The long read
Golden Dawn: the rise and fall of Greece’s
neo-Nazis
A decade ago, violent racists exploited a national
crisis and entered mainstream politics in Greece. The party has since been
caught up in the biggest trial of Nazis since Nuremberg, and is now crumbling –
but its success remains a warning. By Daniel Trilling
Daniel
Trilling
Tue 3 Mar
2020 06.00 GMT
After he
stabbed Pavlos Fyssas in the chest, leaving him to bleed to death on the
pavement, Giorgos Roupakias walked calmly back to his car and waited to be
arrested. “Don’t give me away, I’m one of you,” he said, according to a police
officer who arrived at the scene.
“What do
you mean, are you police?” asked the officer.
“No, I am
Golden Dawn.”
Roupakias,
an unemployed lorry driver, would later claim that the killing was an act of
self-defence. He said he had simply got caught up in a random street brawl in
the Greek port city of Piraeus, shortly after midnight on 18 September 2013.
What he told the police officer, overheard by several witnesses, suggested
something quite different. Golden Dawn was a neo-Nazi party that had risen to
prominence the previous year amid Greece’s economic crisis. The party had gone
from winning fewer than 20,000 votes in the country’s 2009 general election to
winning more than 7% of the vote, and 18 parliamentary seats, in 2012. No
outright fascist party in Europe had made such gains in a general election for
years.
Although
Golden Dawn’s members sometimes played the game of respectable politics, they
were no mere rightwing populists; they were the kind of Nazis you are more
likely to read about in history books. Driven by profound racism and
antisemitic conspiracy theory, with a fervent devotion to Hitler, Golden Dawn
combined street violence with torchlit flag-waving rallies and extreme
rhetoric. One of its MPs proclaimed “civil war” to a BBC reporter, while an
election candidate promised in front of a documentary crew to “turn on the
ovens” and make lampshades from the skins of immigrants, a reference to what
Nazi Germany did to Jews, Roma and other minorities in the Holocaust. “The
Europe of nations is back,” declared the party’s leader, Nikolaos
Michaloliakos, at a press conference in May 2012. “Greece is only the
beginning.”
In the
years before Golden Dawn’s electoral breakthrough, its opponents had been
intimidated, beaten up and, in some cases, almost killed. Once the party’s
candidates entered parliament, this kind of violence only seemed to grow. Party
associates like Roupakias – who claims not to have been a member, although
other witnesses say he was a key official in his local branch – seemed to
believe that they were tolerated, or even supported, in their endeavours by
parts of the Greek state. But the events that night in September 2013 changed
everything.
On the
evening of 17 September, three Golden Dawn supporters were watching football at
a bar in Keratsini, a suburb of Piraeus, when they spotted Fyssas, a
34-year-old rapper on a night out with friends. Fyssas, who went by the stage
name Killah P, was well known locally as a hip-hop promoter and campaigner
against racism with a following among working-class Greek youth. The Golden
Dawn trio started making phone calls; surveillance records show how
communications travelled up the party hierarchy and back down again.
At 11.28pm,
the records show that an SMS was sent from a phone alleged to belong to Giorgos
Patelis, the leader of Golden Dawn’s branch in Nikaia, to several dozen contacts:
“Everyone come now to the local office. Whoever is nearby. We will not wait for
those who are far. Now.” Roupakias, who had been at home watching television,
was one of the people who apparently responded to the call-out. Just before
midnight, a convoy of Golden Dawn supporters on motorbikes, with Roupakias
following in his car, arrived in Keratsini. Witnesses saw the Golden Dawn group
threaten Fyssas and his friends, before chasing them around the corner and on
to the main road, Tsaldari Avenue. As his friends fled, Fyssas stopped to face
his attackers, who quickly pinned him to the wall.
CCTV
footage shows what happens next. While Fyssas is assaulted by groups of men in
twos and threes, in apparently coordinated fashion, a car driven by Roupakias
pulls up. He gets out, moves in close to Fyssas as if to embrace him and
delivers the fatal blow. A doctor who treated Fyssas later told his parents
that the stabbing looked like a “professional hit”.
