Gli ultimi dati sono semplicemente folli. In Grecia i disoccupati sono il 27% della popolazione. In Portogallo nuova impennata, e siamo già al 17.7%. Ma anche in Italia le cose non vanno bene e solo per il 2013 si parla di oltre 600 mila posti di lavoro a rischio. Va ancora peggio per la generazione perduta - manco parlassimo di America Latina negli anni 80: 64.4% di disoccupazione giovanile in Grecia, 57 in Spagna, 38% in Italia e Portogallo.
Insomma, un disastro sociale. Eppure davanti a tutto questo continua il silenzio tombale dei governi, dell'Europa, preoccupati delle "riforme", ma ancora legati a doppio filo alla balzana idee dei conti in ordine proprio quando, invece, si dovrebbe cominciare a spendere, e parecchio, per bloccare la spirale della recessione, per aumentare l'occupazione, per voltare pagina. I numeri, evidentemente, contano solo quando si parla di spread.
Visualizzazione post con etichetta Grecia. Mostra tutti i post
Visualizzazione post con etichetta Grecia. Mostra tutti i post
venerdì 10 maggio 2013
domenica 20 gennaio 2013
La Grecia tra economia a pezzi e politica corrotta
No, non ci siamo dimenticati della Grecia, come invece pare aver fatto il resto dei media italiani. Oggi proponiamo un articolo di Megan Green da Bloomberg in cui si racconta lo scandalo della famigerata lista Lagarde, la lista degli evasori greci che vari governi hanno cercato di far sparire. E che, ricomparsa a sorpresa, sta scatenando un terremoto soprattutto nel PASOK (ah, questi socialisti europei!) ma che il parlamento sta cercando di insabbiare. Ancora una volta è Syriza l'unico partito a chiedere una vera e propria commissione d'inchiesta, mentre Sinistra Democratica, pseudo-partito di sinistra entrato nella grande coalizione tradendo le promesse elettorali, ha addirittura espulso 2 suoi parlamentari per aver appoggiato la richiesta di una commissione d'inchiesta. Parigi (o Atene), si sa, val bene una messa.
di Megan Green
da Bloomberg
Just before Christmas, I met with former Greek Finance Minister George Papaconstantinou, and he talked about how excited he was to spend the holidays abroad, where -- unlike in Greece -- he could roam freely without a security detail. His holiday didn’t go quite as expected.
On Dec. 28, Papaconstantinou was accused of removing names from a list of Greeks with Swiss bank accounts -- the so-called Lagarde list -- and he was expelled from the socialist Pasok party. This week, Greek legislators will debate whether to start a parliamentary investigation against him.
The story begins in late 2010, when then French Finance
Minister Christine Lagarde distributed a list to her
counterparts around Europe with the names of thousands of
depositors at the Geneva branch of HSBC Holdings Plc. Most
countries investigated the accounts and collected many millions
of euros and other currencies in unpaid taxes.
Not so in Greece, a country that international creditors have repeatedly lambasted for its tolerance of rampant tax evasion. While the Lagarde list included about 2,000 Greek depositors, successive Greek governments did not use it to collect a single cent from tax evaders.
Papaconstantinou was the first Greek official to receive the list from Lagarde. In a TV interview last week, he said he immediately asked the Financial Crimes Squad in Athens to check a sample of names. Then he says he transferred the data onto a memory stick and gave the full list to the squad.
After Papaconstantinou left office as finance minister in June 2011, the list disappeared until September 2012, when the current finance minister, Yannis Stournaras, apparently learned of its existence from the press and said he had never received it. Evangelos Venizelos, the finance minister serving between Papaconstantinou and Stournaras, responded to Stournaras’s statement by saying he didn’t know the whereabouts of the Lagarde list. A few days later, he nevertheless presented it to the authorities, declaring that he had never read it but instead only briefly glanced at it, noticing that there were three Jewish names on it (whatever that means).
The mishandling of the Lagarde list is the result of extremely weak -- and, in some cases, failed -- institutions in Greece. The Financial Crimes Squad should have conducted a full investigation of the names on the list, with the finance minister then authorizing a course of action to recoup revenue from identified tax evaders.
That this scandal should have happened at all is bad enough, yet the government’s proposed remedy is worse. On Dec. 28, a total of 71 members of the ruling coalition signed a petition demanding that Papaconstantinou -- alone -- should be investigated, for allegedly removing the names of three of his relatives from the list.
If Greece’s parliamentarians vote in favor of this plan this week, it would be yet another reflection of institutional failure in Greece.
More important, Papaconstantinou is only one of many people involved. Venizelos’s recollection of the list evolved as the scandal unfolded. He not only failed to start an investigation into the names on the list, but also took the list with him when he left office. Should Venizelos not be under investigation, as well? Additionally, any complete inquiry should include senior members of the crimes squad, who received the list from Papaconstantinou and also sat on their hands.
The proposed parliamentary investigation against Papaconstantinou has already ruffled some Greek feathers. Last week, two members of the Democratic Left were expelled from their party for demanding a more complete inquiry. The Independent Greeks and neo-fascist Golden Dawn parties have demanded that former prime ministers also be included in the investigation.
The real threat to the government, however, comes from the main opposition party, Syriza. No matter who is investigated, Syriza stands to gain support from the Lagarde-list saga given the party’s status as an outsider to the cozy political establishment that has run Greece into the ground.
So far, the coalition has managed to hold on to power because no party has had the incentive to bring it down. But this may be changing. Syriza has led the charge in demanding that the Lagarde-list inquiry include a number of politicians and officials. The party probably smells Pasok’s weakness and is going in for the kill.
If Syriza can use the Lagarde-list scandal to come close to attracting enough support to form a majority government, we can expect it to incite even more anti-austerity sentiment in the electorate than we have seen so far, with the goal of forcing early elections.
Most analysts equate a Syriza government in Greece with the country’s exit from the euro area, given party leader Alexis Tsipras’s saber rattling before the June election. The party’s language has softened recently, with Tsipras swapping demands for a moratorium on debt payments with calls for a more constructive debt conference to renegotiate the terms. This week, Tsipras began a public-relations blitz in Germany and the U.S. to manage his party’s image abroad.
So once in government, Syriza might just back down and fall into line with the demands of the European Union, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Then again, it might not. Following the decision of European finance ministers in late 2012 to grant Greece some public-debt relief, most investors concluded that the euro area’s problem child would remain out of sight, at least until after the German elections in September 2013. The Lagarde-list saga could bring Greece back into focus earlier than anyone was expecting.
fonte: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-01-15/thought-it-was-safe-to-forget-greece-think-again.html
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di Megan Green
da Bloomberg
Just before Christmas, I met with former Greek Finance Minister George Papaconstantinou, and he talked about how excited he was to spend the holidays abroad, where -- unlike in Greece -- he could roam freely without a security detail. His holiday didn’t go quite as expected.
On Dec. 28, Papaconstantinou was accused of removing names from a list of Greeks with Swiss bank accounts -- the so-called Lagarde list -- and he was expelled from the socialist Pasok party. This week, Greek legislators will debate whether to start a parliamentary investigation against him.
Not so in Greece, a country that international creditors have repeatedly lambasted for its tolerance of rampant tax evasion. While the Lagarde list included about 2,000 Greek depositors, successive Greek governments did not use it to collect a single cent from tax evaders.
No Trust
So what did the government do with the list? That depends on whom you ask. Most Greeks I speak to about this tell me without hesitation that the Lagarde list was used for extortion. There is no proof of this, but it demonstrates clearly the level of trust that Greeks have in their politicians.Papaconstantinou was the first Greek official to receive the list from Lagarde. In a TV interview last week, he said he immediately asked the Financial Crimes Squad in Athens to check a sample of names. Then he says he transferred the data onto a memory stick and gave the full list to the squad.
After Papaconstantinou left office as finance minister in June 2011, the list disappeared until September 2012, when the current finance minister, Yannis Stournaras, apparently learned of its existence from the press and said he had never received it. Evangelos Venizelos, the finance minister serving between Papaconstantinou and Stournaras, responded to Stournaras’s statement by saying he didn’t know the whereabouts of the Lagarde list. A few days later, he nevertheless presented it to the authorities, declaring that he had never read it but instead only briefly glanced at it, noticing that there were three Jewish names on it (whatever that means).
The mishandling of the Lagarde list is the result of extremely weak -- and, in some cases, failed -- institutions in Greece. The Financial Crimes Squad should have conducted a full investigation of the names on the list, with the finance minister then authorizing a course of action to recoup revenue from identified tax evaders.
That this scandal should have happened at all is bad enough, yet the government’s proposed remedy is worse. On Dec. 28, a total of 71 members of the ruling coalition signed a petition demanding that Papaconstantinou -- alone -- should be investigated, for allegedly removing the names of three of his relatives from the list.
If Greece’s parliamentarians vote in favor of this plan this week, it would be yet another reflection of institutional failure in Greece.
No Motive
The accusation against Papaconstantinou is hardly clear- cut. Papaconstantinou’s relatives have presented evidence to the Financial Crimes Squad that their deposits in Switzerland were legal and properly declared. If this evidence is accepted, then the former finance minister had no obvious motive for removing their names, raising the question of whether he, or someone else, did so and why.More important, Papaconstantinou is only one of many people involved. Venizelos’s recollection of the list evolved as the scandal unfolded. He not only failed to start an investigation into the names on the list, but also took the list with him when he left office. Should Venizelos not be under investigation, as well? Additionally, any complete inquiry should include senior members of the crimes squad, who received the list from Papaconstantinou and also sat on their hands.
The proposed parliamentary investigation against Papaconstantinou has already ruffled some Greek feathers. Last week, two members of the Democratic Left were expelled from their party for demanding a more complete inquiry. The Independent Greeks and neo-fascist Golden Dawn parties have demanded that former prime ministers also be included in the investigation.
The real threat to the government, however, comes from the main opposition party, Syriza. No matter who is investigated, Syriza stands to gain support from the Lagarde-list saga given the party’s status as an outsider to the cozy political establishment that has run Greece into the ground.
So far, the coalition has managed to hold on to power because no party has had the incentive to bring it down. But this may be changing. Syriza has led the charge in demanding that the Lagarde-list inquiry include a number of politicians and officials. The party probably smells Pasok’s weakness and is going in for the kill.
If Syriza can use the Lagarde-list scandal to come close to attracting enough support to form a majority government, we can expect it to incite even more anti-austerity sentiment in the electorate than we have seen so far, with the goal of forcing early elections.
Impossible Reforms
The public outcry would make further austerity measures and structural reforms almost impossible to implement, and members of parliament would probably continue to resign under pressure from international creditors to meet target conditions for the loans that keep Greece afloat. The coalition’s numbers in the 300-seat parliament have already dwindled to 164 from 179 since the June election.Most analysts equate a Syriza government in Greece with the country’s exit from the euro area, given party leader Alexis Tsipras’s saber rattling before the June election. The party’s language has softened recently, with Tsipras swapping demands for a moratorium on debt payments with calls for a more constructive debt conference to renegotiate the terms. This week, Tsipras began a public-relations blitz in Germany and the U.S. to manage his party’s image abroad.
So once in government, Syriza might just back down and fall into line with the demands of the European Union, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Then again, it might not. Following the decision of European finance ministers in late 2012 to grant Greece some public-debt relief, most investors concluded that the euro area’s problem child would remain out of sight, at least until after the German elections in September 2013. The Lagarde-list saga could bring Greece back into focus earlier than anyone was expecting.
fonte: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-01-15/thought-it-was-safe-to-forget-greece-think-again.html
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lunedì 17 dicembre 2012
Sinistra e Destra nella Grecia in crisi
Oggi proponiamo un articolo del New Statesman sulla situazione politica ad Atene, un soggetto che viene tuttora largamente ignorato dai nostri media. L'articolo racconta la crescita di Alba Dorata ed il significato politico e le radici sociali e culturali dell'avanzata del fascismo. E contrappone questo al "fenomeno|" Syriza e all'alternativa che questo rappresenta per l'Europa.
A warning from Athens
di Daniel Trilling
New Statesman
It’s Saturday morning in Athens and the players are taking up their positions for a familiar ritual. Around the National Garden, behind the Greek parliament, fortified police vans lie in wait, their occupants playing cards or chatting on mobile phones. Along the streets that stretch north from Syntagma Square, in front of the parliament building, there are more police, standing on street corners in riot gear, drinking iced coffee and idly watching groups of tourists or Athenians running Saturday errands. Crisis or no, this is still a bustling capital city.
Next door to the National Archaeological Museum, the courtyard of which is peopled with ancient statues rescued from a shipwreck, limbs eroded and faces barnacled, is the Athens Polytechnic. Inside the gates, a crowd of people – elderly men, mothers with teenage children, twentysomething couples – has gathered to lay red and white carnations in front of a memorial stone. Around them, students are making banners, leafleting and gathering into groups according to political affiliation. Later, they will march noisily into the centre of Athens. For now, however, the atmosphere is quiet, reverential, if a little tense.
Demonstrations have become commonplace in Athens, so much so that people talk of “protest fatigue”. In the past month alone, there have been two general strikes, plus another walkout on 14 November as part of a pan-European day of action. On the night of 7 November, police tear-gassed protesters in Syntagma Square, while inside the parliament MPs debated a new wave of public spending cuts and privatisation demanded by the troika – the EU, the IMF and the European Central Bank – in return for another slice of bailout money. Opposition is such that the measures are being implemented by ministerial decree –emergency legislation reminiscent of Germany in the 1930s. And it’s hurting: Eurostat reports that 31 per cent of the population, 3.5 million people, are living near or below the poverty line and 15 per cent cannot afford “basic commodities”. Greece is a laboratory for austerity, the most extreme iteration of policies that are being imposed by governments from London to Lisbon.
On Saturday 17 November, the protest is of a different kind. It is the date on which Greece commemorates the fall of the military junta that ruled the country from 1967 to 1974. On this day in 1973, a tank burst through the gates of the Athens Polytechnic, which had been occupied by students protesting against the military regime and demanding the right to elect their leaders. This direct democracy had been too much for the colonels to bear and 24 people were killed in the crackdown that followed. The massacre spelled the beginning of the end for their regime, which fell a year later. The 17th has long been a symbolic date for the Greek left but in the past few years the ranks of marchers have been swelled by a new generation.
As the students begin to form into blocs, stamping their feet in unison, the old chant of those who fought the junta goes up: “Bread, education, freedom!” Now, though, it comes with a reply: “The dictatorship is not over!”
**
Manolis Glezos, white-haired and dressed in a sharp, powder- blue jacket, leans forward across the desk and jabs a finger. “I want to write an ‘I accuse’ to Britain. During the war, we stood by them as allies. So where’s Britain now?”At the age of 90, Glezos knows Greece’s recent history intimately. In 1941, he and a comrade tore down the swastika flag from the Acropolis, at the height of the Nazi occupation. They were imprisoned and tortured. When civil war erupted in 1946, between the communist- led resistance partisans and a rightwing government propped up by Britain and the US, he was sentenced to death. He was sent to prison camps twice more in the years that followed – along with thousands of other leftists – and eventually forced into exile when the junta came to power. Yet Glezos is more than a symbol of resistance; he is back in front-line politics, as an MP.
