“We are extreme right,” said the witness. “Nationalist, extreme right, and proud of it,” he said. “What are we, murderers? We don’t go out to steal, nor do we kill.” The people on the square, he said, were “Greek Golden Dawn members.” He added, as if an afterthought: “And residents of the area.”
A series of callers began to phone in. The first was Loukia Rizou, the retired statistics employee I had met in her capacity as Committee of Residents member. The police attack, she said, was sudden and excessive. The worst part of all of it was the damage to the church. Chios thanked her for her account, and then took several more calls from people who seemed to be reading lines someone had given to them, though Chios said that the callers weren’t “made up.” One caller said that after witnessing what took place on the square that day, she had decided to take her children and leave for Australia again. “Unfortunately, unfortunately, Greece isn’t governed by Greeks, but by foreigners, masons, and Jews.” Another woman called and said that unless politicians resigned, the people would “have to go out in the streets with sticks and rocks and with everything to chase whoever gets in front of us.” One male caller said he was ashamed to be Greek. “Isn’t there a general that can take care of these shit dogs and send them to hell? Isn’t there a general? At some point, there were generals with eyebrows,” he said, a kind of way of saying “with balls” and an apparent reference to Greece’s military dictatorship.
As if on cue, a man with big eyebrows called. It was Michaloliakos, the Golden Dawn chief. The police attack was totally unprovoked, he said. “We’re talking about a deep state, about a shadow state that has recruited bums who beat old ladies and children and disperse chemicals,” he said. “They even got to the point of throwing stun grenades at the church candle stand.”
It was noteworthy to hear Michaloliakos’s ostensible offense at such impiety. The party had long shed its preference for the paganism of the ancient Hellenes, knowing that such sacrilege would not get it very far in Greek politics. Golden Dawn, by this point, actively sought to associate itself with the church. During the feast day of St. Panteleimon the following year, for instance, a formation of men wearing black Golden Dawn shirts carried an icon of the saint during a procession around the church as priests with long beards, girls wearing white dresses, and altar boys in sparkling robes watched from the church steps amid ringing bells and chants of “Kyrie eleison,” or “Lord, have mercy.” Maximos later told me he was out of town when this happened. Had he been there, he wouldn’t have allowed it, he said, and he considered it a sacrilege for a political party to exploit a church service. “Simply, there was no one there to tell them, ‘Stop. You can’t come here.’ ”
Michaloliakos went on, telling the television viewers that the police actions of the day illustrated how Greece was enduring the most horrible dictatorship that had ever existed. Yet he also expressed hope. Despite all this, despite this unprovoked police attack for which there was no reason, the Greeks who were on the square that day, proudly holding the flag of their nation, did not budge. “The people faced them with simple hands, with bare hands.”
—
One Sunday in early May 2012, I met Khalid Abdulrahman and Mukhtar Jama next to a basketball court by the train station in central Athens, a ten-minute walk from Agios Panteleimonas. Abdulrahman was in his early thirties, wore a Che Guevara baseball cap, and seemed tired. He’d come to Greece five months earlier from Sudan, and things hadn’t gone well. He was living in a defunct train car and subsisting off food from a Catholic charity soup kitchen. In a plastic bag he carried a few half-eaten chunks of bread. “I will try and go back to Sudan now,” he told me. Jama, on the other hand, had just arrived from Somalia, and appeared to be still processing the difficulty of his new circumstances. He was lanky and twenty-two, and looked bookish in eyeglasses and neat clothes. He said he had sold a piece of land in Mogadishu for $1,500 in order to pay a smuggler to get him to this point. First, they put him on a flight to Damascus, Syria. From there, the journey was one and a half months through rugged topography, most of it on foot. Sugar water kept him from passing out. Jama’s “dream” had been to go to a European university, he said, but the idea now seemed fanciful in retrospect. The Somalis who had come before him were dejected and told depressing stories. “They’re, you know, what’s the word.” He scanned his English lexicon for a moment. “Fucked,” he said with a wide grin, pleased to have found the right way to put it.
