The Full Catastrophe (27 page)

Greece was indeed facing an immigration problem that required the kind of responsible policy response the government had long proven incapable of mustering. Had the government been able to improve its asylum system, it would not only have created more humane conditions for asylum seekers, but it would have also allowed for faster deportation of those migrants who didn’t qualify for it and instead lingered in the country indefinitely. The Greek
government could not exactly use its financial troubles as an excuse for its failure to do this. European Union funds were available to make needed improvements. A spokesman for the European Commission told me that it had earmarked 304 million euros for Greece from 2007 through 2012 to be put to use for “migration management.” Greece’s government hadn’t “absorbed” much of that money due to administrative red tape, the spokesman said. Politicians’ increasing anti-immigrant rhetoric, however, provided a useful way to deflect the focus from their long-standing failings.

Samaras, after his election win, delivered on his promise to do something about the influx of migrants crossing the border illegally. The tactics the government used to accomplish this, however, raised a lot of questions. Within a few months, the Greek government launched Operation “Xenios Zeus,” a nickname for the Greek god that emphasizes his role as the protector of foreign travelers. Authorities began conducting sweeps in which they detained migrants in order to check their papers. Human Rights Watch, which called the name Xenios Zeus a “cruel irony,” urged Greek police to stop detaining people based on their skin color. In the first seven months of the operation, 85,000 foreigners were taken into custody in Athens. On a few occasions, nonwhite tourists were also detained by police, prompting the U.S. State Department to warn travelers of “confirmed reports of U.S. African American citizens detained by police conducting sweeps for illegal immigrants in Athens.” One Nigerian American tourist detained during a sweep complained of having been beaten by police while handcuffed, telling the BBC that he woke up in the hospital with a concussion. He later filed a complaint with the help of the U.S. embassy in Athens, though a year and a half after the incident, an embassy official told me the Greek government had not yet responded.

In the Evros River Valley, Xenios Zeus meant the arrival of 1,800 additional border patrol officers. As a result, “the situation
changed dramatically,” according to a report by Frontex. The number of migrants detected crossing the border went from 2,000 per week in August 2012 to ten per week in October of the same year, according to the agency. Questions arose, however, concerning the methods Greek border police were using to accomplish this result, particularly as the civil war in Syria was generating a record number of refugees, many of whom set their sights on Europe.

In November 2013, the UNHCR released a statement asking for clarification from Greek authorities on the fate of a group of 150 Syrians who had reportedly crossed over the Evros River into Greece. Locals in Prangi, a village near the river, told the agency that many of the Syrians had gathered next to the village church. Police arrived in vans and took them away, the locals told the UNHCR. The agency, however, despite what it called “repeated contacts” with the police, was never able to trace the Syrians’ whereabouts. Police told UNHCR officials that they had found only thirteen Syrians, a spokesman for the refugee agency told me. The UNHCR called for an investigation and, in pained diplomatic jargon, said it had repeatedly appealed to states “to facilitate access of refugees to safety” and to “avoid returns to countries neighboring Syria.”

Around this time, the Council of Europe’s commissioner for human rights, Nils Muižnieks, sent a letter to the Greek ministers in charge of the police and the coast guard asking them to investigate the “large number of reported collective expulsions by Greece of migrants, including a large number of Syrians fleeing war violence, and allegations of ill-treatment of migrants by members of the coast guard and of the border police.” The boost in patrols along the Evros River meant that most migrants began attempting to cross into Greece over the Aegean, where they often encountered the Hellenic Coast Guard. After Muižnieks sent his letter, on January 20, 2014, eleven Afghans off the Greek islet of
Farmakonisi drowned while the coast guard was towing their boat. Survivors said it capsized after the coast guard tried to drag them back to Turkey at high speed. Coast guard officials denied this, and said they were dragging the migrants toward safety when the passengers panicked, causing the boat to capsize. Eight of the dead were children. The surviving migrants were taken to a coast guard station in the morning, where they were lined up on the harborside. Greek authorities, as if to show how well the survivors were being treated, released a video of men who had just lost their entire families being provided sandwiches by a woman wearing a surgical mask and gloves. The survivors later arrived at the port of Piraeus, where a crowd of journalists waited for them. Television cameras focused on two mournful-looking men, one of whom emitted a high-pitched wail of grief. The man held up five fingers to indicate the number of his family—four children and his wife—all of them dead. He looked at the hand and wept as if it were the only trace of them he had left. Another man beside him looked like his eyes had been sewn almost shut from sleeplessness and sorrow. “Who did he lose?” asked one journalist. “His daughter, two sons, and his wife,” a translator said. The children were nine, eleven, and thirteen. “They threw them into the sea on purpose,” said the man, before covering his face with his hand.