Earlier in
2013, two men linked to Golden Dawn had stabbed to death a Pakistani man,
Shehzad Luqman, on the streets of Athens. That murder barely registered in
Greek media, let alone internationally. The killing of Fyssas, however, made
headlines all over the world. In Greece, there was widespread shock –
particularly as the image of Fyssas’s mother, Magda, appeared on TV news
bulletins and newspaper front pages. Clad in black, grieving, demanding justice
for her son, she made it “a case for every Greek”, as Kostis Papaioannou, a prominent
human rights activist, told me last year.
The murder
investigation quickly became an investigation of Golden Dawn itself, and the
result is a vast criminal trial – the largest trial of Nazis since Nuremberg,
according to lawyers representing some of Golden Dawn’s alleged victims. More
than six years after it began, the trial is only now drawing to a close. A
total of 68 people are charged with directing or belonging to a criminal
organisation. The defendants, who include Golden Dawn’s entire leadership and
all of its former MPs, are charged with dozens of additional crimes including
racketeering, attempted murder and weapons possession. They all deny the
charges.
Court
hearings will end this spring, and a verdict is due shortly after, but Greece
has already started to move on. Golden Dawn was wiped out in last year’s
general election, and a new conservative government has declared the years of
crisis over. Many media outlets only cover the trial sporadically. According to
the centrist political commentator Yannis Palaiologos, Greece now has an
opportunity to draw a line under the populism of both left and right. “As the
various populist myths about the causes and possible solutions to Greece’s
crisis have been revealed as delusions and outright lies,” he wrote in a piece
for the Washington Post last year, “the fuel that sustained extremism has been
depleted.”
Yet it
would be a mistake to overlook what the trial has revealed. The story of Golden
Dawn is the closest we’ve yet come to seeing fascism in its most extreme form
regain a foothold in European politics this century. What makes it doubly
shocking is that it took place in a country that suffered brutally at the hands
of Nazi Germany – and that the European Union, founded on the promise of “never
again”, was partly responsible for Golden Dawn’s rise. How is it that a
movement that recalls some of the worst moments of the 20th century could
flourish in our own time?
In the days
after the killing, Greece’s justice system sprung into action. The minister for
public order asked the supreme court to investigate Golden Dawn, handing over
details of 32 alleged crimes that ranged from violent threats to grievous
bodily harm, stabbings and murder. Michaloliakos, a squat, middle-aged man with
greying hair and a bulldog face, was arrested, along with dozens of other
senior members. Raids on party offices and members’ homes uncovered caches of
weapons and Nazi paraphernalia, and footage of occult swearing-in ceremonies.
Before September 2013, Golden Dawn’s support had been higher than ever – that
year, according to Papaioannou, some pollsters had been reluctant to publish
the results of surveys that put it in double-digit figures, some as high as 17%
or 18%, for fear it would give them further legitimacy. Now the party’s poll
ratings plummeted.
Yet the
danger posed by Golden Dawn had been clear for years. North-west of Athens city
centre is a square dominated by an Orthodox Church dedicated to the
fourth-century martyr Saint Pantaleimon. In the late 2000s, Golden Dawn
established a public presence there by turning some of the local Greek
residents against their immigrant neighbours.
Golden Dawn
was founded in the early 80s, initially as a Masonic society, according to the
investigative journalist Dimitris Psarras, an authority on the party. For many
years it remained small and semi-hidden, recruiting its members from Greece’s
football hooligan scene. In the late 00s, however, it pursued a new strategy,
setting up an “angry citizens” group in Saint Pantaleimon to complain about
crime it linked to immigrants, mainly refugees from Afghanistan, who had
recently moved into the area. Many lived in poverty or destitution, trapped by
a Greek asylum system that didn’t work and an EU regulation that would not let
them travel elsewhere, but a community was starting to put down roots; some
Afghans had opened shops and cafes on the square.
In an early
sign of economic turmoil, several inner-city neighbourhoods of Athens became
visibly poorer during this period; a decline that some people blamed on
immigration. Saint Pantaleimon and the surrounding streets became notorious for
racist attacks. So-called “assault squads” of men, who witnesses often said
wore T-shirts bearing Golden Dawn’s logo, would beat Afghan, Pakistani and west
African residents with sticks and knuckledusters. Local Greek people who spoke
out against Golden Dawn, like the owner of a pharmacy I interviewed a few years
ago, were threatened, too. “After the refugees,” she said they’d told her, “the
targets will be you, the leftists and the Jews.” In 2010, voters in Athens
elected Michaloliakos to the city council.