I meet Glezos in his office at the Greek parliament, which is staffed by a couple of young assistants who are busy posting copies of his speeches on Facebook. (The most recent one has been “liked” 680 times, Glezos tells me.) He is an MP for Syriza, the coalition of radical left-wing parties that has been the main bene - ficiary of public discontent. In the past three years, it has gained momentum as support has drained away from the centre-left Pasok, which once promised Greeks a welfare state and national self-determination but now finds itself in coalition with the right-wing New Democracy, administering the troika’s demands. In May’s general election, Syriza won an unprecedented 17 per cent of the vote. At a second election, called when the government failed to hold a coalition together, its vote rose to 27 per cent and it narrowly missed an outright victory. It is now the main opposition party and most opinion polls put it on course to win power the next time elections are held.
For the first time since 2008, Europe faces the real possibility of a government whose stated aim is, as Glezos tells me, to “cancel” the debt, halting the programme of spending cuts and demanding that the troika renegotiate terms. “Two and a half thousand years ago, an ancient writer, Menander, said: ‘Loans make people slaves.’ You can forgive other people if they don’t know this but Greeks are not allowed not to know this.”
According to Procopis Papastratis, a professor at Panteion University in Athens, Syriza’s success has sent a shockwave through the Greek political establishment. “The left terrifies a lot of people . . . They say that if the left comes, they will slaughter us or they will take our houses like Stalin did in the Soviet Union. The big businesses say that they will leave Greece and they say to those who work for them that if you vote Syriza, you will be unemployed because we will take our companies and go.”
For Glezos, the division is “not between left and right. It is between the Greek people and those who have subjected themselves to the troika and the will of the powerful.” And the elite have good reason to be scared. “We don’t just want to give a good make-up to the system. We really want to change it.” Glezos sets out a range of measures – a crackdown on Greece’s endemic tax evasion; forcing banks to loan the government money at zero interest; investment in industry and agriculture – that he believes would restore economic prosperity.
His pugnacious stance encapsulates the popular feeling that the current government is not acting in the nation’s best interests. “The crisis was not provoked by Greek people. Why should [we] pay for the crisis? This is a basic question. I am never going to stop asking until someone has an answer.”
**
Nationalism, however, always has its dark side. Like many other Greeks I meet, 31-year-old Kelly feels deep anger at the way her country was led into crisis. Greece only gained entry to the eurozone by manipulating economic data – as did other countries, including Italy – and was left exposed when the crash came. “I feel it was a lie all these years. The way they told us how things will be – that you will have a good career if you study. For our generation, we have learned one system and now suddenly there is a big change.”Kelly is not doing too badly –when we meet, at a sandwich chain in a southern suburb of Athens, she has just been promoted to sales manager at the telemarketing firm where she works. But Kelly wants to “punish” the politicians she believes have led Greece into crisis. She feels the biggest shock she can inflict on the system is to give her vote to the fascist Golden Dawn. To Kelly, the party’s main appeal is that it’s “real”: “They say to you, ‘I am the devil,’ and they are devils. I prefer someone that says the truth and says to me, ‘You know what, I am the bad guy,’ rather than another one that says to me, ‘I am the good guy and I will save you.’” She stops and asks, a little nervously, “Does that make me crazy?”
Kelly is not alone. The first almost anyone outside Greece heard of Golden Dawn was in May 2012, when the party swept into parliament with 7 per cent of the vote. Politics in Greece have polarised – and just as Syriza’s support soared, so right-wing voters have been pushed further and further to extremes, as a succession of right-wing parties have been tainted by coalition.
Europe has become used to the slow, attritional progress of far-right movements; those led by fascists such as Nick Griffin or the Le Pen family, who have put on suits and concealed their real views in an attempt to enter the mainstream. But from Golden Dawn’s Nazi-esque imagery to the militaristic rallies and openly violent conduct of its members, it was immediately apparent that this time was different. Golden Dawn did not emerge from nowhere. As Dimitris Psarras, an investigative journalist who has recently published The Black Book of Golden Dawn, explained to me, the party was founded in the early 1980s by Nikolaos Michal - oliakos, a right-wing extremist with connections to the junta.
From the outset, the group’s core beliefs were “neo-Nazi” and “pagan”, says Psarras, mixing the ideas of Adolf Hitler with a nostalgia for ancient Greek culture – and the movement was structured along quasi-military lines, modelled on the Sturmabteilung, Hitler’s stormtroopers. During its early years, Golden Dawn operated as a kind of security service, doing bodyguard work and “the dirty jobs” for certain members of Greece’s wealthy elite.
In the 1990s, explains Psarras, a series of changes in Greek society enabled Golden Dawn to grow. First came a rise in nationalist sentiment after disputes with the former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia over its name and with Turkey over ownership of islands in the Aegean Sea. Then came a wave of immigrants following the collapse of the eastern bloc and wars in the Balkans. Finally, with the advent of unregulated private television channels –whose sensationalist output, says Psarras, is “like your Sun newspaper in Britain” – came a rise in antiimmigrant sentiment.
These feelings continued to grow throughout the 2000s, exacerbated by mainstream politicians who pandered to xenophobia. Now, many Greeks have come to see immigration as a cause of the country’s economic turmoil. During my conversation with Kelly, she was at pains to stress that she bore no animosity to foreigners. “I want you to know about Greek people that we are very generous, very clever, very open-minded and very hard-working,” she told me. “But at this time, it’s like a ship – we have water [coming in] from one side and, on the other side, sharks.”
For all its shocking brutality, Golden Dawn has consolidated its support in a way typical of far-right parties across Europe. It follows a theory of community politics derived, says Psarras, from the French nouvelle droite – a group of far-right intellectuals who set out the blueprint for the Front National’s success in France and whose ideas Griffin tried to emulate as leader of the British National Party.
The difference is in Golden Dawn’s relationship with the state. Greece has a history of right-wing militias collaborating with the police and there have been documented incidents in which Golden Dawn members have appeared to work in tandem with officers in attacking left-wing protesters. One study of voting patterns suggests that as much as 50 per cent of Athens police officers voted for Golden Dawn at the last election.
A Golden Dawn MP, Ilias Kasidiaris, physically attacked a female opponent on live television but managed to evade arrest. Three others were filmed smashing up market stalls belonging to immigrant vendors – and posted the video on Golden Dawn’s website –yet have not been charged with any crime.
The tide may be turning: in response to public outrage, all four have now been stripped of parliamentary immunity to prosecution but Klio Papapantoleon, a lawyer who has represented several victims of attacks committed by Golden Dawn members, points out that the Greek justice system, while slow at the best of times, has been “very lenient in judging these members”. She points to the testimony of victims and witnesses who say that they have been “obstructed and encumbered by police officers while trying to sue members of Golden Dawn”.
For now, mainstream politicians follow the same logic as in other countries when faced with a threat from the far right: they compete on its territory. The government’s most recent move on immigration, for instance, has been to suspend all applications for Greek citizenship. Since August, a major police operation has been in progress to round up undocumented migrants and put them in detention centres. Yet such moves have only further legitimised Golden Dawn, which now positions itself as the real defender of the Greek people against austerity, taking a strong anti-bailout line and staging “Greeks-only” food distribution, blood donations and soup kitchens.
Still, the same Nazi beliefs lie at its core, glimpsed on occasions such as when one of its MPs read out a part of the anti-Semitic Protocols of the Elders of Zion in parliament or in the anti-gay protests it organised that forced the closure of the play Corpus Christi.
Through an intermediary, I contact “John”, a member of Golden Dawn who would speak to me only on the condition of anonymity. Now 32 and working for a banking group in Athens, he joined the movement at 16, convinced that politicians had “betrayed” Greece over the territorial dispute with Turkey. He tells me he was attracted by the “total discipline” of the group. “There was mutual appreciation and, of course, respect towards higher-ranking members.” There were frequent meetings and talks aimed at “ideological orientation”, towards the ideas of what John describes as “National Socialism”. His main task, he says, was to spread these ideas among his friends and classmates, handing out fliers and selling copies of the party newspaper.
Because of family and work commitments, John is no longer an active member but he still votes for the party. What, I ask, would Golden Dawn do if it got into government? “We’ll do what others don’t dare . . . I think about how many times people have laughed at us [during election counts] – and now half of them feel intimidated and half consider us the only solution.”
Journalists, drawn as ever to a good story, have struggled to deal with this. I do, too. Nobody wants to underplay the threat Golden Dawn poses to Greek democracy and there’s a pressing need to expose its underlying extremism. Yet the aggression, which may seem alarming to an outsider, is exactly what attracted voters such as Kelly in the first place. “They do bad things. I don’t agree with that I don’t want them to be the government,” she tells me. “My intention is just to get them in the parliament.”
For now, though, the door to power remains ajar. And it will be much harder to shut than it was to open.
**
Just north-west of the centre of Athens stands the grand Orthodox church of Aghios Panteleimonas, dedicated to the fourth-century martyr St Pantaleon. In the square outside is a children’s playground; it’s locked shut and looks like it has been that way for some time. When I visited with a friend early one weekday morning, our only companions were stray cats that picked their way through the weeds sprouting through the tarmac beneath the swings. Greek flags hung limply from apartment balconies beyond the square and, on the ground in front of the church steps, spray-painted in blue and white, was the message “Foreigners out – Greece for the Greeks”.A few blocks away, down a side street off one of the main boulevards, is the office of Yonous Muhammadi, chair of the Greek Forum of Refugees. I had trouble finding it: there is no sign outside and the buzzer is unmarked. It’s for a good reason, Muhammadi tells me – he was chased out of his previous office two years ago by fascist thugs, who smashed the place and beat him up. For im migrants such as Muhammadi, who came to Greece from Afghanistan in 2001, the rise of Golden Dawn has merely brought an existing problem out into the open. “In 2010, when we closed the office of the forum, we held a big press conference. We told them, now it is our problem, migrants and refugees, but it will be a problem for Greek people, also. For all of you.”
Like the rest of Europe, Greece experienced a further wave of immigration from the late 1990s onwards. Refugees – from conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, Sudan, Somalia and elsewhere – were joined by economic migrants from South Asia and Africa. Three things combined to turn this into an acute crisis. The first was Greece’s lack of a functioning immigration system. Applying for citizenship was – and is – so difficult that the only way most migrants can get permission to stay in the country is by presenting themselves as refugees. Temporary papers are renewed every six months and it can take up to ten years for an asylum application to be processed. The second was the removal of landmines from the Evros region in northern Greece, on the Turkish border. This opened up a safer route for migrants who previously had to make dangerous journeys by boat across the Mediterranean.
The third, decisive factor was the construction of “fortress Europe” – a pan-European immigration policy designed to make it harder for migrants from poor countries to enter the EU. Spain and Italy strengthened their border controls, making Greece an even more popular point of entry for migrants crossing from Asia or the southern Mediterranean. Along with this came the Dublin II Regulation, a 2003 agreement that asylum-seekers would be sent back to the country where they first set foot in the EU.
It was a perfect storm: hundreds of migrants a day being “returned” to a country they never intended to live in, with thousands more arriving, unaware of what awaited them.
Many migrants, such as Muhammadi, have made successes of their lives here: a trained doctor, he now works as a nurse in one of the capital’s main hospitals. Tanzanian and Pakistani shopkeepers have businesses all over the city. However, the failed policies have led to thousands of people being trapped in Greece, vulnerable to people-smugglers and crammed into apartments in once-smart citycentre neighbourhoods or sleeping rough, without sanitation, work or food, in squares such as Aghios Panteleimonas. At its peak, estimates Muhammadi, there were perhaps 5,000 Afghans intending to stay in Greece but a constant turnover of between 12,000 and 15,000 coming and leaving. Crime – theft, drug-trafficking and prostitution – rose in Athens city centre, and at one point around 500 people were sleeping rough in the playground outside Aghios Panteleimonas. The local council’s response was to lock it shut, forcing them on to the streets.
What came next, says Muhammadi, could have been avoided if the police had done their job and kept order. Instead, feeling like they had been abandoned, Greek residents in the area surrounding the church formed a campaign group – the “angry citizens” –which was soon infiltrated by members of Golden Dawn. The party encouraged Greeks to hang the national flag from their windows to show opposition to immigration and began carrying out “vigilante” patrols and covert attacks on immigrants. “The violence was here before the crisis,” says Muhammadi. “And the police were there, they were looking, but they were doing nothing. When I was attacked, I was bleeding but when I went to the police station to complain, the policemen who were standing in front told me, ‘If you complain, we’ll put you in a detention centre for two nights.’”
Then, in May 2011, came the spark. A shocking murder – of a Greek man as he fetched his car to take his pregnant wife to hospital – committed by two illegal immigrants from Afghanistan, caused a national media scandal. It provoked a two-week pogrom around Aghios Panteleimonas orchestrated by Golden Dawn, with fascist gangs attacking non-whites in broad daylight, dragging them off buses and destroying their shops. The playground was closed, immigrants forced off the streets and the message sent out: Golden Dawn is the group that knows how to sort out the immigrant “problem”. We do what others don’t dare.
The difference now, Muhammadi tells me, is a much wider acceptance of this violence as part of everyday life. “Before, the fascists would attack a group of immigrants and leave straight away. Now, they are there, they are waiting, they are attacking and the others look on. And nobody can do anything.”
Later, after my meeting with Muhammadi, I visited Saxi and Hakima, an Afghan couple in their late twenties with three young children. Kicking off my shoes, I was welcomed into their small apartment, which they share with four other refugees. We sat on carpets and cushions in their living room, while Hakima brought tea and boiled sweets. When I asked if their children had been born here, meaning in Greece, Hakima said, “Yes, here,” and pointed to the floor just in front of me.
As their two-year-old daughter Zeinab climbed over me and drew in my notebook, Saxi explained how he had been a policeman in Afghanistan but fled, fearing for his life, over a decade ago. “I haven’t seen my parents in 12 years,” he told me. “I would go back if it was safe.” After travelling through Iran and Turkey, he arrived in Greece, where he found work in the construction industry. Hakima joined him in 2008. It was always hard, explained Saxi, but things started to get worse from that year onwards. Two and a half years ago, he was beaten up so badly that he spent a week in hospital. When he came out, he was attacked again – and the time spent off work cost him his job. Saxi had recently found another job but Hakima told me that the family struggles for money and that she takes it in turns with other Afghan women to root through rubbish bins by night to find goods to sell and food to eat. They can’t go in large groups, because they’re scared of attracting attention and being attacked. “We thought we would come here, that we would be safe,” says Saxi, “but the people here don’t treat us like human beings.”