Muižnieks said the incident appeared to be a “case of failed collective expulsion.” Greece’s minister in charge of the coast guard, Miltiadis Varvitsiotis, denied this was the case and said the coast guard had tried to save them all. In a letter to Muižnieks, he expressed his “deepest sorrow for the lives lost in this tragic incident” and pointed out that the coast guard had heroically saved thousands of lives. In a Greek television interview around the same time, though, the maritime minister’s tone was noticeably more hostile. “Look, Mr. Muižnieks and others want to create a political issue in Greece,” the minister said. The boat’s sinking should not become “the object of dumb political exploitation,” he
added. “I don’t believe anyone wants for us to open the gates for all the immigrants to enjoy asylum in this country.”

It was around this time, while walking in central Athens one day, that I met Mohamad Hussien, a twenty-year-old Syrian from the civil war–ravaged city of Homs. Hussien had a boyish face, though the dark circles under his eyes and some stubble made him look weary. He had left Syria with his mother and younger brother—leaving their father and a young sibling behind in Homs. Over a glass of tea in a dingy apartment crowded with other Syrians, he described for me the first time the three of them tried to enter Greece from the Turkish coastline. On an October night, he said, they boarded an inflatable boat with some forty other migrants. The smugglers told them that Europe was the lights flickering in the darkness, the Greek island of Samos. The Syrians steered toward the lights, but what Hussien said was a Greek coast guard vessel intercepted their boat, and men wearing balaclavas emerged pointing machine guns at them. Some of the masked men boarded their boat, Hussien said, and confiscated mobile phones and wallets; his family lost 2,000 euros, and one migrant who protested having his money taken was beaten. Last, the officers removed their engine and left the boat floating idle, he said. “Try and get to Samos now,” he recalled one of the masked men yelling as the coast guard boat pulled away. The migrants then used their hands to paddle back to the Turkish shore. Hussien told me his family tried several more times to get to Greece over the Aegean. On five occasions, they met Greek patrol boats, he said. Each of those times, crew members took their engine and left them to drift and be rescued by the Turkish coast guard. On another occasion, a Turkish vessel intercepted them and dragged them back to Turkey. Finally, the family crossed into Greece over
the land border. Some days before I met him, the family had tried to fly to Amsterdam using fake identity cards. Only their mother made it through security, though. The two sons were let go, and would try again later.

Greek officials denied the Hellenic Coast Guard did the kinds of things Hussien described. Credible allegations of wrongdoing were investigated, they said. Hussien’s story, however, was one in a large chorus of similar migrant testimonies documented by human rights groups. Why, one might ask, would all of these people lie? The Greek coast guard and navy, one must keep in mind, did save thousands of migrants drifting in Greek territorial waters. But if some officers acted with such mercilessness, a patriotic rationale for doing so could certainly be found. An officer, after all, might see such actions as a defense of the country against the “unarmed invaders” Greek politicians spoke of. Greece, after all, seemed to be pursuing an unofficial policy of deterring migrants and asylum seekers from coming or staying. Prime Minister Samaras indicated as much. Speaking in parliament, he stressed his government’s willingness to use “additional deterrence tactics that until today were also prohibited,” though he did not specify what those tactics were. Other Greek officials also suggested that Greek policy was to make life for migrants as hard as possible. In the summer of 2013, for instance, Adonis Georgiadis, a New Democracy parliamentarian, told a Greek radio station that the purpose of the police practice of apprehending migrants in Athens and releasing them twenty-five miles outside of the city was to make migrants’ “lives as difficult as you can so that they understand the time has come to get on an airplane and leave.” A few weeks later Georgiadis received a promotion of sorts, becoming minister of health.

While inexcusable, it was not entirely hard to understand why Greek officials advocated such deterrence tactics. In theory, if Greece had built the apotheosis of an excellent and just asylum
system according to European law, the country would very likely have become one of the world’s prime destinations for refugees—people wishing not just to pass through, but to stay. Greek politicians and their electorate clearly did not want to make their small country a haven for people fleeing the world’s conflicts. Nor, for that matter, did other European politicians want that for their own countries. The Italians were deporting migrants who had managed to escape Greece back to Greece. The Spanish were summarily deporting to Morocco migrants who climbed over a twenty-foot-high border fence onto Spanish territory. Northern European politicians seemed intent on keeping a great deal of the burden down south. Greece, however, was making a great effort to avoid bearing it. As with the country’s debt troubles, a comprehensive solution to the problem was not up to Greece alone, but would have to come from Europe. The migrants, after all, weren’t usually coming for Greece. It just happened to be in the way.