Every
country in Europe has groups like Golden Dawn: small, often clandestine
networks of rightwing extremists whose ideology blurs the line between politics
and a cult. Their hopes of breaking into the mainstream lie in economic
collapse, intense social conflict or a state that doesn’t enforce the law. In
the wake of the global financial crisis, Greece offered Golden Dawn a
combination of all three.
In 2009,
Greece’s newly elected government, led by the centre-left party Pasok (the
Panhellenic Socialist Movement), announced it had discovered a huge hole in the
public finances. Greece was one of the countries left most exposed by the
financial crash, and the fallout threatened not just the national economy but
the stability of the euro. The government was forced to accept a bailout from
international lending institutions, which came with punishing austerity measures
insisted on by the EU. Tax rises, wage suppression and cuts to public spending
forced hundreds of thousands of people into poverty. A tax on heating fuel
symbolised the hardship and humiliation: many people started to use
wood-burning stoves, and 19th-century smog returned to Greek cities during the
winter months.
Public
anger at austerity swept many parts of Europe during these years, but in Greece
it developed into a full-blown crisis of legitimacy for the state. To many
Greeks, the entire political class seemed corrupt. “We vote, you vote, they
steal,” ran one popular slogan in the protest movement that erupted in 2011.
The government’s response was to crack down on protests with riot police and
teargas, even as it struggled to carry out basic functions of the state, such
as tax collection or running public services.
Across the
political spectrum, a feeling of national betrayal took hold. “This is not a
division of left or right. The division is between the Greek people and the
ones who have subjected themselves to the will of the bankers and the troika
[Greece’s lenders],” said Manolis Glezos, a leftwing figurehead of the protest
movement, when I interviewed him at the peak of the crisis. Glezos was a hero
of the Greek resistance during the second world war. As a teenage boy, while
Athens was under German occupation, he had climbed the Acropolis and torn down
the swastika flag that hung there. In return, he was tortured. Now, in his 90s,
he led protests outside the Greek parliament that were attended by an array of
groups: leftists and some rightwing nationalists; labourers and middle-class
professionals; public sector workers and small business owners.
In this
fraught atmosphere, Golden Dawn worked hard to attract the support of the
disaffected, vehemently opposing the disorder of the protests, but positioning
itself against austerity. It expanded across the country, building several
well-organised branches around Piraeus, a port city dominated by Greece’s
powerful shipping industry and beset by unemployment. “Call us if you want to
get rid of the commies,” its members told people in the shipyards,
traditionally the stronghold of a trade union affiliated with Greece’s Communist
party.
For the
2012 general election, the party veered between a more populist image – railing
against Greece’s creditors; allegedly hiding the neo-Nazi parts of its doctrine
with a new party constitution – and violent rhetoric, promising to sink boats
carrying migrants across the Aegean. Its candidates claimed to offer security
that the state was unable to provide: one widely circulated campaign photograph
showed Golden Dawn members escorting an elderly Greek woman to a cashpoint; she
was later revealed to be the mother of one of the members.
The 2012
election was won by the established rightwing party New Democracy, but the
bigger story was that voters had deserted the mainstream in droves. Many went
left, transforming the once-marginal radical left party Syriza into a major
opposition force. Others turned to Golden Dawn. “I feel like the whole system
is a lie,” one Golden Dawn voter, a young woman who worked in marketing, told
me that year. On another occasion, I was accosted by an elderly lady at a food
market who demanded I tell my readers that she voted for Golden Dawn to show
that “we Greeks can stand on our own two feet”.
In October,
five months after the election, a coalition of NGOs including the UN’s refugee
agency warned of a steep rise in racist assaults in Greece, many of which
shared the modus operandi of Golden Dawn’s alleged attack squads. Other violent
incidents began to stack up: one of Golden Dawn’s MPs slapped a female leftwing
opponent in the face live on television; two others led a mass assault on a
community centre in suburban Athens that offered language lessons to
immigrants, in which witnesses described adults being beaten in front of
terrified children. A string of assaults, increasing in severity, preceded the
killing of Fyssas.