Saxi’s and Hakima’s story is typical. One recent study by the newly formed Racist Violence Recording Network noted 87 attacks in Greece between January and September 2012, 83 of which took place in public spaces – in squares, streets or on public transport. Daphne Kapetanaki, of the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, tells me that these statistics are “just the tip of the iceberg”. Many immigrants will not report attacks, she says, because they lack papers and fear arrest or abuse by police officers. The network’s report also highlighted an almost total lack of prosecutions for racist attacks and identified 15 incidents in which police and racist violence were “interlinked”.
Many Greeks are shocked at the rise of fascism in their country but there is disagreement on what to do about it. Until recently, Syriza took the line that fighting austerity should be the focus. Anarchist groups have organised night-time motorbike patrols in areas with large immigrant populations. Yet Petros Constantinou of the Movement Against Racism and Fascist Threat (KEERFA) is adamant that a successful campaign will work only if it gives immigrants the courage to speak out, argue for their place in Greek society and join the wider protest movement. He looks to Britain’s history of successful anti-fascist movements; in particular the Anti-Nazi League and Rock Against Racism of the late 1970s. A national demonstration against racism and fascism in Syntagma Square has been called for 19 January.
For its part, the Racist Violence Recording Network hopes that its work will bring pressure on the government to reform the justice system: already, the minister of public order has promised to set up dedicated police units to tackle racist crime and to provide training for all officers in dealing with these issues. However, as Kapetanaki explains, what’s needed is “an assurance that migrants will not be arrested and detained if they report an attack”.
It will take hard work to lift the veil of fear. When I ask Saxi if he has ever considered joining anti-fascist protests, his answer is bleak. “Greek people, whoever they are, they hate us.”
**
By late afternoon on 17 November, the march from the Athens Polytechnic has swelled in numbers. Now some 20,000 strong, the students having been joined by various political groups, including the still-powerful Greek Communist Party (KKE), it snakes its way through central Athens, past the Academy, a neoclassical building from which glares in red the graffiti “Malakies [wankers] – you are the refugees of Europe!”; past Syntagma and the parliament, guarded by lines of police in gas masks; and up a palm tree-lined boulevard to its target, the US embassy. Obeying cold war logic, the US backed the colonels’ regime – just as Britain had backed the Greek right against the partisans two decades earlier – and to many Greeks, the troika’s bailout is just the latest instance of foreign interference.By the time the march reaches the embassy, a looming Bauhaus edifice emblazoned with a giant state seal, it is dark. Everyone expects a confrontation with police. But this year, the marchers keep walking, pushing on further up the road. It is the third day of Israel’s bombardment of Gaza and the demonstrators have decided to take their protest all the way to the Israeli embassy.
It’s a symbolic gesture but it mirrors the many acts of solidarity, big or small, I see or hear about during my stay. One rainy evening later that week, I take a taxi out to Elliniko, a suburb of Athens, to visit a large medical clinic staffed entirely by volunteers. Set up to provide medical care to the growing number of Greeks without health insurance, it has dedicated rooms for a GP, for paediatricians, gynaecologists, psychologists and more.
A dentist whose practice was closing gave the clinic his entire surgery’s worth of equipment. There are arrangements to use the radiology and chemotherapy departments of nearby hospitals out of hours. Doctors come to work here for a few hours after doing a full day’s work. A trained pharmacist co-ordinates the sorting out and cataloguing of medicines. Cancer medication is particularly expensive and many people donate unused courses of tablets when relatives die. Volunteers without medical training spend their time doing clerical work or building up the network of donors.
Showing me around, Elena – a freelance economist by day, she says with an ironic laugh – tells me that since the summer the number of people using the clinic has doubled. It treated 1,200 in August and nearly 2,500 in October. As the number of people needing help soars, so, too, does the number of people ready to step in to help. “It’s not why I do it,” says Elena, “but every day I come here, I leave feeling just a little bit taller.”
There are two rules, she says – “No money and leave your politics at the door.” But its very existence raises an explicitly political question: what if we could build a society that operated this way not out of dire emergency, but by design?
It is this challenge that faces Syriza, should it fulfil expectations and win the next election. In 2011, ordinary Greeks began occupying public squares all over the country, in imitation of the indignados movement in Spain, and debating the changes they wanted to see in their country. Now, Syriza is trying to harness this energy and since the summer has been holding public meetings of its own to determine the party’s programme for government.
Manolis Glezos tells me he is one of the few MPs to have visited these meetings across eece and lists an array of proposals that the movement has thrown up: local and regional autonomy to combat corruption; a justice system free from political interference; giving social institutions such as trade unions and medical associations a say in proposing policies; the “socialisation” of banks, in which members of civil society sit on corporate boards; the right to recall MPs when they don’t implement the policies they have been elected to enact.
First, Syriza must transform itself from a broad coalition into a unified party. This month, it will hold the first of several conferences where delegates elected by each of the public meetings will discuss what principles the party should adopt.
The left is further divided: the KKE, along with a few other parties, remains aloof, convinced that Greece needs to exit the euro before any social change can begin. (Syriza would rather stay and build a wider European movement.) According to Glezos, the rise of grassroots democracy is already affecting how Greeks think about their country: “By taking these assemblies to industries, factories, workplaces, communities, it’s changing the whole shape of society.” This time, he says, there is a chance to avoid the past mistakes of the left, because this movement aims to put “the people in power and the people in government”.
Glezos recalls the slogan of the polytechnic uprising: “Bread, education, freedom. These questions are still current.”
A week after visiting the clinic in Elliniko, I go to see another project, supported once again by donations and staffed by volunteers. This time, it’s food, not medicine, to provide for those who are unable to feed themselves or their families. Staff tell me that they have been overwhelmed by donations from the local community: shoppers at the nearby supermarket drop by with anything from a few tins of tomatoes to whole carrier bags full of supplies.
However, this isn’t Greece. It’s London – just down the road from my house. Some 13 million people live below the poverty line in Britain and as austerity forces more out of work or on to part-time wages, a growing number of people are struggling to cover the basic necessities.
Since 2008, when 26,000 people used food banks, the number has soared: more than 100,000 used them between April and September this year and the Trussell Trust, which operates the largest network of food banks in the UK, estimates that 200,000 people will use them in the year to come.
Greece’s crisis may be acute but it is not unique. In Britain, its effects have so far been easier to hide, while outbreaks of dissent have been more spasmodic: the student occupations of 2010; the 2011 summer riots; last autumn’s Occupy movement. And fortunately, the far right is in decline, even though victim-blaming and xenophobia are rife in our media.
None of this has to happen; but to stop it, we need each other.It’s Saturday morning in Athens and the players are taking up their positions for a familiar ritual. Around the National Garden, behind the Greek parliament, fortified police vans lie in wait, their occupants playing cards or chatting on mobile phones. Along the streets that stretch north from Syntagma Square, in front of the parliament building, there are more police, standing on street corners in riot gear, drinking iced coffee and idly watching groups of tourists or Athenians running Saturday errands. Crisis or no, this is still a bustling capital city.
Next door to the National Archaeological Museum, the courtyard of which is peopled with ancient statues rescued from a shipwreck, limbs eroded and faces barnacled, is the Athens Polytechnic. Inside the gates, a crowd of people – elderly men, mothers with teenage children, twentysomething couples – has gathered to lay red and white carnations in front of a memorial stone. Around them, students are making banners, leafleting and gathering into groups according to political affiliation. Later, they will march noisily into the centre of Athens. For now, however, the atmosphere is quiet, reverential, if a little tense.
Demonstrations have become commonplace in Athens, so much so that people talk of “protest fatigue”. In the past month alone, there have been two general strikes, plus another walkout on 14 November as part of a pan-European day of action. On the night of 7 November, police tear-gassed protesters in Syntagma Square, while inside the parliament MPs debated a new wave of public spending cuts and privatisation demanded by the troika – the EU, the IMF and the European Central Bank – in return for another slice of bailout money. Opposition is such that the measures are being implemented by ministerial decree –emergency legislation reminiscent of Germany in the 1930s. And it’s hurting: Eurostat reports that 31 per cent of the population, 3.5 million people, are living near or below the poverty line and 15 per cent cannot afford “basic commodities”. Greece is a laboratory for austerity, the most extreme iteration of policies that are being imposed by governments from London to Lisbon.
On Saturday 17 November, the protest is of a different kind. It is the date on which Greece commemorates the fall of the military junta that ruled the country from 1967 to 1974. On this day in 1973, a tank burst through the gates of the Athens Polytechnic, which had been occupied by students protesting against the military regime and demanding the right to elect their leaders. This direct democracy had been too much for the colonels to bear and 24 people were killed in the crackdown that followed. The massacre spelled the beginning of the end for their regime, which fell a year later. The 17th has long been a symbolic date for the Greek left but in the past few years the ranks of marchers have been swelled by a new generation.
As the students begin to form into blocs, stamping their feet in unison, the old chant of those who fought the junta goes up: “Bread, education, freedom!” Now, though, it comes with a reply: “The dictatorship is not over!”
**
Manolis Glezos, white-haired and dressed in a sharp, powder- blue jacket, leans forward across the desk and jabs a finger. “I want to write an ‘I accuse’ to Britain. During the war, we stood by them as allies. So where’s Britain now?”At the age of 90, Glezos knows Greece’s recent history intimately. In 1941, he and a comrade tore down the swastika flag from the Acropolis, at the height of the Nazi occupation. They were imprisoned and tortured. When civil war erupted in 1946, between the communist- led resistance partisans and a rightwing government propped up by Britain and the US, he was sentenced to death. He was sent to prison camps twice more in the years that followed – along with thousands of other leftists – and eventually forced into exile when the junta came to power. Yet Glezos is more than a symbol of resistance; he is back in front-line politics, as an MP.
I meet Glezos in his office at the Greek parliament, which is staffed by a couple of young assistants who are busy posting copies of his speeches on Facebook. (The most recent one has been “liked” 680 times, Glezos tells me.) He is an MP for Syriza, the coalition of radical left-wing parties that has been the main bene - ficiary of public discontent. In the past three years, it has gained momentum as support has drained away from the centre-left Pasok, which once promised Greeks a welfare state and national self-determination but now finds itself in coalition with the right-wing New Democracy, administering the troika’s demands. In May’s general election, Syriza won an unprecedented 17 per cent of the vote. At a second election, called when the government failed to hold a coalition together, its vote rose to 27 per cent and it narrowly missed an outright victory. It is now the main opposition party and most opinion polls put it on course to win power the next time elections are held.
For the first time since 2008, Europe faces the real possibility of a government whose stated aim is, as Glezos tells me, to “cancel” the debt, halting the programme of spending cuts and demanding that the troika renegotiate terms. “Two and a half thousand years ago, an ancient writer, Menander, said: ‘Loans make people slaves.’ You can forgive other people if they don’t know this but Greeks are not allowed not to know this.”
According to Procopis Papastratis, a professor at Panteion University in Athens, Syriza’s success has sent a shockwave through the Greek political establishment. “The left terrifies a lot of people . . . They say that if the left comes, they will slaughter us or they will take our houses like Stalin did in the Soviet Union. The big businesses say that they will leave Greece and they say to those who work for them that if you vote Syriza, you will be unemployed because we will take our companies and go.”
For Glezos, the division is “not between left and right. It is between the Greek people and those who have subjected themselves to the troika and the will of the powerful.” And the elite have good reason to be scared. “We don’t just want to give a good make-up to the system. We really want to change it.” Glezos sets out a range of measures – a crackdown on Greece’s endemic tax evasion; forcing banks to loan the government money at zero interest; investment in industry and agriculture – that he believes would restore economic prosperity.
His pugnacious stance encapsulates the popular feeling that the current government is not acting in the nation’s best interests. “The crisis was not provoked by Greek people. Why should [we] pay for the crisis? This is a basic question. I am never going to stop asking until someone has an answer.”
**
Nationalism, however, always has its dark side. Like many other Greeks I meet, 31-year-old Kelly feels deep anger at the way her country was led into crisis. Greece only gained entry to the eurozone by manipulating economic data – as did other countries, including Italy – and was left exposed when the crash came. “I feel it was a lie all these years. The way they told us how things will be – that you will have a good career if you study. For our generation, we have learned one system and now suddenly there is a big change.”Kelly is not doing too badly –when we meet, at a sandwich chain in a southern suburb of Athens, she has just been promoted to sales manager at the telemarketing firm where she works. But Kelly wants to “punish” the politicians she believes have led Greece into crisis. She feels the biggest shock she can inflict on the system is to give her vote to the fascist Golden Dawn. To Kelly, the party’s main appeal is that it’s “real”: “They say to you, ‘I am the devil,’ and they are devils. I prefer someone that says the truth and says to me, ‘You know what, I am the bad guy,’ rather than another one that says to me, ‘I am the good guy and I will save you.’” She stops and asks, a little nervously, “Does that make me crazy?”
Kelly is not alone. The first almost anyone outside Greece heard of Golden Dawn was in May 2012, when the party swept into parliament with 7 per cent of the vote. Politics in Greece have polarised – and just as Syriza’s support soared, so right-wing voters have been pushed further and further to extremes, as a succession of right-wing parties have been tainted by coalition.
Europe has become used to the slow, attritional progress of far-right movements; those led by fascists such as Nick Griffin or the Le Pen family, who have put on suits and concealed their real views in an attempt to enter the mainstream. But from Golden Dawn’s Nazi-esque imagery to the militaristic rallies and openly violent conduct of its members, it was immediately apparent that this time was different. Golden Dawn did not emerge from nowhere. As Dimitris Psarras, an investigative journalist who has recently published The Black Book of Golden Dawn, explained to me, the party was founded in the early 1980s by Nikolaos Michal - oliakos, a right-wing extremist with connections to the junta.
From the outset, the group’s core beliefs were “neo-Nazi” and “pagan”, says Psarras, mixing the ideas of Adolf Hitler with a nostalgia for ancient Greek culture – and the movement was structured along quasi-military lines, modelled on the Sturmabteilung, Hitler’s stormtroopers. During its early years, Golden Dawn operated as a kind of security service, doing bodyguard work and “the dirty jobs” for certain members of Greece’s wealthy elite.
In the 1990s, explains Psarras, a series of changes in Greek society enabled Golden Dawn to grow. First came a rise in nationalist sentiment after disputes with the former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia over its name and with Turkey over ownership of islands in the Aegean Sea. Then came a wave of immigrants following the collapse of the eastern bloc and wars in the Balkans. Finally, with the advent of unregulated private television channels –whose sensationalist output, says Psarras, is “like your Sun newspaper in Britain” – came a rise in antiimmigrant sentiment.
These feelings continued to grow throughout the 2000s, exacerbated by mainstream politicians who pandered to xenophobia. Now, many Greeks have come to see immigration as a cause of the country’s economic turmoil. During my conversation with Kelly, she was at pains to stress that she bore no animosity to foreigners. “I want you to know about Greek people that we are very generous, very clever, very open-minded and very hard-working,” she told me. “But at this time, it’s like a ship – we have water [coming in] from one side and, on the other side, sharks.”