Our conversation was interrupted by the sound of an explosion. Several others followed. A cloud of smoke appeared from around the corner, followed by a chorus of male voices chanting in a deep staccato: “Blood, honor, Golden Dawn” and “Greece belongs to the Greeks.” Jama decided it would be a good time to leave and disappeared in a hurry. Abdulrahman lingered long enough for me to buy him a couple of meat-filled hot pockets, his choice among the scant options available at the closest fast-food restaurant. He then shuffled off in the direction of his train car.
A bit later, Michaloliakos marched down the same street surrounded by an entourage of muscled disciples. Voting had just concluded in national parliamentary elections held to replace the unelected, technocratic government that had pushed through the second bailout agreement. The first results had come in, and Michaloliakos, it appeared, had just received a promotion from Athens city councilman to parliamentarian. The loud booms around the corner had been celebratory explosives being tossed off the balcony of the party’s main headquarters. His party, having established a foothold with the migrant issue, was now riding a wave of anti-bailout feeling. The party won 7 percent of the national vote, a result that had placed Michaloliakos in the pantheon of short, dangerous men throughout history who, in their pursuit of power, had surpassed expectations of how much of it they could get.
Michaloliakos was on his way to a nearby hotel conference room where a few dozen journalists waited to hear him speak. He strutted passed Hellenic busts in the hotel lobby and entered the meeting room, where a plump party official with a shaved head named Giorgos Germenis instructed the journalists to rise from their chairs and stand at attention. Germenis was also the bassist and guttural grunter for Naer Mataron, a Greek death-metal group of modest acclaim, or, in the band’s own words, “the most dangerous satanic band in the world.” Naer Mataron was just about to release a new studio album, Long Live Death, which one metal reviewer called a “wicked piece of venomous black/death,” containing insane drumming and a “brutal vomiting of assaulting vocals.” Germenis, known by his stage alias, Kaiadas, the name of the gorge into which ancient Spartans tossed executed criminals, was also about to become a parliamentarian and the party’s point person on issues pertaining to decentralization and local governance.
Most of the journalists obeyed Germenis’s order to rise. I was fortunate to already have been standing against the back wall, thereby avoiding the predicament of how to react. One woman, whom I could not see behind the phalanx of cameras being hoisted in the air, refused to stand up. Germenis walked in her direction and began waving his hand to indicate she should stand immediately. “Rise! Rise! Rise! Rise! Show respect!”
“What happened?” Michaloliakos said as he walked into the room and encountered the commotion. Behind the cameras, I heard the woman explain to him the nature of the disagreement, as if he might arbitrate in a reasonable manner. Instead he told her she could leave, and she did. Michaloliakos then sat down beside the red party flag, which featured at its center a black meander design. Despite the banner’s unmistakable resemblance to the German Nazi flag in both color and design, anyone making this connection was misguided, according to party officials. In fact, any allusion to it as a Nazi flag, they said, was “ridiculous” and “calumnious.” Beside Michaloliakos sat the largest man in the room, Ioannis Lagos, the one who on the day of the Battle of Agios Panteleimonas had persistently challenged the riot policemen to fight. “No one talks,” Lagos instructed the room as Michaloliakos sat down at a table in front of the jour
nalists. The party leader placed both hands on the table, as if he were an angry teacher about to scold the classroom, and thanked—“with all the strength of my Greek heart”—his voters. The party would continue its resistance to “the slavery of the bailout program” and fight the “social jungle” of illegal immigration. He then uttered to his political opponents a phrase attributed to Julius Caesar: “Veni, vidi, vici”—I came, I saw, I conquered. (For a pure Hellene, Michaloliakos possessed a peculiar oratory fondness for Latin.) “A new golden dawn of Hellenism is rising,” he said. “For those who betray this homeland, the time has come to be afraid. We are coming.” He then paraded out of the room surrounded by his burly associates.
In front of the party’s headquarters a few blocks away, supporters had begun to gather in the street. Police arrived and blocked off traffic in order to provide room for celebration. A couple of motorcycle cops revved their engines as they rolled by. At this discreet but clear endorsement, the Golden Dawn adherents whooped with glee. Golden Dawn’s core constituency, it turned out, was not so much the people of Agios Panteleimonas, where the party had come in third, winning between 12 and 14 percent of the vote—a smaller portion than in the municipal election years earlier. Rather, its greatest support came from the neighborhood of Ampelokipoi, a more prosperous area of the city to the east, which happened to be the location of the Greek police headquarters. Greek police, unlike other citizens, voted where they worked, and in several Ampelokipoi polling stations where police were among the voters, Golden Dawn did exceptionally well, capturing in some stations nearly a quarter of the vote. In area polling stations where police did not vote, the party’s performance was on par with the national average.