When I
first visited Athens, in late 2012, I found that the Afghan community had been
driven out of Saint Pantaleimon, their shops and cafes shuttered. Yonous
Muhammadi, the head of the Afghan community association, was working from an office
in a secret location, because his previous headquarters had been firebombed. A
few years earlier, he said, his organisation had held a press conference to
raise the alarm about the violence linked to Golden Dawn. “For now it is our
problem – migrants and refugees,” he had warned. “But soon it will be a problem
for all of you Greek people too.”
In late
2013, after the wave of arrests that followed the killing of Fyssas, Greece’s
supreme court appointed two magistrates to carry out the investigation. Over
nine months, they assembled a case file containing more than a terabyte of
data: witness statements, police interviews, photographs, videos, confiscated
hard drives, call records and wiretapped phone conversations. Some of the more
lurid details were leaked to the Greek media, such as a video of the party’s
deputy leader, Christos Pappas, apparently teaching his children to shout “Heil
Hitler”.
The drop in
public support for Golden Dawn proved to be temporary. A few months after the
killing, it was back to polling around 7% – the vote it had received in the
2012 election. Greece’s crisis had not abated, and the New Democracy-led
government was trying to push through the unpopular austerity measures that its
predecessors had failed to.
The
country’s political and media class was split over how to treat Golden Dawn,
since Greece’s constitution does not allow for the banning of political
parties. In late 2013, when parliament voted to suspend the party’s state
election funding and waive its MPs’ immunity from prosecution, the move was
opposed by a minority of leftwingers, one of whom argued that Golden Dawn was
“not a classic Nazi party”, since it set itself in opposition to “the dominant
bourgeois forces”. In 2014, several defence lawyers for Golden Dawn members who
were under investigation appeared on a TV chat show to argue that while they
didn’t support the party’s views, they were doing their jobs in the interest of
democracy and free speech.
Suspending
funds did not stop 17 of Golden Dawn’s 18 MPs retaining their seats at the
general election of January 2015. It was won overall by Syriza, who formed a
left-right coalition with the nationalist Independent Greeks, promising to defy
EU-imposed austerity. One month later, the judicial council of the Athens
appeals court, a panel of judges that decides on whether a case should proceed,
charged 69 Golden Dawn members and supporters, including all of its sitting
MPs, under article 187 of Greece’s penal code, which relates to organised
crime. (One defendant has since died, so 68 now await a verdict.) The
indictment made clear that the defendants were not on trial for their beliefs.
“This ideology of the leaders, supporters and friends of the political party is
not in itself criminal,” the council wrote. Instead, the trial examines whether
Golden Dawn used violence to impose its ideas on others, and whether that
violence was planned and directed from the top of the party.
Dozens of
other charges, ranging from weapons possession to perjury, have been brought
against individual defendants. In addition to the state’s case, lawyers
representing some of Golden Dawn’s alleged victims have brought civil
prosecutions, which have also been incorporated into the main trial. These
relate to the murder of Fyssas, the attempted murder of communist trade
unionists outside the Piraeus shipyards, and the attempted murder of a group of
Egyptian fishermen, also close to Piraeus.
In April
2015, the trial began, with a flurry of media attention as Golden Dawn’s
supporters fought with their anti-fascist opponents outside the Athens
courthouse. More than 150 witnesses – police officers, legal and political
experts, alleged victims of assaults, anonymous informants – have given
testimony over the years. During this time, the media’s interest in the case
has ebbed and flowed. Journalists have largely arrived only to cover
spectacular moments such as Magda Fyssa’s testimony, which ended with her
hurling a bottle of water at her son’s alleged killers.
The trial’s
progress has been slow, beset by strikes and procedural wrangling. But it has
revealed something of vital importance: how fascist ideology tries to exploit a
society’s anger and resentment. At the heart of the prosecution’s case is
testimony given by five former Golden Dawn members, all of whom are now under
witness protection, over the course of several weeks in late 2017. Their
evidence purports to set out the anatomy of a neo-Nazi organisation.