For all its shocking brutality, Golden Dawn has consolidated its support in a way typical of far-right parties across Europe. It follows a theory of community politics derived, says Psarras, from the French nouvelle droite – a group of far-right intellectuals who set out the blueprint for the Front National’s success in France and whose ideas Griffin tried to emulate as leader of the British National Party.
The difference is in Golden Dawn’s relationship with the state. Greece has a history of right-wing militias collaborating with the police and there have been documented incidents in which Golden Dawn members have appeared to work in tandem with officers in attacking left-wing protesters. One study of voting patterns suggests that as much as 50 per cent of Athens police officers voted for Golden Dawn at the last election.
A Golden Dawn MP, Ilias Kasidiaris, physically attacked a female opponent on live television but managed to evade arrest. Three others were filmed smashing up market stalls belonging to immigrant vendors – and posted the video on Golden Dawn’s website –yet have not been charged with any crime.
The tide may be turning: in response to public outrage, all four have now been stripped of parliamentary immunity to prosecution but Klio Papapantoleon, a lawyer who has represented several victims of attacks committed by Golden Dawn members, points out that the Greek justice system, while slow at the best of times, has been “very lenient in judging these members”. She points to the testimony of victims and witnesses who say that they have been “obstructed and encumbered by police officers while trying to sue members of Golden Dawn”.
For now, mainstream politicians follow the same logic as in other countries when faced with a threat from the far right: they compete on its territory. The government’s most recent move on immigration, for instance, has been to suspend all applications for Greek citizenship. Since August, a major police operation has been in progress to round up undocumented migrants and put them in detention centres. Yet such moves have only further legitimised Golden Dawn, which now positions itself as the real defender of the Greek people against austerity, taking a strong anti-bailout line and staging “Greeks-only” food distribution, blood donations and soup kitchens.
Still, the same Nazi beliefs lie at its core, glimpsed on occasions such as when one of its MPs read out a part of the anti-Semitic Protocols of the Elders of Zion in parliament or in the anti-gay protests it organised that forced the closure of the play Corpus Christi.
Through an intermediary, I contact “John”, a member of Golden Dawn who would speak to me only on the condition of anonymity. Now 32 and working for a banking group in Athens, he joined the movement at 16, convinced that politicians had “betrayed” Greece over the territorial dispute with Turkey. He tells me he was attracted by the “total discipline” of the group. “There was mutual appreciation and, of course, respect towards higher-ranking members.” There were frequent meetings and talks aimed at “ideological orientation”, towards the ideas of what John describes as “National Socialism”. His main task, he says, was to spread these ideas among his friends and classmates, handing out fliers and selling copies of the party newspaper.
Because of family and work commitments, John is no longer an active member but he still votes for the party. What, I ask, would Golden Dawn do if it got into government? “We’ll do what others don’t dare . . . I think about how many times people have laughed at us [during election counts] – and now half of them feel intimidated and half consider us the only solution.”
Journalists, drawn as ever to a good story, have struggled to deal with this. I do, too. Nobody wants to underplay the threat Golden Dawn poses to Greek democracy and there’s a pressing need to expose its underlying extremism. Yet the aggression, which may seem alarming to an outsider, is exactly what attracted voters such as Kelly in the first place. “They do bad things. I don’t agree with that I don’t want them to be the government,” she tells me. “My intention is just to get them in the parliament.”
For now, though, the door to power remains ajar. And it will be much harder to shut than it was to open.
**
Just north-west of the centre of Athens stands the grand Orthodox church of Aghios Panteleimonas, dedicated to the fourth-century martyr St Pantaleon. In the square outside is a children’s playground; it’s locked shut and looks like it has been that way for some time. When I visited with a friend early one weekday morning, our only companions were stray cats that picked their way through the weeds sprouting through the tarmac beneath the swings. Greek flags hung limply from apartment balconies beyond the square and, on the ground in front of the church steps, spray-painted in blue and white, was the message “Foreigners out – Greece for the Greeks”.A few blocks away, down a side street off one of the main boulevards, is the office of Yonous Muhammadi, chair of the Greek Forum of Refugees. I had trouble finding it: there is no sign outside and the buzzer is unmarked. It’s for a good reason, Muhammadi tells me – he was chased out of his previous office two years ago by fascist thugs, who smashed the place and beat him up. For im migrants such as Muhammadi, who came to Greece from Afghanistan in 2001, the rise of Golden Dawn has merely brought an existing problem out into the open. “In 2010, when we closed the office of the forum, we held a big press conference. We told them, now it is our problem, migrants and refugees, but it will be a problem for Greek people, also. For all of you.”
Like the rest of Europe, Greece experienced a further wave of immigration from the late 1990s onwards. Refugees – from conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, Sudan, Somalia and elsewhere – were joined by economic migrants from South Asia and Africa. Three things combined to turn this into an acute crisis. The first was Greece’s lack of a functioning immigration system. Applying for citizenship was – and is – so difficult that the only way most migrants can get permission to stay in the country is by presenting themselves as refugees. Temporary papers are renewed every six months and it can take up to ten years for an asylum application to be processed. The second was the removal of landmines from the Evros region in northern Greece, on the Turkish border. This opened up a safer route for migrants who previously had to make dangerous journeys by boat across the Mediterranean.
The third, decisive factor was the construction of “fortress Europe” – a pan-European immigration policy designed to make it harder for migrants from poor countries to enter the EU. Spain and Italy strengthened their border controls, making Greece an even more popular point of entry for migrants crossing from Asia or the southern Mediterranean. Along with this came the Dublin II Regulation, a 2003 agreement that asylum-seekers would be sent back to the country where they first set foot in the EU.
It was a perfect storm: hundreds of migrants a day being “returned” to a country they never intended to live in, with thousands more arriving, unaware of what awaited them.
Many migrants, such as Muhammadi, have made successes of their lives here: a trained doctor, he now works as a nurse in one of the capital’s main hospitals. Tanzanian and Pakistani shopkeepers have businesses all over the city. However, the failed policies have led to thousands of people being trapped in Greece, vulnerable to people-smugglers and crammed into apartments in once-smart citycentre neighbourhoods or sleeping rough, without sanitation, work or food, in squares such as Aghios Panteleimonas. At its peak, estimates Muhammadi, there were perhaps 5,000 Afghans intending to stay in Greece but a constant turnover of between 12,000 and 15,000 coming and leaving. Crime – theft, drug-trafficking and prostitution – rose in Athens city centre, and at one point around 500 people were sleeping rough in the playground outside Aghios Panteleimonas. The local council’s response was to lock it shut, forcing them on to the streets.
What came next, says Muhammadi, could have been avoided if the police had done their job and kept order. Instead, feeling like they had been abandoned, Greek residents in the area surrounding the church formed a campaign group – the “angry citizens” –which was soon infiltrated by members of Golden Dawn. The party encouraged Greeks to hang the national flag from their windows to show opposition to immigration and began carrying out “vigilante” patrols and covert attacks on immigrants. “The violence was here before the crisis,” says Muhammadi. “And the police were there, they were looking, but they were doing nothing. When I was attacked, I was bleeding but when I went to the police station to complain, the policemen who were standing in front told me, ‘If you complain, we’ll put you in a detention centre for two nights.’”
Then, in May 2011, came the spark. A shocking murder – of a Greek man as he fetched his car to take his pregnant wife to hospital – committed by two illegal immigrants from Afghanistan, caused a national media scandal. It provoked a two-week pogrom around Aghios Panteleimonas orchestrated by Golden Dawn, with fascist gangs attacking non-whites in broad daylight, dragging them off buses and destroying their shops. The playground was closed, immigrants forced off the streets and the message sent out: Golden Dawn is the group that knows how to sort out the immigrant “problem”. We do what others don’t dare.
The difference now, Muhammadi tells me, is a much wider acceptance of this violence as part of everyday life. “Before, the fascists would attack a group of immigrants and leave straight away. Now, they are there, they are waiting, they are attacking and the others look on. And nobody can do anything.”
Later, after my meeting with Muhammadi, I visited Saxi and Hakima, an Afghan couple in their late twenties with three young children. Kicking off my shoes, I was welcomed into their small apartment, which they share with four other refugees. We sat on carpets and cushions in their living room, while Hakima brought tea and boiled sweets. When I asked if their children had been born here, meaning in Greece, Hakima said, “Yes, here,” and pointed to the floor just in front of me.
As their two-year-old daughter Zeinab climbed over me and drew in my notebook, Saxi explained how he had been a policeman in Afghanistan but fled, fearing for his life, over a decade ago. “I haven’t seen my parents in 12 years,” he told me. “I would go back if it was safe.” After travelling through Iran and Turkey, he arrived in Greece, where he found work in the construction industry. Hakima joined him in 2008. It was always hard, explained Saxi, but things started to get worse from that year onwards. Two and a half years ago, he was beaten up so badly that he spent a week in hospital. When he came out, he was attacked again – and the time spent off work cost him his job. Saxi had recently found another job but Hakima told me that the family struggles for money and that she takes it in turns with other Afghan women to root through rubbish bins by night to find goods to sell and food to eat. They can’t go in large groups, because they’re scared of attracting attention and being attacked. “We thought we would come here, that we would be safe,” says Saxi, “but the people here don’t treat us like human beings.”
Saxi’s and Hakima’s story is typical. One recent study by the newly formed Racist Violence Recording Network noted 87 attacks in Greece between January and September 2012, 83 of which took place in public spaces – in squares, streets or on public transport. Daphne Kapetanaki, of the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, tells me that these statistics are “just the tip of the iceberg”. Many immigrants will not report attacks, she says, because they lack papers and fear arrest or abuse by police officers. The network’s report also highlighted an almost total lack of prosecutions for racist attacks and identified 15 incidents in which police and racist violence were “interlinked”.
Many Greeks are shocked at the rise of fascism in their country but there is disagreement on what to do about it. Until recently, Syriza took the line that fighting austerity should be the focus. Anarchist groups have organised night-time motorbike patrols in areas with large immigrant populations. Yet Petros Constantinou of the Movement Against Racism and Fascist Threat (KEERFA) is adamant that a successful campaign will work only if it gives immigrants the courage to speak out, argue for their place in Greek society and join the wider protest movement. He looks to Britain’s history of successful anti-fascist movements; in particular the Anti-Nazi League and Rock Against Racism of the late 1970s. A national demonstration against racism and fascism in Syntagma Square has been called for 19 January.
For its part, the Racist Violence Recording Network hopes that its work will bring pressure on the government to reform the justice system: already, the minister of public order has promised to set up dedicated police units to tackle racist crime and to provide training for all officers in dealing with these issues. However, as Kapetanaki explains, what’s needed is “an assurance that migrants will not be arrested and detained if they report an attack”.
It will take hard work to lift the veil of fear. When I ask Saxi if he has ever considered joining anti-fascist protests, his answer is bleak. “Greek people, whoever they are, they hate us.”
**
By late afternoon on 17 November, the march from the Athens Polytechnic has swelled in numbers. Now some 20,000 strong, the students having been joined by various political groups, including the still-powerful Greek Communist Party (KKE), it snakes its way through central Athens, past the Academy, a neoclassical building from which glares in red the graffiti “Malakies [wankers] – you are the refugees of Europe!”; past Syntagma and the parliament, guarded by lines of police in gas masks; and up a palm tree-lined boulevard to its target, the US embassy. Obeying cold war logic, the US backed the colonels’ regime – just as Britain had backed the Greek right against the partisans two decades earlier – and to many Greeks, the troika’s bailout is just the latest instance of foreign interference.By the time the march reaches the embassy, a looming Bauhaus edifice emblazoned with a giant state seal, it is dark. Everyone expects a confrontation with police. But this year, the marchers keep walking, pushing on further up the road. It is the third day of Israel’s bombardment of Gaza and the demonstrators have decided to take their protest all the way to the Israeli embassy.
It’s a symbolic gesture but it mirrors the many acts of solidarity, big or small, I see or hear about during my stay. One rainy evening later that week, I take a taxi out to Elliniko, a suburb of Athens, to visit a large medical clinic staffed entirely by volunteers. Set up to provide medical care to the growing number of Greeks without health insurance, it has dedicated rooms for a GP, for paediatricians, gynaecologists, psychologists and more.
A dentist whose practice was closing gave the clinic his entire surgery’s worth of equipment. There are arrangements to use the radiology and chemotherapy departments of nearby hospitals out of hours. Doctors come to work here for a few hours after doing a full day’s work. A trained pharmacist co-ordinates the sorting out and cataloguing of medicines. Cancer medication is particularly expensive and many people donate unused courses of tablets when relatives die. Volunteers without medical training spend their time doing clerical work or building up the network of donors.
Showing me around, Elena – a freelance economist by day, she says with an ironic laugh – tells me that since the summer the number of people using the clinic has doubled. It treated 1,200 in August and nearly 2,500 in October. As the number of people needing help soars, so, too, does the number of people ready to step in to help. “It’s not why I do it,” says Elena, “but every day I come here, I leave feeling just a little bit taller.”
There are two rules, she says – “No money and leave your politics at the door.” But its very existence raises an explicitly political question: what if we could build a society that operated this way not out of dire emergency, but by design?
It is this challenge that faces Syriza, should it fulfil expectations and win the next election. In 2011, ordinary Greeks began occupying public squares all over the country, in imitation of the indignados movement in Spain, and debating the changes they wanted to see in their country. Now, Syriza is trying to harness this energy and since the summer has been holding public meetings of its own to determine the party’s programme for government.
Manolis Glezos tells me he is one of the few MPs to have visited these meetings across eece and lists an array of proposals that the movement has thrown up: local and regional autonomy to combat corruption; a justice system free from political interference; giving social institutions such as trade unions and medical associations a say in proposing policies; the “socialisation” of banks, in which members of civil society sit on corporate boards; the right to recall MPs when they don’t implement the policies they have been elected to enact.
First, Syriza must transform itself from a broad coalition into a unified party. This month, it will hold the first of several conferences where delegates elected by each of the public meetings will discuss what principles the party should adopt.
The left is further divided: the KKE, along with a few other parties, remains aloof, convinced that Greece needs to exit the euro before any social change can begin. (Syriza would rather stay and build a wider European movement.) According to Glezos, the rise of grassroots democracy is already affecting how Greeks think about their country: “By taking these assemblies to industries, factories, workplaces, communities, it’s changing the whole shape of society.” This time, he says, there is a chance to avoid the past mistakes of the left, because this movement aims to put “the people in power and the people in government”.
Glezos recalls the slogan of the polytechnic uprising: “Bread, education, freedom. These questions are still current.”
A week after visiting the clinic in Elliniko, I go to see another project, supported once again by donations and staffed by volunteers. This time, it’s food, not medicine, to provide for those who are unable to feed themselves or their families. Staff tell me that they have been overwhelmed by donations from the local community: shoppers at the nearby supermarket drop by with anything from a few tins of tomatoes to whole carrier bags full of supplies.