Men in black shirts lit flares that emitted the blue hue of the Greek flag. Explosives were tossed intermittently. “Foreigners out of Greece!” Though the event was out in the middle of the street, the party had determined it was closed to unapproved journalists, and I watched as a few hefty men turned away a dejected German public television news crew. I kept my notebook and a voice recorder in my pocket. The growing crowd applauded with excitement as they waited for Michaloliakos, who was to emerge onto an upper balcony and speak.
Soon, Michaloliakos appeared next to two large Greek flags. He was greeted with cheers, ear-piercing firecrackers, and car alarms triggered by the explosions. Beside him in the shadows stood someone he introduced as a monk from Mount Athos. “Whoever thinks that now that we are entering parliament, we’re going to become good boys and girls, we answer: the streets await us!” Competing chants of “Foreigners out of Greece” and “Greece belongs to the Greeks” merged into a repulsive cacophony. “At some point, the roads will open up and Greece will once again become ours,” he said. “They criticized us nationalists, the Golden Dawners, because we had the bravery to protect neighborhoods, to liberate the squares.” After thirty-eight years of fake democracy, he said, a nationalist movement had been born to save Greece. The crowd shouted in near ecstasy: “Hellas! Hellas!” followed by the Spartan “E tan e epi tas.”
—
Over the course of the next year—as Golden Dawn continued its attacks on migrants—its stature continued to rise, and polls showed it to be the country’s third most popular party. Its good fortune went on unimpeded until a mid-September night in 2013 when Pavlos Fyssas, a thirty-four-year-old antifascist rapper known as Killah P, went to a café in Piraeus with some friends to watch a soccer game. There, Fyssas exchanged words with some members of Golden Dawn, who called for reinforcements. Some thirty or so men equipped with clubs arrived on the street outside, according to witnesses, and shortly after midnight, when Fyssas tried to leave, he was attacked. A Golden Dawn member drove up, got out of his car, and stabbed Fyssas in the chest, killing him. This was self-defense, the accused killer said after he was arrested. The next day, the Greek news media heavily covered the murder. The attack, investigators said, appeared to have been ordered through a chain of command, implicating Golden Dawn leaders. Many Greeks were upset. This time, the victim was one of their own—a Greek, a “palikari,” to use the affectionate term for a good young man.
The Greek government then acted quickly to crack down on the party. The minister in charge of police ordered raids of Golden Dawn offices and homes, and requested that prosecutors bring a case against the party for being a criminal organization. Before long, the Greek parliament voted to revoke immunity for Golden Dawn parliamentary members, and the party’s public funding was cut. As Prime Minister Samaras was about to take a planned trip to the United States, Michaloliakos was arrested along with several other Golden Dawn parliamentarians. Some were later released, though Michaloliakos remained in jail.
In order to crack down on the party, the government decided, it would also have to purge police ranks of party sympathizers. High-ranking police officers across the country resigned for personal reasons, and several others were removed from their positions. The head of a division of Greece’s national intelligence agency was removed, and though the government did not provide a reason for this, the Greek press alleged a connection to Golden Dawn. Additionally, the police internal affairs division sifted through police ranks and accused ten police officers of having criminal connections to Golden Dawn. One of them was the man who for seven years had been “head of security” at the Agios Panteleimonas police station, apparently providing insight into how Golden Dawn was able to establish itself in the area. Investigators arrested him for abuse of power, money laundering, and illegal weapons and drug possession, among other charges. Found in the officer’s home and residences was an arsenal of weaponry—pistols, many shotguns, a great deal of ammunition, knives, axes, swords—and 700 grams of cannabis.
In New York, after the first arrests were made, Prime Minister Samaras spoke about Golden Dawn before an audience at the American Jewish Committee. “It’s important for me to deracinate this group,” he said. “Now, everyone realizes who they really are.” The Greek government, however, clearly knew what Golden Dawn was before Fyssas’s killing. If it was important for Samaras to deracinate the group, a lot of people in Greece were asking why the government hadn’t acted sooner.