The former
members described a group with a dual structure. It recruited from wider
society, like a regular political party, but also gradually inducted a chosen
few into “closed cells” that, they said, were sent to boot camps in the Greek
countryside and trained to follow orders. Protected Witness A said he joined
Golden Dawn in 2012 after a friend suggested they could help him find work and
receive financial support. Witness B said she had got involved the same year
after reading a Facebook post that falsely claimed “Pakistanis” were on their
way to attack her local Golden Dawn branch office. Witness E said she was told
that a woman “is a good national socialist if she stays in the house and has
children, because her goal is to breed warriors”. But when it came to election
time and Golden Dawn needed female names on the ballot paper, she claimed, she
was ordered to stand as a candidate.
Witness C
described what it was like to be a member of the inner core. He said he had
joined the party in 2006, aged 16, when it was still a “closed club”. For the
first few years, he attended discussions at the party headquarters in downtown
Athens, two or three times a week, where they were taught about Hitler and
Nazism. When he was a little older, Witness C claimed, he was taken out for
“walks” – the term his comrades used to describe night-time assaults on people
from ethnic minority backgrounds. “This one night,” Witness C recalled, “we
found an immigrant, probably a Pakistani. We went near him and I punched him in
the face wearing my brass knuckles. The others laughed and told me: ‘Well done
boy, you’re really coming into your own.’”
The
witnesses all said they believed that instructions came directly from the top.
As Ilias Stavrou, another former member who waived his right to anonymity,
testified: “In a party with such a military-style structure, nothing can happen
without an order or permission from above. If Michaloliakos orders a hit, the
person isn’t what’s important. Golden Dawn does not harbour personal feelings.
For Golden Dawn, race is the ideological unit, not the person.”
The alleged
existence of closed cells – similar to the stormtrooper units of the original
German Nazi party, or the black-shirted squadristi of Mussolini’s Fascists – is
central to the case. Psarras, the investigative journalist, told me that these
core members never numbered more than 200 or 300, with just a few dozen being
involved in most of the violent incidents. After 2012, as the party became more
popular, it attracted at most 2,000 new members, who were kept at arm’s length
as “registered supporters”.
Throughout
Golden Dawn’s rise to prominence, there were persistent allegations that
elements in the Greek police tolerated, or even supported its activities. In
2018, the research organisation Forensic Architecture published a study of CCTV
footage and police and ambulance radio transmissions on the night Fyssas was
killed, which appeared to place officers at the scene of the crime before it
happened, contradicting the official account. In the neighbourhood of Saint
Pantaleimon, the victims of racist attacks reported police officers looking on
– or joining in – as Golden Dawn members beat them up. Trial witnesses
described occasions at protests when it appeared as if Golden Dawn was acting
as the “rear guard” of the riot squad, or that clashes between the two seemed
like “a friendly match”.
In April
2018, the court heard wiretap evidence of a phone call between a senior Golden
Dawn member – not on trial in this case – and an officer in the riot control
unit, who was apparently passing on details of the movements of leftwing
demonstrators. One analysis of votes cast in the 2012 election suggested that
as many as 50% of riot control officers in Athens may have voted for the party.
(The study was made possible because riot squad barracks had their own
dedicated ballot boxes.)
The
activist Kostis Papaioannou, a former president of the National Commission for
Human Rights, told me that these revelations have not come as a great shock,
since there is a feeling among many Greeks that “it’s not the first time”
they’ve seen this happen. Rather, it’s a reminder of the country’s traumatic
experiences during the 20th century.
The German
occupation of Greece in the second world war was marked by famine, massacres
and a growing conflict between communist-led partisans and those rightwing
Greeks who collaborated with the occupiers. As the war drew to a close, British
forces, who had until then supported the partisans, attempted to prevent them
from running the newly liberated country. Instead, the British empowered the
right. This sowed the seeds for the civil war of 1946 to 1949, during which
more than 150,000 people were killed. As the historian Mark Mazower writes in
Inside Hitler’s Greece, the civil war ended in victory for the right, behind
whom “lurked the mysterious ‘para-state’, a loose network of shadowy rightwing
paramilitary organisations dedicated to protecting Greece … from the left”.
Almost
three decades of repression followed; first under a system of “managed”
democracy in which leftwingers and their families were blocked from taking up
public sector jobs, and former partisans were exiled to remote islands in the
Aegean – then, between 1967 and 1974, by a military junta backed by the US.