However, this isn’t Greece. It’s London – just down the road from my house. Some 13 million people live below the poverty line in Britain and as austerity forces more out of work or on to part-time wages, a growing number of people are struggling to cover the basic necessities.
Since 2008, when 26,000 people used food banks, the number has soared: more than 100,000 used them between April and September this year and the Trussell Trust, which operates the largest network of food banks in the UK, estimates that 200,000 people will use them in the year to come.
Greece’s crisis may be acute but it is not unique. In Britain, its effects have so far been easier to hide, while outbreaks of dissent have been more spasmodic: the student occupations of 2010; the 2011 summer riots; last autumn’s Occupy movement. And fortunately, the far right is in decline, even though victim-blaming and xenophobia are rife in our media.
None of this has to happen; but to stop it, we need each other.
fonte: http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/politics/2012/12/warning-athens
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martedì 6 novembre 2012
Una Weimar Ellenica
di Nicola Melloni
da Ombre Rosse
Qualche settimana fa il primo ministro greco Samaras ha messo in guardia l’Europa: la democrazia greca è a grave rischio e ricorda quella di Weimar prima dell’ascesa al potere di Hitler. Una provocazione molto forte, tenuta in nessuna considerazione dalle cancellerie europee e che è passata inosservata sulla maggior parte dei media italiani. Il paragone sembra davvero essere molto forte, ma non proprio campato in aria. La storia del XX secolo ha insegnato che le crisi economiche e la caduta in disgrazia dei regimi democratici hanno spesso portato a soluzioni autoritarie e reazionarie. In Germania l’ascesa dei Nazisti al potere fu impetuosa ed avvenne in concomitanza con la grande Crisi del '29. Nel 1928 i nazisti avevano poco più del 2%, due anni dopo erano già al 18 e nel 1933 conquistarono il potere con oltre il 37%. Nel frattempo la disoccupazione era arrivata al 33%, grazie anche alle politiche di austerity dei vari governi “tecnici” che si susseguirono in Germania in quegli anni. Ad Atene non siamo ancora a questi livelli ma l’austerità ha minato le fondamenta del contratto sociale che rende possibile il normale svolgimento della vita pubblica. La maggioranza dei giovani sono disoccupati; la classe media sta ormai sparendo; il potere di acquisto è crollato; ed i servizi pubblici, a cominciare da scuola e sanità, sono al collasso. Soprattutto non sembra esserci nessuna via d’uscita, il rapporto debito/pil peggiorerà più del previsto il prossimo anno, sfiorando il 190% e richiederà, una volta di più, nuovi tagli. Al momento la crisi ha portato soprattutto all’impetuosa avanzata di Syriza che quasi solitaria si è opposta al memorandum europeo, pur volendo rimanere nella Ue - ma da membro paritario e non come junior partner senza alcun diritto di voto. Le forze della conservazione si sono arroccate dietro Nuova Democrazia che rappresenta tutto quel sistema clientelare che ha governato la Grecia negli ultimi 30 anni. Ma mentre la disoccupazione cresce ed il vecchio sistema politico pian piano si incrina, un fetore di marcio comincia a salire in superficie. I nazisti di Alba Dorata che han preso il 6% alle ultime elezioni sarebbero ormai già in doppia cifra, secondo praticamente tutti i sondaggi. La loro azione politica non è dissimile dallo squadrismo nazi-fascista degli anni '20 e '30. Picchiano gli stranieri e ne distruggono banchetti e negozi. Prendono d’assalto teatri che ospitano spettacoli a loro sgraditi. Marciano alla luce del sole sotto lo sguardo compiaciuto della polizia, decisamente infiltrata dall’estrema destra. Tra gli agenti in strada pare che qualcosa come il 50-60% simpatizzino attivamente per Alba Dorata. Non è davvero un caso allora che la stessa polizia si sia resa protagonista di comportamenti molto simili a quelli tenuti delle nostre forze dell’ordine durante il G8 di Genova. Botte gratuite ai manifestanti, arresti illegali, torture sistematiche nelle caserme. La politica istituzionale assiste inerme, quando non compiaciuta. Il Pasok è ormai sparito ma continua a sostenere un governo legato mani e piedi dalla troika. Nuova Democrazia pretende di ergersi come l’unico partito tradizionale, contro la sinistra e la destra, ma il suo esecutivo continua una politica di austerity che è insensata agli occhi di tutti, mentre difende con le unghie e con i denti i privilegi di una striminzita ma influente classe di truffatori e sfruttatori. Sia il governo attuale che quello precedente si sono rifiutati di pubblicare una lista di grandi evasori data a Venizelos (l’ex primo ministro socialista) dal Fondo Monetario e dalla Ue. Troppi nomi grossi erano coinvolti nello scandalo. Ma quando un giornalista coraggioso, Kostas Vaxevanis, è riuscito a pubblicare i nomi degli evasori, ecco che la giustizia greca, immobile fino a quel momento, si è messa immediatamente in moto. Non perseguendo gli evasori, ma arrestando il giornalista. Alla faccia del caso Sallusti – ecco quel che vuol veramente dire stampa imbavagliata. In una situazione di questo genere è inevitabile che la fiducia nella democrazia e nelle sue regole vengano meno. I cittadini vedono che lo squadrismo resta impunito; che la polizia viola i diritti umani; che i soliti noti godono dell’impunità più sfacciata mentre chiunque si opponga viene messo a tacere, con le buone o con le cattive. Soprattutto, i cittadini greci vivono in un paese a sovranità limitata, non più padroni del loro destino, non più in grado di esprimere la loro opinione. In tutto questo l’Europa non batte ciglio. Anche il Fondo Monetario Internazionale ha pubblicato ultimamente diversi studi che spiegavano quanto fosse controproducente l’austerity. La stessa Christine Lagarde ha richiesto una tempistica diversa per ripagare il debito, in effetti sposando la richiesta di Samaras di aver un po’ più tempo per rimettere a posto i conti. Ma nulla da fare, la politica europea non è disposta a transigere. Almeno sui numeri, mentre sull’etica è tutto un altro discorso – Merkel&C. hanno tifato ed aiutato Nuova Democrazia in ogni maniera pur sapendo che proprio quelle stesse persone che stavano per tornare al governo erano state le principali protagoniste del disastro greco, e pur sapendo benissimo che quella lista di evasori e ladri chiamava in causa proprio conservatori e socialisti che siedono ora al governo. E’ un Europa cieca che si rifiuta di vedere a quali disastri stia portando il rigore finanziario, proprio come fecero i governi tedeschi tra il 1928 ed il 1933. I poteri tradizionali lottano col coltello tra i denti per mantenere le loro posizioni di privilegio, per ora attaccati alla sopravvivenza della vecchia politica clientelare che ha però ormai finito i soldi da distribuire. La classe politica è ormai delegittimata, le istituzioni democratiche cominciano a vacillare, come i fatti sopraelencati chiaramente dimostrano. La soluzione neo-liberale di restringere tutti gli spazi di democrazia attiva rischia di non poter reggere l’urto della crisi economica e dell’esplosione sociale. Il tempo per risolvere questa situazione sta rapidamente finendo e se si continuerà ad andare avanti di questo passo il parallelo con Weimar rischia di diventare drammaticamente attuale.
http://www.controlacrisi.org/notizia/Economia/2012/11/2/27897-finestra-internazionale-una-weimar-ellenica/
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da Ombre Rosse
Qualche settimana fa il primo ministro greco Samaras ha messo in guardia l’Europa: la democrazia greca è a grave rischio e ricorda quella di Weimar prima dell’ascesa al potere di Hitler. Una provocazione molto forte, tenuta in nessuna considerazione dalle cancellerie europee e che è passata inosservata sulla maggior parte dei media italiani. Il paragone sembra davvero essere molto forte, ma non proprio campato in aria. La storia del XX secolo ha insegnato che le crisi economiche e la caduta in disgrazia dei regimi democratici hanno spesso portato a soluzioni autoritarie e reazionarie. In Germania l’ascesa dei Nazisti al potere fu impetuosa ed avvenne in concomitanza con la grande Crisi del '29. Nel 1928 i nazisti avevano poco più del 2%, due anni dopo erano già al 18 e nel 1933 conquistarono il potere con oltre il 37%. Nel frattempo la disoccupazione era arrivata al 33%, grazie anche alle politiche di austerity dei vari governi “tecnici” che si susseguirono in Germania in quegli anni. Ad Atene non siamo ancora a questi livelli ma l’austerità ha minato le fondamenta del contratto sociale che rende possibile il normale svolgimento della vita pubblica. La maggioranza dei giovani sono disoccupati; la classe media sta ormai sparendo; il potere di acquisto è crollato; ed i servizi pubblici, a cominciare da scuola e sanità, sono al collasso. Soprattutto non sembra esserci nessuna via d’uscita, il rapporto debito/pil peggiorerà più del previsto il prossimo anno, sfiorando il 190% e richiederà, una volta di più, nuovi tagli. Al momento la crisi ha portato soprattutto all’impetuosa avanzata di Syriza che quasi solitaria si è opposta al memorandum europeo, pur volendo rimanere nella Ue - ma da membro paritario e non come junior partner senza alcun diritto di voto. Le forze della conservazione si sono arroccate dietro Nuova Democrazia che rappresenta tutto quel sistema clientelare che ha governato la Grecia negli ultimi 30 anni. Ma mentre la disoccupazione cresce ed il vecchio sistema politico pian piano si incrina, un fetore di marcio comincia a salire in superficie. I nazisti di Alba Dorata che han preso il 6% alle ultime elezioni sarebbero ormai già in doppia cifra, secondo praticamente tutti i sondaggi. La loro azione politica non è dissimile dallo squadrismo nazi-fascista degli anni '20 e '30. Picchiano gli stranieri e ne distruggono banchetti e negozi. Prendono d’assalto teatri che ospitano spettacoli a loro sgraditi. Marciano alla luce del sole sotto lo sguardo compiaciuto della polizia, decisamente infiltrata dall’estrema destra. Tra gli agenti in strada pare che qualcosa come il 50-60% simpatizzino attivamente per Alba Dorata. Non è davvero un caso allora che la stessa polizia si sia resa protagonista di comportamenti molto simili a quelli tenuti delle nostre forze dell’ordine durante il G8 di Genova. Botte gratuite ai manifestanti, arresti illegali, torture sistematiche nelle caserme. La politica istituzionale assiste inerme, quando non compiaciuta. Il Pasok è ormai sparito ma continua a sostenere un governo legato mani e piedi dalla troika. Nuova Democrazia pretende di ergersi come l’unico partito tradizionale, contro la sinistra e la destra, ma il suo esecutivo continua una politica di austerity che è insensata agli occhi di tutti, mentre difende con le unghie e con i denti i privilegi di una striminzita ma influente classe di truffatori e sfruttatori. Sia il governo attuale che quello precedente si sono rifiutati di pubblicare una lista di grandi evasori data a Venizelos (l’ex primo ministro socialista) dal Fondo Monetario e dalla Ue. Troppi nomi grossi erano coinvolti nello scandalo. Ma quando un giornalista coraggioso, Kostas Vaxevanis, è riuscito a pubblicare i nomi degli evasori, ecco che la giustizia greca, immobile fino a quel momento, si è messa immediatamente in moto. Non perseguendo gli evasori, ma arrestando il giornalista. Alla faccia del caso Sallusti – ecco quel che vuol veramente dire stampa imbavagliata. In una situazione di questo genere è inevitabile che la fiducia nella democrazia e nelle sue regole vengano meno. I cittadini vedono che lo squadrismo resta impunito; che la polizia viola i diritti umani; che i soliti noti godono dell’impunità più sfacciata mentre chiunque si opponga viene messo a tacere, con le buone o con le cattive. Soprattutto, i cittadini greci vivono in un paese a sovranità limitata, non più padroni del loro destino, non più in grado di esprimere la loro opinione. In tutto questo l’Europa non batte ciglio. Anche il Fondo Monetario Internazionale ha pubblicato ultimamente diversi studi che spiegavano quanto fosse controproducente l’austerity. La stessa Christine Lagarde ha richiesto una tempistica diversa per ripagare il debito, in effetti sposando la richiesta di Samaras di aver un po’ più tempo per rimettere a posto i conti. Ma nulla da fare, la politica europea non è disposta a transigere. Almeno sui numeri, mentre sull’etica è tutto un altro discorso – Merkel&C. hanno tifato ed aiutato Nuova Democrazia in ogni maniera pur sapendo che proprio quelle stesse persone che stavano per tornare al governo erano state le principali protagoniste del disastro greco, e pur sapendo benissimo che quella lista di evasori e ladri chiamava in causa proprio conservatori e socialisti che siedono ora al governo. E’ un Europa cieca che si rifiuta di vedere a quali disastri stia portando il rigore finanziario, proprio come fecero i governi tedeschi tra il 1928 ed il 1933. I poteri tradizionali lottano col coltello tra i denti per mantenere le loro posizioni di privilegio, per ora attaccati alla sopravvivenza della vecchia politica clientelare che ha però ormai finito i soldi da distribuire. La classe politica è ormai delegittimata, le istituzioni democratiche cominciano a vacillare, come i fatti sopraelencati chiaramente dimostrano. La soluzione neo-liberale di restringere tutti gli spazi di democrazia attiva rischia di non poter reggere l’urto della crisi economica e dell’esplosione sociale. Il tempo per risolvere questa situazione sta rapidamente finendo e se si continuerà ad andare avanti di questo passo il parallelo con Weimar rischia di diventare drammaticamente attuale.
http://www.controlacrisi.org/notizia/Economia/2012/11/2/27897-finestra-internazionale-una-weimar-ellenica/
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mercoledì 31 ottobre 2012
Grecia: il fascismo è alle porte
Continuiamo con una serie di articoli sulla Grecia e sulla terribile avanzata di Alba Dorata che sembra interessare assai poco i media italiani - e soprattutto i leader europei, interessati solamente a tagli e licenziamenti.
Questa settimana presentiamo un articolo del Guardian - Paura e delirio ad Atene - che ben descrive l'avanzata di Alba Dorata, le sue origini e le sue tattiche squadristiche.
Il secondo pezzo, di El Pais, fornisce un buon riassunto di come la destra greca stia ormai occupando le strade e guadagnando consenso a ritmo frenetico.
di Maria Margaronis
You can hear it from blocks away: the deafening beat of Pogrom, Golden Dawn's favourite band, blasting out of huge speakers by a makeshift stage. "Rock for the fatherland, this is our music, we don't want parasites and foreigners on our land…"
It's a warm October evening and children on bicycles are riding up and down among the young men with crew cuts, the sleeves of their black T-shirts tight over pumped-up biceps, strolling with the stiff swagger of the muscle-bound. They look relaxed, off-duty. Two of them slap a handshake: "Hey, fascist! How's it going?"