At a café next to the neighborhood police station in Agios Panteleimonas one morning around this time, I got an answer to this question from a finely dressed man the proprietor of the establishment introduced to me as “Boss.” Boss wore a suit and tie, multiple gold rings, a thick silver watch, and wingtip shoes. He had a long nose and spiky gray hair. I’d come to the right place, he told me, after I introduced myself and told him the subject of my interest. “I am extreme right.” He was indeed dressed a bit like the shadowy right-wing henchmen portrayed in Greek movies about the postwar period, the men who showed up in the middle of the night to kidnap some leftist from his bed. “People you see licking themselves at a café next to the police station are always from the right-wing realm,” Boss told me. “You won’t see a single leftist.” Boss, a retiree who didn’t want to tell me his real name, paced back and forth while I sat at a table by the window. He occasionally bent down to stick his face directly in front of mine for emphasis as he explained to me a few things about Greek politics. Boss then began to clap; during the military dictatorship in Greece, he told me, a lot of people were doing this. “Where do you think they all ended up?” The answer, according to Boss, was that most of them went to New Democracy, the party he, too, had long supported until switching to Golden Dawn a few years earlier. “New Democracy is extreme right,” Boss told me. “At least a big piece of it.” New Democracy and Golden Dawn, he said, were “cousins,” and it’s hard to clamp down on your cousin.
Some apparent evidence of the family ties Boss was talking about surfaced a couple of months after our conversation, as prosecutors were working on the Golden Dawn case. Kasidiaris—the Golden Dawn parliamentarian with a swastika tattoo on his arm—released a video of a secretly recorded conversation he’d had with Samaras’s senior aide, Panagiotaros Baltakos, in which the
aide suggested that Golden Dawn’s prosecution was purely political. “First of all, he’s afraid for himself,” Baltakos said of Samaras. “Because you’re hitting him, giving Syriza the lead.”
“And because we take his votes, he puts us in jail?” said Kasidiaris.
“The motherfucker. Incredible thing. Unbelievable,” said Baltakos about his boss.
Samaras condemned Baltakos after the video surfaced, saying he did not know his aide had close contacts in Golden Dawn. Baltakos resigned, and in an interview on Greek radio he said he was telling Kasidiaris what he wanted to hear as part of a strategy to stay in touch with Golden Dawn and get information about them. This had to be done for the good of the country, he said. “New Democracy is a center-right party that for two years has been in danger of losing its right wing,” he said. “And if that happens, it will fall completely out of the primacy of the political spectrum. That should not happen.”
The episode helped explain why the conservative-led government did not move against Golden Dawn earlier. Samaras had long been advised against a crackdown on the party out of concern it would alienate New Democracy’s nationalist wing, and in the beginning, that logic seemed to have won out. Samaras initially tried to defeat the political threat that Golden Dawn posed to him by getting tough on illegal immigration and anarchist street protesters. This, Samaras hoped, would make those far-right voters who had defected come back. Instead, the strategy just seemed to help legitimize and strengthen Golden Dawn. Samaras’s government then turned to Plan B: prosecution. The killing of a Greek palikari, and the revulsion this stirred among Greeks, provided the window of opportunity.
Samaras’s conservative-led government was by no means solely to blame for Golden Dawn’s unhindered rise. Golden Dawn had begun its political ascent and violent tactics long before he took power, and the state’s tacit consent ran far deeper. The fact that sympathy for Golden Dawn flourished within the ranks of the Greek police and in the upper echelons of the government lay bare the nationalist extremism that had skulked inside the organs of the government since the end of World War II. Had Greece’s police and judiciary functioned as one imagines they ought to in a modern European state, Golden Dawn members would have faced prosecution far sooner. The complicity also extended to the wider Greek society. The mainstream Greek press largely ignored Golden Dawn’s violence, inflamed fear of immigrants, and sometimes praised the party for defending Greeks. Church clerics did not speak out forcefully enough against the party’s violence, and some echoed its rhetoric.
The Full Catastrophe Page 28