Golden Dawn’s leadership hails from the far-right milieu that surrounded the
junta. Michaloliakos once led the youth wing of a party founded by the former
leader of the dictatorship.
After the
fall of the junta in 1974, Greece went through a process of reconciliation,
establishing a liberal-democratic constitution. Writing in the mid-90s, Mazower
could optimistically suggest that the Nazi occupation and its aftermath “has
come to seem to a younger generation a matter of some antiquity, of little
relevance to their own concerns”. But the crisis that engulfed Greece after
2008 brought matters that many hoped were settled back to the fore.
As people
argued over who was responsible for betraying the country, and who was
defending it, historical events took on a new meaning. Among the
anti-government graffiti that appeared on the streets of Athens, for instance,
was the slogan “Varkiza is not over”, a reference to the town where a fragile
peace treaty was signed between the left and the right in 1945. As the
historian Procopis Papastratis explained to me at the time, it expressed a
sentiment that “our grandfathers agreed to work together and they were
betrayed. And we’re not going to make the same mistake.”
In 2012,
amid increasing polarisation, the party that won the general election, New
Democracy, presented itself as charting a course between “two extremes” – that
of Syriza on the left, and Golden Dawn on the right. But New Democracy was itself
promoting a form of rightwing nationalism, aided by xenophobic media coverage
on Greece’s privately owned television channels. While the government aimed to
carry out the austerity measures, it also promised voters it would crack down
on migrants and refugees and restore law and order. The New Democracy prime
minister, Antonis Samaras, vowed to “retake” Greek city centres, which had been
“occupied” by illegal immigrants. “The country has not faced an invasion of
such magnitude since the Dorian invasion 3,000 years ago,” claimed one of his
ministers in August 2012.
That
November, the government launched a large-scale police operation to round up
undocumented immigrants and place them in detention centres. Scores of people
were arrested, including two tourists, an African American and a South Korean,
both of whom said they were beaten up by police despite showing their
passports. Yet the anti-government mood continued unabated. According to Yannis
Palaiologos in his history of the Greek crisis, The 13th Labour of Hercules,
some New Democracy officials even started to privately discuss the possibility
of going into coalition with Golden Dawn. “The government,” he writes, “was
playing with fire.”
In this
atmosphere, Golden Dawn campaigned hard to position itself as the defender of
the nation. Its activists staged “Greeks-only” food banks and blood-donation
drives, and forced their way into hospitals to check the residence permits of
immigrant nurses. It staged spectacular rallies, with hundreds of members
marching with torches and Greek flags at night, to boost its prominence in the
media, with some outlets giving the party an easy ride. One talkshow host, for
instance, told his viewers he believed a Golden Dawn MP’s claim that what
appeared to be a swastika tattoo was, in fact, a “Trojan symbol”. The party’s
public statements frequently appealed to more mainstream Greek nationalism:
invocations of ancient Greek history and Orthodox Christianity; resentment of
Turkey and Germany, the former oppressors; and conspiracy theories about who
was responsible for Greece’s troubles.
Yet Golden
Dawn’s efforts to claim the myths and symbols of the Greek nation for itself
also played a part in its undoing. On 15 September 2013, days before Fyssas was
killed, members stormed a commemoration event at Meligalas, a village in the
Peloponnese region where, in 1944, partisans killed several hundred Greeks they
accused of being Nazi collaborators. The left and the right in Greece each have
their own historical moments to commemorate: when Syriza were elected to power
in 2015, for instance, one of the first acts by Alexis Tsipras, the new prime
minister, was to place flowers at the spot where 200 mainly communist activists
were murdered by the Nazis in 1944.
Meligalas,
by contrast, is claimed by the right: in its version of events, the dead were
mainly civilians, and this kind of atrocity justified the subsequent repression
of the left. But the sight of Golden Dawn members marching in formation to the
front of the crowd and pushing the village mayor off the stage – just as he was
giving a speech saying the events of the war should never be repeated – was too
much for some Greek conservatives. “In Meligalas, Golden Dawn declared war on
the right!” read the headline on one rightwing news website. Papaioannou told
me that it was particularly shocking since Samaras, the prime minister at the
time, hails from the Peloponnese. “Symbolically, it was an attack on the leader
of the conservatives, because it was an attack in his own back yard,” said
Papaioannou.