Trestle tables are stacked with Golden Dawn merchandise: black T-shirts bearing the party's name in Greek, Chrysi Avgi, the sigma shaped like the S on SS armbands; mugs with the party symbol, a Greek meander drawn to resemble a swastika; Greek flags and black lanyards, lighters and baseball caps. I lean over to talk to one woman stallholder, dressed in Golden Dawn black with thickly kohl-rimmed eyes, but as soon as she opens her mouth a man in a suit strides up: "What are you writing? Are you a journalist? Tear that page out of your notebook. No, no, you can't talk to anyone."
Tonight is the opening of the Golden Dawn office in Megara, a once prosperous farming town between Athens and Corinth. The Greek national socialist party polled more than 15% here – double the national average – in the June election, when it won 18 seats in parliament. (One was taken up by the former bassist with Pogrom, whose hits include Auschwitz and Speak Greek Or Die.)
Legitimised by democracy and by the media, Golden Dawn is opening branches in towns all over Greece and regularly coming third in national opinion polls. Its black-shirted vigilantes have been beating up immigrants for more than three years, unmolested by the police; lately they've taken to attacking Greeks they suspect of being gay or on the left. MPs participate proudly in the violence. In September, three of them led gangs of black-shirted heavies through street fairs in the towns of Rafina and Messolonghi, smashing up immigrant traders' stalls with Greek flags on thick poles.
Such attacks are almost never prosecuted or punished. Ask Kayu Ligopora, of the Athens Tanzanian Community Association, whose premises were vandalised by around 80 "local residents" on 25 September after police walked away. He's lived in Greece for 20 years; for the first time, he says, he's thinking about leaving. Or Hussain Ahulam, 22, who told me how four men with dogs and a metal crowbar left him bleeding and unconscious by the side of the road as he walked home one day. Or 21-year-old HH, a Greek citizen of Egyptian origin, who was beaten on 12 October by three men with chains as he stepped off the trolley bus, and whose sight may be damaged for good.
Or ask @manolis, a blogger for Lifo magazine, who on 11 October went to photograph Golden Dawn's attack on a theatre showing Terrence McNally's Corpus Christi, which casts Christ and the apostles as gay men in Texas. He says four or five people surrounded him in front of the riot police, hit him and spat on him, and put a lit cigarette in his pocket. "A known Golden Dawn MP follows me, punches me twice in the face, knocks me down," he tweeted. "I lose my glasses. The MP kicks me. The police are exactly two steps away." Another MP, Ilias Panagiotaros, stood on the sidelines ranting in front of video cameras: "Wrap it up, you little faggots. Wrap it up, arse-fuckers. You little whores, your time has come. You fucked Albanian arseholes." A third, Christos Pappas, was filmed releasing a man from police custody. He is the only one now under police investigation.
In Megara, as the light fades, people are gathering: families, children, grandmothers. A woman in a long green dress and high-heeled silver mules is choosing a black T-shirt; another asks the price of a Greek flag. Suddenly there's shouting, a thunder of boots on asphalt: 50 yards from the stage, a group of braves have pushed a man off a red motorbike and are kicking and punching him as he lies on the ground. His arms are protecting his head; I can hear the boots go in. No one stirs until an older member calls them off: "Come back to our space, fellow fighters. The Leader is on his way." The Leader, Nikolaos Michaloliakos, squat in a baggy suit, threads his way through the crowd accompanied by the party's spokesman, Ilias Kasidiaris, a former commando with five criminal charges pending, famous abroad for assaulting two women candidates on TV in June. On talkshows, Kasidiaris scowls and slouches like a delinquent teenager, but tonight he looks expansive, almost rock star cool. The office door is flanked by men in camouflage trousers, with crash helmets and Greek flags rolled around wooden staves; more stand guard on the balcony and the roof.
Standing among the citizens of Megara as Michaloliakos addresses them, I feel as if I've slipped into a parallel universe. As a Greek, I've known these people all my life: middle-aged women with coiffed hair and well-upholstered bosoms, men in clean white shirts and neatly belted trousers. They're the people who run the cafes and corner shops; who work hard every day, often at two or three jobs; who pinch children's cheeks and won't let you pay for your coffee; who were always cynical about politicians' promises. I never thought they could fall prey to fascist oratory. Yet here they are, applauding Michaloliakos as he barks and roars, floodlit against a low white building next to the petrol station. We could almost be back in the 1940s, between the Axis occupation and the civil war, when former collaborators whipped up hatred of the left resistance.
Michaloliakos has his populism down pat. His message is pride, and purity, and power. He lambasts the other parties for selling out the country, for their lies and corruption, with special attention to the left party, Syriza. Golden Dawn, he says, are the only patriots, the only ones who haven't dipped their hands in the honeypot. He praises Megara, which used to supply all of Greece, "before we started eating Egyptian potatoes, Indian onions and Chilean apples". Then he turns to "the two million illegal immigrants who are the scourge of this country", who sell heroin and weapons with impunity. "Voting for us is not enough," he says. "We want you to join the struggle for Greece. Don't rent your house to foreigners, don't employ them… We want all illegal foreigners out of our country, we want the usurers of the troika and the IMF out of our country for ever."
After the fireworks and the flares and the national anthem, Efthimia Pipili, 67, gives me her reaction. "Foreigners have come twice to my house to rob me in the night," she says. "If I didn't have my rottweiler, I'd be dead by now. I used to vote for Pasok [the Panhellenic Socialist Movement]. Last time I voted for Tsipras [the leader of Syriza] because I thought he was different. But Tsipras wants to protect the foreigners. I have €100 to last for the next three weeks. I owe €400 to the electricity company; they're going to cut me off. Why shouldn't I be for Golden Dawn, my love?"
Golden Dawn is many things: a party, a movement, a subculture; a vigilante force; a network inside the police and the judiciary. Vasilis Mastrogiannis of the Democratic Left, a former senior police officer turned politician, describes it frankly as "a criminal organisation". New Democracy MP Dimitrios Kyriazidis, who founded the Greek police union, calls it a "political excrescence". "Because of my past in the police, I know very well where these people come from," Kyriazidis says. "Most declare their profession as 'businessman'. But one has to pause at that."
The party's founder and leader, Nikolaos Michaloliakos, served time in the late 1970s for assault and illegal possession of guns and explosives. While inside, he met members of the military junta that ruled Greece from 1967 to 1974, but his political views, as expressed in Golden Dawn, the magazine he started when he was released, were well to the right of theirs. Breaking the boundaries of "acceptable" rightwing nationalism, Michaloliakos published paeans to Adolf Hitler, arguing that Greece should have been at the side of the Axis in the second world war. The magazine, its covers periodically adorned with portraits of the Führer and his acolytes, served up a weird amalgam of Nazi propaganda, antisemitism, traditional nationalism and pagan fantasy. The party that now courts and counts on the Orthodox church once advocated a return to "the faith of the Aryans" – the Olympian gods – claiming that Christianity had "grafted Jewish obscurantism on to the trunk of European civilisation". In the one interview I was allowed with a Golden Dawn official, MP Panagiotis Iliopoulos told me that, as a young man, the magazine expressed his ideas completely. Have the party's views changed since then? "Not at all," he said. "There are no neo-Nazi articles in the magazine. Only historical ones."
Golden Dawn first drew attention in the early 1990s, when the dispute over the name of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia fuelled an upsurge of Greek nationalism. It found fertile ground in the anti-immigrant sentiment that spread through Greece with the first wave of migrants from Albania and eastern Europe; it gathered strength as the failures of Greek and European policy turned Greece into a lobster trap for refugees and migrants coming from Asia, Africa and the Middle East. As thousands struggled to survive beside impoverished Greeks in neighbourhoods shattered by the economic crisis, Golden Dawn vigilantes began to "clear" Athenian squares with fists and clubs and knives; to storm unofficial mosques; to sell protection to shopkeepers; to escort old ladies to the supermarket. In 2009 the party polled a mere 0.29% in the national election. In 2010, Michaloliakos was elected to the Athens city council; he celebrated his arrival with a fascist salute.
As the crisis deepens – 25% unemployment, and 54% among the young; a third of the businesses in central Athens closed; savings gone and faith in the two old mainstream parties lost; violent scenes erupting even in parliament – there is a smell of fear in Athens, as well as one of numb depression. In June, many voted for Golden Dawn as a protest against the parties that brought the country down: "I want them in parliament to beat the others up." Now they are turning to it because hope is exhausted; because things are out of control and they want someone to take charge; because it's "doing something". "It's not that Greece is going to be saved," one voter said to me. "Greece can't be saved." What, then?
The Golden Dawn office in downtown Athens is open three evenings a week. Most of the visitors are middle-aged women with dull eyes and sunken cheeks, faces too old for their bodies, hardened, tired expressions. More than 50 come in an hour. Quietly, they ask the bouncers, "Are they giving out food inside?" "Third floor," the bouncers say; but most of the women come out empty-handed save for a mauve piece of paper with the Golden Dawn logo on it. There's only enough today for voters from this ward; they'll announce the next distribution on a poster, in the papers, if you phone.
Away from the door, Maria Kirimi tells me she's been locked out of her flat with all her things inside since 29 July; the family are crowded at her mother's now, seven people surviving on €400 a month. "We're the living dead," she says. Isn't she troubled by Golden Dawn's violence? "The boys in the black shirts are the only ones I'm not scared of. I feel they'll protect me." I ask her mother, old enough to remember the junta, what she thinks of their far-right views. "I heard Michaloliakos say on TV that their sign isn't Hitler's sign but a patriotic one," she says, and then looks down at her feet. "It does upset me a bit. But I haven't heard of anyone else giving out food."
For the young people drawn into its inner circle, Golden Dawn means much more. Vetta has Celtic crosses on her collar points, a pack of Stuyvesants and a can of Red Bull clutched in her left hand. Her kohl-rimmed eyes dart back and forth as she speaks, but she is open, friendly. The 33-year-old says she helped to "clear" Aghios Panteleimon square three years ago and was stunned by people's gratitude. She's a member now, one of 20 chosen each year for their contribution to the cause and given lessons in ideology and behaviour: "We have to welcome everybody, to be polite but serious." There's a dress code for women – no heels, low-cut tops or bare backs – and a growing Women's Front, which offers training in self-defence. "But there's no difference between men and women here. We all sweep and mop. And, yes, the men make coffee."
The Golden Dawn office in industrial Aspropyrgos is in a flat above an empty garage, next to the old elevated motorway. The stairs are lined with crash helmets, black shields and Greek flags rolled on to wooden staves, ready to snatch up at a moment's notice. The walls are hung with the slogans of Greek nationalism – "Macedonia is Greek soil" – and a blown-up photograph of Golden Dawn supporters fighting the riot police. Arete Demestika – six months pregnant, ponytail down to her waist, earrings like black roses – waxes lyrical in praise of the party: "It's an attitude, a way of life, it's what's called Greece. It awakens new parts of you and makes you stronger, it arms you with knowledge, it's a secret school. We learn our true history, the lore of the nation, because the Greeks are a superior race. And it's given me my family – I met my husband here – and made me feel I'm not alone in the struggle for our country."
But outside, as the sun goes down, 27-year-old Costas, a black-booted Golden Dawn cadre, slips out from under the rhetoric and speaks in his own words. He's an inspector now in the Eleusis oil refineries, but that's not his vocation. He's a craftsman, a marble carver; he used to work at the Acropolis, but the pay was terrible and you couldn't get a decent contract if you weren't in the right party. His face softens and sweetens as he talks about working the marble, learning the craft as a boy, and I realise that he comes from a village I know well. Suddenly we're two people – two Greeks – talking about a place we love, a place full of memories, almost as if things were normal.
Deliberately, inexorably, Golden Dawn is moving into the gaps left open by the crippled Greek state. Its strategy is a blend of seduction and extortion, the exploitation of need backed by the threat of violence. To its existing "solidarity projects" – "Food for Greeks only" and "Blood for Greeks only" – the party has now added a third: "Jobs for Greeks only". Golden Dawn members are visiting workshops and factories, counting and publicising the number of foreign workers there, "encouraging" employers to hire Greeks instead. But its biggest success has been the provision of "security", with the collusion of the authorities: the intimidation of migrants, protection of Greek shops, vigilante patrols.
Adept at spectacle, the party claims new territory with a show of black-shirted strength, fireworks and flares and fanfare, masculine energy. Physical fitness is a big part of its culture. There are Golden Dawn gyms that don't admit foreigners; Golden Dawn security firms. MP Panagiotaros owns a shop called Phalanga that sells military memorabilia; bovver boots and black gloves; ultra football shirts; kit by Pit Bull and Hooligan. Members of the military junta beam from photos on the wall. The heavy stuff is said to be kept in a back room.
Yianna Kourtovik acts for victims of racial attacks. Photograph: Eirini Vourloumis for the Guardian As middle-class Greeks have fled the centre of Athens, immigrants have moved into their empty properties. It's common knowledge that if you want to get squatters out of your flat, you call Golden Dawn, not the police, who at best will quietly pass you a Golden Dawn telephone number. The story has become a staple of dinner-party conversation; in the version I heard from unemployed journalist Julia Iliakopoulou, the Golden Dawn heavies who cleared the Pakistanis out of her friend's flat by "beating them black and blue" made them clean it up and paint it afterwards. "Don't upset yourself," they said. "We're Greeks helping Greeks."
It's hard to measure just how deeply Golden Dawn has penetrated the police. In Athens wards where the police vote in large numbers, the party polled 19-24% last summer; Panagiotaros crows that 50-60% of the force is now with the movement. What's obvious is that rightwing violence almost always goes unchecked, even when it happens under officers' noses or on camera. Early in October, anti-fascist protesters told me they had been tortured in the Athens police headquarters: burned with a cigarette lighter; forced to strip naked, bend over and spread their buttocks; filmed by officers who said they'd give the pictures to Golden Dawn. As I tried to interview some of them in a public lobby of the Athens courthouse, an officer grabbed me by the arm and pulled me roughly away. A police spokesperson denied the protesters' allegations.A senior police officer claims successive governments in Greece allowed the ultra-nationalist Golden Dawn party to infiltrate the country's police force.
Lawyer Yianna Kourtovik is familiar with Athens' most notorious police station, Aghios Panteleimon, which in 2010 was censured by a United Nations special rapporteur. She tells me that migrants trying to bring complaints of racist violence are routinely threatened with counter-charges and held in the cells; that local supporters of Golden Dawn wander freely in and out of rooms where complainants are giving statements; that she has had to prevent a friend of accused attackers from removing evidence. "If that isn't giving cover to Golden Dawn, I don't know what is," she says. A few weeks ago, she was egged by Golden Dawn outside the station while the police looked on. Then: "The other day, as I was walking down the road, two uniformed officers behind me started chanting, just loud enough for me to hear, 'Blood! Honour! Golden Dawn!'"
