more volunteers among the riot policemen for a one-on-one faceoff. I later asked Maximos how it felt to be caught in the middle of this. “I wasn’t in the middle of it,” Maximos told me. “I was in my sanctuary. For me, they’re all my children. I don’t separate people. Nor am I in the middle between anyone,” he said. “My job isn’t to be with one side or the other. My job is to be there. To be present.”
At one point, the police began to march up the church steps. By the door, under the marble arches, the two sides started to beat one another. Many of the combatants fled inside the sanctuary and one of them placed his Celtic-cross shield in the doorway, blocking the police from entering. Maximos then thrust himself toward the door, and as a chemical cloud wafted into the air, he blocked the entrance himself. The police reverently backed away from the cleric. All of this was unnecessary and could have been prevented had the police acted differently, Maximos told me later. He said he asked the police “to not start hitting and the rest” because nothing of severity was occurring, just the screaming of some Golden Dawn slogans. The police unfortunately did not listen, Maximos said. “The truth is, they pushed me, too. And they went toward the church. That’s when I got in front and said, not in here. Here no. Here, that’s not permitted.”
After the police backed off, men with their shields and Greek flags began to trickle back outside, repopulating the church steps and watching the police march around on the square. “They want to take the square!” yelled one combatant in a Paul Revere–like plea. The combatants sang the national anthem again, louder this time. “Greece belongs to the Greeks,” they chanted. “Greece, they’re selling you, they’re kneeling before the foreigners.” Paul Revere began to chant again: “We’re protecting it. We’re protecting it. The square. We’re protecting it.”
After nearly two hours of this, the two sides seemed to agree to a truce. Police backed away and gave their opponents a chance to honorably remove themselves from the battlefield. The combatants lined up into four rows and, holding their shields and their Greek flags, sang the Golden Dawn anthem. “Followers of mighty progenitors, children of resplendent fighters, we are the new Spartans, with our brave heart,” the men sang in a gruff unison, followed by the chorus: “Forward, always forward, a new glorious era is rising. Forward, always forward, the light of Hellenism guides us.” They then sang the second verse: “We were the ones to light the torch, to us was born the wrath. We want a new Greece, that will cover all the earth.” After they finished, their drill leader yelled, “Hail victory!” which in German happens to translate to Sieg heil. “Hail!” the formation responded. The remaining onlookers near the square applauded, and the combatants then marched off in formation, chanting: “Greece belongs to the Greeks.”
The events of the day were subsequently overblown in the press, according to Maximos. “In my judgment, I don’t think anything important happened,” he said. “Again, the television made it a much bigger thing than it really was. Who was it? Some kids they brought to yell slogans, whether they believed them or not.”
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Those most interested in inflating the significance of the day’s events, it so happened, were indignant residents and members of Golden Dawn. Following the battle, a news talk show program called Makeleio, or “Carnage,” on an Athens channel not known for its high journalistic standards, dedicated a program to the fight on the square. The host, Stefanos Chios, a volatile man who introduced his program as the “freest show on Greek television,” began by insulting various politicians as the “scum of the society” and then dared the “bastards in power” to sue him, if indeed they had the manhood to sue him. The source of his anger that day was the shameful beating police had unleashed on the Greek citizens on Agios Panteleimonas, and the desecration of the church, the insult to Orthodoxy. The program that night would “smash the bones” of the politicians, he said. Then, pausing as if he could sense potential legal consequences for s
aying that, added: “Not their physical bones, but their political and policing bones.”
One of the guests that night was “a witness” to the day’s events. He wore a tight-fitting black T-shirt and black cap, and looked and spoke a bit like Rocky Balboa. He was among those guarding the square from immigrants and leftists who had planned the demonstration, he explained, and then came the vicious police attack. The police went inside the church, broke windows, and threw chemicals, the witness said. He then held up his right arm and pulled back the white gauze that was wrapped around his wrist, revealing a gash. “This is my wound,” he said. He then suggested the politicians governing the country leave “before it’s too late.” The rage of the people was boiling over, he said. “This can’t go on. The people have reached the end. The end. Period. They will rise up. We’ll take weapons and go out onto the streets. It can’t go on. Period.”
Chios told the witness that there were reports Golden Dawn had participated in the residents’ demonstration. He wanted to know if this was accurate. “Can you tell me what information you have so we can understand some things? And how the residents gathered and who were these residents who gathered at Agios Panteleimonas? Because they equate everyone with the far right. This thing needs to be cleared up.”
The Full Catastrophe Page 27