Two days
after Fyssas was killed, Samaras visited the neighbourhood where the murder had
taken place. “This government is determined,” he declared, “not to allow the
descendants of Nazis to poison our social life, to commit crime and to
undermine the foundations of the country that gave birth to democracy.”
In the
autumn of 2019, six years after they were arrested, Golden Dawn’s leadership
finally appeared in court. Throughout the year, the 68 defendants took turns to
give their final statements to the court. A panel of judges – there is no jury
in this type of trial – will decide whether or not Golden Dawn is a criminal
organisation, and who, if anybody, bears responsibility for running it.
Even before
it concludes, the trial has in effect suppressed the party, at least
temporarily. With its election funds suspended, and its senior members facing
prosecution, Golden Dawn was never able to build on the 7% it received in the
2012 election. After the arrests and raids of 2013, racist attacks in Greece
dropped sharply: according to the Racist Violence Recording Network, an NGO
monitor, there were 18 incidents in the final quarter of that year, as compared
to around 50 in each of the previous quarters. In the general election of 2019,
New Democracy regained power from Syriza – which, despite dire predictions of
left-populist chaos in some quarters, was defeated in its attempt to overturn
austerity and ended up governing as a fairly moderate social democratic party –
and Golden Dawn was unseated from the national parliament. It retained just one
MEP, who has since quit to form his own breakaway party.
For
Thanasis Kampagiannis, a lawyer representing some of Golden Dawn’s alleged
victims, the trial is only one tool among many to counter the party. He
believes the case may not even have come to court were it not for mass
anti-fascist protests in the autumn of 2013, which placed the government under
public pressure and sought to reclaim city squares dominated by Golden Dawn.
“We do not trust the institutions to dismantle completely this Nazi
organisation,” declares a statement issued by Kampagiannis and other lawyers in
2013.
For this
reason, Kampagiannis and two dozen other volunteers – there is no legal aid
available to them – have put in hundreds of unpaid hours to sift through the
case files and find evidence that state investigators may have missed. It is “a
legal scandal”, he told me, that Golden Dawn members are not being prosecuted
under a stricter anti-terrorism law, as was the case for 17 November, a
leftwing group whose leaders were convicted in 2003 of a string of high-profile
assassinations. A legacy of Greece’s fractured history is an undercurrent of
violence on the left as well as the right: in late 2013, two Golden Dawn
members were shot dead outside party offices in an Athens suburb, an attack
that was later claimed by a hitherto unknown “revolutionary” organisation as
retaliation for the killing of Fyssas.
Some
individuals linked to Golden Dawn have now been convicted of specific crimes in
separate trials – the killers of Shehzad Luqman, for instance, were found
guilty of murder, with the judge acknowledging the crime had a racist motive.
But Kampagiannis, along with several other people I spoke to, was concerned
that the state still does not take the far right or racism seriously enough. In
recent months, anti-immigrant protests have grown in the wake of the refugee
crisis; at one such event in Athens this January, a German journalist was
assaulted by far-right activists. In February, a gang of men suspected of
having links to Golden Dawn were arrested on the island of Lesbos as they were patrolling
a village armed with wooden clubs, allegedly looking for migrants to beat up.
And in the past few days, growing tension over Turkey’s decision to let
refugees approach the Greek border means the rhetoric of a migrant “invasion”
has once again returned to European politics.
Towards the
end of last year, as lawyers prepared to make their closing arguments, the
state prosecutor – an official who sits alongside the judges and recommends
what course of action they take – surprised many observers by suggesting that
Golden Dawn’s leadership should be acquitted of the most serious charges, since
the violent crimes were “isolated acts for which the leadership was not
responsible”. This provoked a retort from Fyssas’s mother, who has attended
court every day since the trial began. “Pavlos Fyssas has been dead for 75
months,” she told the prosecutor in front of the court. “You chose today to
stab him again?”
For Golden
Dawn’s part, the approach has been to deny everything. I visited court in the
autumn of 2019 and saw a series of alleged middle-ranking members claim they
knew nothing about any of the crimes they were accused of. One, who was
recorded discussing the killing of Fyssas on the phone with his mother, told
the court he had been making it all up. Many refused to say if they were
members of the party or not. (If the court does decide that Golden Dawn is a
criminal organisation, then being a member could itself be incriminating.)