Why are such allegations never investigated? The usual response from those on the left is that Golden Dawn is "the long arm of the state" – that the government tolerates it to discourage immigration and keep people in a passive state of terror. But Golden Dawn is now much more of a threat to public order than protesters against austerity. There is also the fear of further alienating a desperately underfunded, underpaid and demoralised police force. New Democracy's Kyriazidis has led efforts to isolate Golden Dawn in parliament and, as a veteran union organiser, has intimate knowledge of the old militarised, post-junta police. But when I put the question to him, he hesitates: "Now that Golden Dawn is a legal party in parliament, we can't do anything… If there is an investigation, it has to be done internally, to remove individuals who act in this way but not weaken the police as a whole."
Through some lethal cocktail of intention, incompetence and inertia, the state has let a violent, anti-democratic force take control of law enforcement.
Greece has bitter experience of what can happen when the far right infiltrates the security services. But the Democratic Left's Mastrogiannis thinks what is happening now is more dangerous than a coup. "With the junta, you knew the enemy," he says. "But these people are acting inside society, undermining the system from within. People doubt that democracy is alive. They see it as something that works only for the few, who exploit it to make money. And the circumstances are not transient. This situation could go on for 15, 20 years."
Already Golden Dawn's success has moved the agenda to the right. Speaking in Paris last month, prime minister Antonis Samaras compared his country to 1930s Weimar. Trying to win back ground before the last election, he launched an ill-thought-out campaign (Xenios Zeus, or Zeus the Host) to round up illegal migrants, and spoke of taking back Greece's city centres. "I try to tell myself that he meant from criminals," says Dr Yunus Mohammadi of the Greek Forum of Refugees, "but really he meant from migrants."
People quickly become inured to hate speech and
violence. Panagiotaros now speaks openly of a "new kind of civil war"
between Greeks and "invaders", nationalists and leftists. Two years ago,
a friend who sits on the Athens city council came in late to find only
one empty seat, beside Michaloliakos. He hesitated, but the Golden Dawn
leader waved him over. "Do sit down," he said. "Fascism isn't
contagious." At the time, we thought it funny.Questa settimana presentiamo un articolo del Guardian - Paura e delirio ad Atene - che ben descrive l'avanzata di Alba Dorata, le sue origini e le sue tattiche squadristiche.
Il secondo pezzo, di El Pais, fornisce un buon riassunto di come la destra greca stia ormai occupando le strade e guadagnando consenso a ritmo frenetico.
Fear and loathing in Athens: the rise of Golden Dawn and the far right
You can hear it from blocks away: the deafening beat of Pogrom, Golden Dawn's favourite band, blasting out of huge speakers by a makeshift stage. "Rock for the fatherland, this is our music, we don't want parasites and foreigners on our land…"
It's a warm October evening and children on bicycles are riding up and down among the young men with crew cuts, the sleeves of their black T-shirts tight over pumped-up biceps, strolling with the stiff swagger of the muscle-bound. They look relaxed, off-duty. Two of them slap a handshake: "Hey, fascist! How's it going?"
Trestle tables are stacked with Golden Dawn merchandise: black T-shirts bearing the party's name in Greek, Chrysi Avgi, the sigma shaped like the S on SS armbands; mugs with the party symbol, a Greek meander drawn to resemble a swastika; Greek flags and black lanyards, lighters and baseball caps. I lean over to talk to one woman stallholder, dressed in Golden Dawn black with thickly kohl-rimmed eyes, but as soon as she opens her mouth a man in a suit strides up: "What are you writing? Are you a journalist? Tear that page out of your notebook. No, no, you can't talk to anyone."
Tonight is the opening of the Golden Dawn office in Megara, a once prosperous farming town between Athens and Corinth. The Greek national socialist party polled more than 15% here – double the national average – in the June election, when it won 18 seats in parliament. (One was taken up by the former bassist with Pogrom, whose hits include Auschwitz and Speak Greek Or Die.)
Legitimised by democracy and by the media, Golden Dawn is opening branches in towns all over Greece and regularly coming third in national opinion polls. Its black-shirted vigilantes have been beating up immigrants for more than three years, unmolested by the police; lately they've taken to attacking Greeks they suspect of being gay or on the left. MPs participate proudly in the violence. In September, three of them led gangs of black-shirted heavies through street fairs in the towns of Rafina and Messolonghi, smashing up immigrant traders' stalls with Greek flags on thick poles.
Such attacks are almost never prosecuted or punished. Ask Kayu Ligopora, of the Athens Tanzanian Community Association, whose premises were vandalised by around 80 "local residents" on 25 September after police walked away. He's lived in Greece for 20 years; for the first time, he says, he's thinking about leaving. Or Hussain Ahulam, 22, who told me how four men with dogs and a metal crowbar left him bleeding and unconscious by the side of the road as he walked home one day. Or 21-year-old HH, a Greek citizen of Egyptian origin, who was beaten on 12 October by three men with chains as he stepped off the trolley bus, and whose sight may be damaged for good.
Or ask @manolis, a blogger for Lifo magazine, who on 11 October went to photograph Golden Dawn's attack on a theatre showing Terrence McNally's Corpus Christi, which casts Christ and the apostles as gay men in Texas. He says four or five people surrounded him in front of the riot police, hit him and spat on him, and put a lit cigarette in his pocket. "A known Golden Dawn MP follows me, punches me twice in the face, knocks me down," he tweeted. "I lose my glasses. The MP kicks me. The police are exactly two steps away." Another MP, Ilias Panagiotaros, stood on the sidelines ranting in front of video cameras: "Wrap it up, you little faggots. Wrap it up, arse-fuckers. You little whores, your time has come. You fucked Albanian arseholes." A third, Christos Pappas, was filmed releasing a man from police custody. He is the only one now under police investigation.
In Megara, as the light fades, people are gathering: families, children, grandmothers. A woman in a long green dress and high-heeled silver mules is choosing a black T-shirt; another asks the price of a Greek flag. Suddenly there's shouting, a thunder of boots on asphalt: 50 yards from the stage, a group of braves have pushed a man off a red motorbike and are kicking and punching him as he lies on the ground. His arms are protecting his head; I can hear the boots go in. No one stirs until an older member calls them off: "Come back to our space, fellow fighters. The Leader is on his way." The Leader, Nikolaos Michaloliakos, squat in a baggy suit, threads his way through the crowd accompanied by the party's spokesman, Ilias Kasidiaris, a former commando with five criminal charges pending, famous abroad for assaulting two women candidates on TV in June. On talkshows, Kasidiaris scowls and slouches like a delinquent teenager, but tonight he looks expansive, almost rock star cool. The office door is flanked by men in camouflage trousers, with crash helmets and Greek flags rolled around wooden staves; more stand guard on the balcony and the roof.
Standing among the citizens of Megara as Michaloliakos addresses them, I feel as if I've slipped into a parallel universe. As a Greek, I've known these people all my life: middle-aged women with coiffed hair and well-upholstered bosoms, men in clean white shirts and neatly belted trousers. They're the people who run the cafes and corner shops; who work hard every day, often at two or three jobs; who pinch children's cheeks and won't let you pay for your coffee; who were always cynical about politicians' promises. I never thought they could fall prey to fascist oratory. Yet here they are, applauding Michaloliakos as he barks and roars, floodlit against a low white building next to the petrol station. We could almost be back in the 1940s, between the Axis occupation and the civil war, when former collaborators whipped up hatred of the left resistance.
Michaloliakos has his populism down pat. His message is pride, and purity, and power. He lambasts the other parties for selling out the country, for their lies and corruption, with special attention to the left party, Syriza. Golden Dawn, he says, are the only patriots, the only ones who haven't dipped their hands in the honeypot. He praises Megara, which used to supply all of Greece, "before we started eating Egyptian potatoes, Indian onions and Chilean apples". Then he turns to "the two million illegal immigrants who are the scourge of this country", who sell heroin and weapons with impunity. "Voting for us is not enough," he says. "We want you to join the struggle for Greece. Don't rent your house to foreigners, don't employ them… We want all illegal foreigners out of our country, we want the usurers of the troika and the IMF out of our country for ever."
After the fireworks and the flares and the national anthem, Efthimia Pipili, 67, gives me her reaction. "Foreigners have come twice to my house to rob me in the night," she says. "If I didn't have my rottweiler, I'd be dead by now. I used to vote for Pasok [the Panhellenic Socialist Movement]. Last time I voted for Tsipras [the leader of Syriza] because I thought he was different. But Tsipras wants to protect the foreigners. I have €100 to last for the next three weeks. I owe €400 to the electricity company; they're going to cut me off. Why shouldn't I be for Golden Dawn, my love?"
Golden Dawn is many things: a party, a movement, a subculture; a vigilante force; a network inside the police and the judiciary. Vasilis Mastrogiannis of the Democratic Left, a former senior police officer turned politician, describes it frankly as "a criminal organisation". New Democracy MP Dimitrios Kyriazidis, who founded the Greek police union, calls it a "political excrescence". "Because of my past in the police, I know very well where these people come from," Kyriazidis says. "Most declare their profession as 'businessman'. But one has to pause at that."
The party's founder and leader, Nikolaos Michaloliakos, served time in the late 1970s for assault and illegal possession of guns and explosives. While inside, he met members of the military junta that ruled Greece from 1967 to 1974, but his political views, as expressed in Golden Dawn, the magazine he started when he was released, were well to the right of theirs. Breaking the boundaries of "acceptable" rightwing nationalism, Michaloliakos published paeans to Adolf Hitler, arguing that Greece should have been at the side of the Axis in the second world war. The magazine, its covers periodically adorned with portraits of the Führer and his acolytes, served up a weird amalgam of Nazi propaganda, antisemitism, traditional nationalism and pagan fantasy. The party that now courts and counts on the Orthodox church once advocated a return to "the faith of the Aryans" – the Olympian gods – claiming that Christianity had "grafted Jewish obscurantism on to the trunk of European civilisation". In the one interview I was allowed with a Golden Dawn official, MP Panagiotis Iliopoulos told me that, as a young man, the magazine expressed his ideas completely. Have the party's views changed since then? "Not at all," he said. "There are no neo-Nazi articles in the magazine. Only historical ones."
Golden Dawn first drew attention in the early 1990s, when the dispute over the name of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia fuelled an upsurge of Greek nationalism. It found fertile ground in the anti-immigrant sentiment that spread through Greece with the first wave of migrants from Albania and eastern Europe; it gathered strength as the failures of Greek and European policy turned Greece into a lobster trap for refugees and migrants coming from Asia, Africa and the Middle East. As thousands struggled to survive beside impoverished Greeks in neighbourhoods shattered by the economic crisis, Golden Dawn vigilantes began to "clear" Athenian squares with fists and clubs and knives; to storm unofficial mosques; to sell protection to shopkeepers; to escort old ladies to the supermarket. In 2009 the party polled a mere 0.29% in the national election. In 2010, Michaloliakos was elected to the Athens city council; he celebrated his arrival with a fascist salute.
As the crisis deepens – 25% unemployment, and 54% among the young; a third of the businesses in central Athens closed; savings gone and faith in the two old mainstream parties lost; violent scenes erupting even in parliament – there is a smell of fear in Athens, as well as one of numb depression. In June, many voted for Golden Dawn as a protest against the parties that brought the country down: "I want them in parliament to beat the others up." Now they are turning to it because hope is exhausted; because things are out of control and they want someone to take charge; because it's "doing something". "It's not that Greece is going to be saved," one voter said to me. "Greece can't be saved." What, then?
The Golden Dawn office in downtown Athens is open three evenings a week. Most of the visitors are middle-aged women with dull eyes and sunken cheeks, faces too old for their bodies, hardened, tired expressions. More than 50 come in an hour. Quietly, they ask the bouncers, "Are they giving out food inside?" "Third floor," the bouncers say; but most of the women come out empty-handed save for a mauve piece of paper with the Golden Dawn logo on it. There's only enough today for voters from this ward; they'll announce the next distribution on a poster, in the papers, if you phone.
Away from the door, Maria Kirimi tells me she's been locked out of her flat with all her things inside since 29 July; the family are crowded at her mother's now, seven people surviving on €400 a month. "We're the living dead," she says. Isn't she troubled by Golden Dawn's violence? "The boys in the black shirts are the only ones I'm not scared of. I feel they'll protect me." I ask her mother, old enough to remember the junta, what she thinks of their far-right views. "I heard Michaloliakos say on TV that their sign isn't Hitler's sign but a patriotic one," she says, and then looks down at her feet. "It does upset me a bit. But I haven't heard of anyone else giving out food."
For the young people drawn into its inner circle, Golden Dawn means much more. Vetta has Celtic crosses on her collar points, a pack of Stuyvesants and a can of Red Bull clutched in her left hand. Her kohl-rimmed eyes dart back and forth as she speaks, but she is open, friendly. The 33-year-old says she helped to "clear" Aghios Panteleimon square three years ago and was stunned by people's gratitude. She's a member now, one of 20 chosen each year for their contribution to the cause and given lessons in ideology and behaviour: "We have to welcome everybody, to be polite but serious." There's a dress code for women – no heels, low-cut tops or bare backs – and a growing Women's Front, which offers training in self-defence. "But there's no difference between men and women here. We all sweep and mop. And, yes, the men make coffee."
The Golden Dawn office in industrial Aspropyrgos is in a flat above an empty garage, next to the old elevated motorway. The stairs are lined with crash helmets, black shields and Greek flags rolled on to wooden staves, ready to snatch up at a moment's notice. The walls are hung with the slogans of Greek nationalism – "Macedonia is Greek soil" – and a blown-up photograph of Golden Dawn supporters fighting the riot police. Arete Demestika – six months pregnant, ponytail down to her waist, earrings like black roses – waxes lyrical in praise of the party: "It's an attitude, a way of life, it's what's called Greece. It awakens new parts of you and makes you stronger, it arms you with knowledge, it's a secret school. We learn our true history, the lore of the nation, because the Greeks are a superior race. And it's given me my family – I met my husband here – and made me feel I'm not alone in the struggle for our country."
But outside, as the sun goes down, 27-year-old Costas, a black-booted Golden Dawn cadre, slips out from under the rhetoric and speaks in his own words. He's an inspector now in the Eleusis oil refineries, but that's not his vocation. He's a craftsman, a marble carver; he used to work at the Acropolis, but the pay was terrible and you couldn't get a decent contract if you weren't in the right party. His face softens and sweetens as he talks about working the marble, learning the craft as a boy, and I realise that he comes from a village I know well. Suddenly we're two people – two Greeks – talking about a place we love, a place full of memories, almost as if things were normal.
Deliberately, inexorably, Golden Dawn is moving into the gaps left open by the crippled Greek state. Its strategy is a blend of seduction and extortion, the exploitation of need backed by the threat of violence. To its existing "solidarity projects" – "Food for Greeks only" and "Blood for Greeks only" – the party has now added a third: "Jobs for Greeks only". Golden Dawn members are visiting workshops and factories, counting and publicising the number of foreign workers there, "encouraging" employers to hire Greeks instead. But its biggest success has been the provision of "security", with the collusion of the authorities: the intimidation of migrants, protection of Greek shops, vigilante patrols.