Several prosecution witnesses had previously testified that a culture of
“omerta” pervades the ranks: one told the court about a member who had stepped
out of line and was beaten up in party offices, with classical music played on
the stereo to cover his screams.
On 6
November 2019, Michaloliakos had his day in court. There was no great showdown.
In front of the judges, he declined to take the opportunity to defend his
beliefs. Instead, he argued that the accusations were all lies. There was, for
instance, no secret party constitution that gave him absolute power, as
numerous witnesses had testified. Anybody who contradicted him couldn’t be
relied on. As a final gesture, he appeared to abandon his own followers,
undermining the claim of Giorgos Patelis, the alleged leader of the Nikaia
branch, that on the night Fyssas was killed they had merely been out delivering
leaflets. It was “weird” to go leafleting at midnight, Michaloliakos said.
After leaving court, he recorded a video for his social media channels, saying
he had “defended Golden Dawn and its fighters” when he took the stand.
Michaloliakos
and his associates represent a nightmare that haunts Europe: that the worst
parts of its history are bound to resurface. Yet as the journalist Psarras told
me, since Golden Dawn was never a mass movement, its relationship with its
supporters was “ideological”. By this he meant that Golden Dawn’s power lay in
failures in the political and justice systems, the platform given to it by the
media, and people’s unwillingness to face up to the problem. Golden Dawn’s rise
inspired a new generation of fascists around the world: one apparent visitor to
its rallies in 2013 was the American founder of the influential neo-Nazi
website The Daily Stormer. But this story is about more than individual
extremists. It is a warning about what can happen when a society feels hurt,
humiliated, angry and ignored.
Fascism,
more than any other political current, is a battle over memory as much as it is
about the present. The extreme nationalists who populate the far right know
this, and they know that in order to succeed they must make us forget what
their ideas have led us to in the past. Fascism seeks to colonise our myths of
identity and belonging, to turn them to its own destructive ends. It starts by
promising to clean up your neighbourhood, your city or your country. It says
the nation is for you, and people like you alone – and that its violence will
only ever be directed against those who don’t matter: the misfits, outsiders,
inferiors. It never stops there.
Yet it only
works if we let it. The trial of Golden Dawn has described a catalogue of
violence – a former head of the Pakistani community association in Athens
testified that he had heard as many as 900 accounts of immigrants being
attacked by people claiming to support Golden Dawn – but it has also given
voice to the fears and hopes of those people who pushed back. There was an
elderly man who told the court that seeing Golden Dawn marching in his town
brought back terrifying memories of the German occupation, and an anti-fascist
activist who testified that being assaulted by Golden Dawn supporters would not
deter him because he felt “a duty to the people that died in the crematoria and
in the islands of exile”. A schoolteacher said she had organised a protest
against Golden Dawn because she wanted to defend her island’s “multicultural
character” and its unique rhythms of life. A Greek father described how shocked
he was when his dark-skinned son was stopped in the street by Golden Dawn and
asked for ID, and a mayor spoke of his determination to support a local Roma
community despite being labelled the “gypsy mayor”. And several former members
talked about what motivated them to give evidence: Protected Witness E felt she
had a “moral duty” to testify; Witness C said he had ideological differences
with Fyssas, but wanted to apologise to his mother.
When I
visited Athens in late 2019, I went to see the spot where Fyssas was killed.
Tsaldari Avenue has since been renamed after the rapper; a memorial stands on
the spot where he died. I also visited the square of Saint Pantaleimon, where
Golden Dawn had established itself a decade earlier. Before, on the occasions I
visited, it was often deserted. Immigrant residents of the neighbourhood were
scared to leave their own houses for fear of assault – one Afghan woman,
brought almost to destitution by a combination of far-right violence and failed
immigration policy, described to me in 2012 how she and her friends were
reduced to going out at night, in groups, to scavenge for food. Seven years
later, the square had transformed. It was banal, even: a multicultural
neighbourhood of a European city, whose Greek, Middle Eastern and Asian
residents were sitting outside together, talking, checking their phones and
catching the evening sun.
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