Adept at spectacle, the party claims new territory with a show of black-shirted strength, fireworks and flares and fanfare, masculine energy. Physical fitness is a big part of its culture. There are Golden Dawn gyms that don't admit foreigners; Golden Dawn security firms. MP Panagiotaros owns a shop called Phalanga that sells military memorabilia; bovver boots and black gloves; ultra football shirts; kit by Pit Bull and Hooligan. Members of the military junta beam from photos on the wall. The heavy stuff is said to be kept in a back room.
Yianna Kourtovik acts for victims of racial attacks. Photograph: Eirini Vourloumis for the Guardian As middle-class Greeks have fled the centre of Athens, immigrants have moved into their empty properties. It's common knowledge that if you want to get squatters out of your flat, you call Golden Dawn, not the police, who at best will quietly pass you a Golden Dawn telephone number. The story has become a staple of dinner-party conversation; in the version I heard from unemployed journalist Julia Iliakopoulou, the Golden Dawn heavies who cleared the Pakistanis out of her friend's flat by "beating them black and blue" made them clean it up and paint it afterwards. "Don't upset yourself," they said. "We're Greeks helping Greeks."
It's hard to measure just how deeply Golden Dawn has penetrated the police. In Athens wards where the police vote in large numbers, the party polled 19-24% last summer; Panagiotaros crows that 50-60% of the force is now with the movement. What's obvious is that rightwing violence almost always goes unchecked, even when it happens under officers' noses or on camera. Early in October, anti-fascist protesters told me they had been tortured in the Athens police headquarters: burned with a cigarette lighter; forced to strip naked, bend over and spread their buttocks; filmed by officers who said they'd give the pictures to Golden Dawn. As I tried to interview some of them in a public lobby of the Athens courthouse, an officer grabbed me by the arm and pulled me roughly away. A police spokesperson denied the protesters' allegations.A senior police officer claims successive governments in Greece allowed the ultra-nationalist Golden Dawn party to infiltrate the country's police force.
Lawyer Yianna Kourtovik is familiar with Athens' most notorious police station, Aghios Panteleimon, which in 2010 was censured by a United Nations special rapporteur. She tells me that migrants trying to bring complaints of racist violence are routinely threatened with counter-charges and held in the cells; that local supporters of Golden Dawn wander freely in and out of rooms where complainants are giving statements; that she has had to prevent a friend of accused attackers from removing evidence. "If that isn't giving cover to Golden Dawn, I don't know what is," she says. A few weeks ago, she was egged by Golden Dawn outside the station while the police looked on. Then: "The other day, as I was walking down the road, two uniformed officers behind me started chanting, just loud enough for me to hear, 'Blood! Honour! Golden Dawn!'"
Why are such allegations never investigated? The usual response from those on the left is that Golden Dawn is "the long arm of the state" – that the government tolerates it to discourage immigration and keep people in a passive state of terror. But Golden Dawn is now much more of a threat to public order than protesters against austerity. There is also the fear of further alienating a desperately underfunded, underpaid and demoralised police force. New Democracy's Kyriazidis has led efforts to isolate Golden Dawn in parliament and, as a veteran union organiser, has intimate knowledge of the old militarised, post-junta police. But when I put the question to him, he hesitates: "Now that Golden Dawn is a legal party in parliament, we can't do anything… If there is an investigation, it has to be done internally, to remove individuals who act in this way but not weaken the police as a whole."
Through some lethal cocktail of intention, incompetence and inertia, the state has let a violent, anti-democratic force take control of law enforcement.
Greece has bitter experience of what can happen when the far right infiltrates the security services. But the Democratic Left's Mastrogiannis thinks what is happening now is more dangerous than a coup. "With the junta, you knew the enemy," he says. "But these people are acting inside society, undermining the system from within. People doubt that democracy is alive. They see it as something that works only for the few, who exploit it to make money. And the circumstances are not transient. This situation could go on for 15, 20 years."
Already Golden Dawn's success has moved the agenda to the right. Speaking in Paris last month, prime minister Antonis Samaras compared his country to 1930s Weimar. Trying to win back ground before the last election, he launched an ill-thought-out campaign (Xenios Zeus, or Zeus the Host) to round up illegal migrants, and spoke of taking back Greece's city centres. "I try to tell myself that he meant from criminals," says Dr Yunus Mohammadi of the Greek Forum of Refugees, "but really he meant from migrants."
fonte: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/oct/26/golden-dawn-greece-far-right?intcmp=122
La ultraderecha griega gana la calle
di Mariangela PaoneSon las seis y media de la tarde del miércoles. Las oficinas abren a las siete pero en la puerta hay al menos 20 personas. Muchos ancianos. Una mujer de pelo blanco con un carrito de la compra. Una pareja de mediana edad y un señor de unos 70 años bien trajeado que lleva una pequeña chapa en el cuello de la chaqueta. Es un meandro, una especie de esvástica, y es el símbolo del partido neonazi griego Aurora Dorada. El edificio frente al que estas personas esperan es su sede central en Atenas. Todos los días, durante dos horas, está abierta para atender al público. Es aquí donde, día tras día, Aurora Dorada construye el apoyo popular sobre las ruinas económicas y políticas del país. Si se votara hoy, según todos los sondeos, sería el tercer partido de Grecia.
Sin mirar a la red que el partido ha construido en los últimos dos
años no se entiende cómo la formación, que en 2009, en las elecciones
europeas, obtuvo menos del 0,5% de los votos, haya podido ganar 18 de
los 300 diputados en los comicios de junio y el doble si se celebraran
comicios ahora.
A las siete, cuando se abren las puertas, Dimitri es de los primeros
en entrar. Ha venido a buscar un libro: Hitler para 1.000 años, del
ideólogo nazi León Degrelle. Tiene 20 años. Guardan la entrada del
edificio dos hombres que lucen músculos debajo de dos apretadas
camisetas negras. Podrían ser dos gorilas de discoteca si no fuera por
la bandera que se entrevé a sus espaldas: el símbolo negro sobre un
fondo rojo. “Damos comida, intentamos ayudar a buscar trabajo. La gente
nos cuenta los problemas con los inmigrantes
que la policía no puede solucionar y nosotros actuamos con nuestros
métodos”, explica Alex, que como la mayoría de los voluntarios viste un
pantalón militar de color verde oscuro y una sudadera negra. “Para
empezar que sea claro: ni fotos ni entrevistas a los que están dentro”,
advierte. Es la condición de la visita.
De las intervenciones de Aurora Dorada hay rastros en Internet. El 8 de septiembre varios miembros y dos de sus diputados asaltaron un mercadillo de inmigrantes en Rafina. Hace dos días, la Red contra la Violencia Antirracista, una organización de 23 ONG patrocinada por el Alto Comisionado de la ONU para los Refugiados, presentó el primer informe de un proyecto piloto para registrar el aumento de casos de violencia contra los extranjeros. Entre enero y septiembre documentaron 87 episodios, la mayoría en Atenas y en lugares públicos. Las víctimas, que en muchos casos han sufrido lesiones importantes, hablan del uso de armas, bastones, tijeras, botellas rotas, cadenas. “En algunos casos”, se lee en el informe, “las víctimas o los testigos de los ataques han reconocido entre los responsables a personas asociadas a Aurora Dorada”.
“Dicen que somos nosotros pero no”, dice Thomas, 35 años, encargado de la pequeña tienda que se encuentra en la primera planta de la sede. ¿Podéis negar el uso de la violencia? “No instigamos. Pero no podemos evitar que nuestra gente se defienda”. En más de una ocasión los miembros del partido han negado ser los autores de los ataques. El miércoles, en una entrevista en la televisión Skai, el líder, Nikolai Michaloliakos, cuya primera declaración tras ser elegido fue “todos los inmigrantes fuera”, volvió a negarlo a pesar de los vídeos. El Parlamento quitó la inmunidad a dos de sus diputados por participar en el ataque de Rafina. La medida también ha afectado a un tercer diputado, imputado por un robo a mano armada en 2007. Es el portavoz del partido, Ilias Kasidiaris, famoso por haber agredido a dos parlamentarias de izquierda durante un debate en televisión en junio.
Thomas está en el paro. Trabajaba en una gran empresa farmacéutica griega que se declaró en bancarrota hace unos meses. Ahora vende aquí el material de propaganda del partido. Al lado de la tienda hay dos estanterías semivacías, la biblioteca del centro. Theodorus, 25 años, traduce los títulos: “Este va de la negación del Holocausto. Estos son escritos de Julius Evola. Este otro son poemas de nuestro líder. Y aquí tenemos discursos de Goebbels”. Theodorus, que trabaja de guardaespaldas en una empresa privada, dice: “Los inmigrantes tienen que irse, el problema de Grecia no es la economía sino que hay un millón de inmigrantes que nos quitan el trabajo. La mezcla entre pueblos no es buena”. En la sala el trajín de gente sigue. Para las consultas también hay una especie de asistencia telefónica: dos jóvenes contestan a las llamadas desde otros puntos del país y remiten las peticiones a las oficinas locales.
“Nos definimos nacionalistas griegos. Cómo nos llamen los demás no nos interesa”, contesta Thomas, cuando se le pregunta por la definición de nazi. Llega un señor de unos 50 años y saca del bolsillo una cartilla de cartón azul claro y el símbolo de Aurora Dorada. “Con esta le damos comida. Tienen que demostrar que están en el paro o que tienen familia numerosa”. Sobra decir que hay que ser griego. “Ahora tenemos un nuevo servicio. Muchos empresarios han venido para decir que quieren contratar solo a griegos, nosotros les ponemos en contacto”. El señor de la cartilla, que está en paro desde hace tiempo, coge una de las tarjetas que el dueño de una lavandería ha dejado en la sede.
Thomas dice que la relación con la policía “no es ni buena ni mala”.
“Creo en todo caso que el 50% de los policías nos apoya”, añade. Lo
mismo dijo a la BBC hace una semana el diputado de Aurora Dorada Ilias Panagiotaros. En septiembre, el diario The Guardian reveló el testimonio de algunos de los 15 anarquistas
detenidos después de un enfrentamiento con miembros de Aurora Dorada,
que denunciaban torturas en comisaría por agentes simpatizantes del
movimiento. El ministro del Interior, Nikos Dendias, ha anunciado una
demanda contra el periódico británico. Pero las críticas a las fuerzas
policiales por las actuaciones durante las acciones de Aurora Dorada son
cada vez más frecuentes. Una de las últimas ocasiones fue el 11 de
octubre: la violenta protesta de un grupo de fanáticos cristianos
apoyados por miembros del partido impidió la representación de la obra
de teatro Corpus Christi, en la que los apóstoles son homosexuales. A
Thomas le parece justo: “Uno no puede decir lo que quiere y pensar que
no pasa nada por ello”. Desde el piso de arriba se oyen aplausos. “Hoy
hay una conferencia sobre el imperio bizantino”.En la sede central, cerca de la estación ferroviaria de Larissa, se reproducen los mecanismos de funcionamiento de las más de 40 oficinas locales. En medio de la depauperación de la clase media griega, Aurora Dorada se presenta como capaz de llenar los huecos dejados por el Estado. En la página web oficial y en las de los grupos locales se anuncian distribuciones de comidas, servicios de asesoramiento para la búsqueda de trabajo, visitas a residencias de ancianos o fábricas en crisis. Todo bajo el lema “Solo para los griegos”.
De las intervenciones de Aurora Dorada hay rastros en Internet. El 8 de septiembre varios miembros y dos de sus diputados asaltaron un mercadillo de inmigrantes en Rafina. Hace dos días, la Red contra la Violencia Antirracista, una organización de 23 ONG patrocinada por el Alto Comisionado de la ONU para los Refugiados, presentó el primer informe de un proyecto piloto para registrar el aumento de casos de violencia contra los extranjeros. Entre enero y septiembre documentaron 87 episodios, la mayoría en Atenas y en lugares públicos. Las víctimas, que en muchos casos han sufrido lesiones importantes, hablan del uso de armas, bastones, tijeras, botellas rotas, cadenas. “En algunos casos”, se lee en el informe, “las víctimas o los testigos de los ataques han reconocido entre los responsables a personas asociadas a Aurora Dorada”.
“Dicen que somos nosotros pero no”, dice Thomas, 35 años, encargado de la pequeña tienda que se encuentra en la primera planta de la sede. ¿Podéis negar el uso de la violencia? “No instigamos. Pero no podemos evitar que nuestra gente se defienda”. En más de una ocasión los miembros del partido han negado ser los autores de los ataques. El miércoles, en una entrevista en la televisión Skai, el líder, Nikolai Michaloliakos, cuya primera declaración tras ser elegido fue “todos los inmigrantes fuera”, volvió a negarlo a pesar de los vídeos. El Parlamento quitó la inmunidad a dos de sus diputados por participar en el ataque de Rafina. La medida también ha afectado a un tercer diputado, imputado por un robo a mano armada en 2007. Es el portavoz del partido, Ilias Kasidiaris, famoso por haber agredido a dos parlamentarias de izquierda durante un debate en televisión en junio.
Thomas está en el paro. Trabajaba en una gran empresa farmacéutica griega que se declaró en bancarrota hace unos meses. Ahora vende aquí el material de propaganda del partido. Al lado de la tienda hay dos estanterías semivacías, la biblioteca del centro. Theodorus, 25 años, traduce los títulos: “Este va de la negación del Holocausto. Estos son escritos de Julius Evola. Este otro son poemas de nuestro líder. Y aquí tenemos discursos de Goebbels”. Theodorus, que trabaja de guardaespaldas en una empresa privada, dice: “Los inmigrantes tienen que irse, el problema de Grecia no es la economía sino que hay un millón de inmigrantes que nos quitan el trabajo. La mezcla entre pueblos no es buena”. En la sala el trajín de gente sigue. Para las consultas también hay una especie de asistencia telefónica: dos jóvenes contestan a las llamadas desde otros puntos del país y remiten las peticiones a las oficinas locales.
“Nos definimos nacionalistas griegos. Cómo nos llamen los demás no nos interesa”, contesta Thomas, cuando se le pregunta por la definición de nazi. Llega un señor de unos 50 años y saca del bolsillo una cartilla de cartón azul claro y el símbolo de Aurora Dorada. “Con esta le damos comida. Tienen que demostrar que están en el paro o que tienen familia numerosa”. Sobra decir que hay que ser griego. “Ahora tenemos un nuevo servicio. Muchos empresarios han venido para decir que quieren contratar solo a griegos, nosotros les ponemos en contacto”. El señor de la cartilla, que está en paro desde hace tiempo, coge una de las tarjetas que el dueño de una lavandería ha dejado en la sede.
fonte: http://internacional.elpais.com/internacional/2012/10/25/actualidad/1351190059_449972.html
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