7
The New Spartans

This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he first appears above ground he is a protector.

—Socrates, in
The Republic
by Plato

T
he Athenians of Agios Panteleimonas Square began their self-described struggle for liberation from foreign dominion near the end of 2008. It was at this time that a group calling itself the Committee of Residents sent a letter describing the unbearable desperation of their circumstances to the president of the Hellenic Parliament, various ministers, the mayor, the head of police, and the archbishop of the Church of Greece. In their area lived one Greek for every six foreigners, the committee wrote. Did the letter’s recipients know that the outnumbered Greeks lived under a “reign of the fullest and worst forms of violence, crime, fear, insecurity, and all forms of delinquency?” Did they know that the majestic church of Agios Panteleimonas that is the square’s namesake had become an “immigrant-dump prohibitive even for the passage of pedestrians?” Did they know the streets and squares of the area had become “a daily place of sleeping and a toilet for destitute and drunk foreigners?” Did they know that the playground
on the square of Agios Panteleimonas “is held by children of immigrants who are destroying it and, yes, threaten and use force against the few Greek children who try in vain to visit it?” That was not the worst of it, according to the letter. Once, a group of a few hundred immigrants gathered outside the church in a fit of rage. “Down with Orthodoxy!” they yelled. “Down with Christ!” And finally, the letter described the “pinnacle of evil, beyond all limits of imagination.” In a three-story building across from the square, where about five hundred foreigners were living, two sheep could be seen on the terrace, and on the first floor, about fifteen hens and roosters. According to those locals with a direct line of sight into the building, its dwellers engaged in “bestiality with the sheep, and moreover, slaughtered the roosters and the hens with unspecified intentions and with a direct impact on public health derived from infectious diseases.” The letter concluded by saying the government had done nothing to rectify the situation and so, lately, “more and more people are threatening to take to the streets to ‘clean’ the area.”

The letter was written at a time when locals began to come together in an apolitical demonstration of indignation over these circumstances, according to Thomais Giannatou, a member of the Committee of Residents. “Local governance requires active citizens,” she told me, years after the letter was written, as we sat at a café on the square. “It didn’t make any difference what party you belonged to,” she said. “What mattered to me was that my neighborhood had died.” Giannatou, a round, short woman with blond-colored bangs covering her forehead and a deepened, withered smoker’s voice, had run a cosmetics shop near the square, but it had recently closed—another victim, she said, of the area’s degradation at the hands of illegal immigrants. Across from where we sat stood the towering, bulbous church named for St. Panteleimon, said to be a physician and healer from Asia Minor who, under the reign of Maximian, was tortured and beheaded. The saint’s
name translates to “all-merciful,” and the fortresslike church in his honor is one of Greece’s largest, though certainly not its prettiest. The church and the square around it represented the heart of the neighborhood, and the residents’ struggle, which, by the time I met Giannatou at the café, had become famous across Greece. The neighborhood, in decades past, had been a middle-class bastion, but as its residents had grown wealthier, and the area congested and overdeveloped, many people moved away to the greener suburbs. This left an abundance of empty apartments that migrants began to inhabit, changing the demographics of the neighborhood rather quickly. Giannatou sipped on her coffee and pithily summarized the change for me like this: “We went to bed in Athens and woke up in Kabul.”

Around the time they sent the letter, residents also planned a demonstration. “No to the ghettoization of our area,” read a flyer advertising the event. “No to the unconditional surrender of our lives.” Leftist groups from the area heard of the planned gathering, however, and, considering the committee’s tone to be one of “racism and fascism,” planned their own counterdemonstration on the square. These leftists threatened to bring 1,500 Afghans with them to “slaughter” the residents, Giannatou recalled during our conversation. Nevertheless, she said, the “indignant residents,” as her group and their supporters came to be known, were determined to deliver themselves from the wretchedness of their situation and would not succumb to such intimidations. One late-fall evening, the indignant residents emerged onto the square. To hear Giannatou recall it, the event marked a spontaneous moment of civic awakening, when locals of various political affiliations, strangers in fact, came together to express their mutual exasperation over their common plight. One protest banner read:
WE ARE NOT RACIST
,
WE ARE DESPERATE
. A far greater number of counterdemonstrators also convened on the square, among them local leftists, antiracist groups, a number of Afghans, and some
anarchists from a nearby squat called Villa Amalia. “We’re all Afghans,” the counterdemonstrators chanted.
“Allahu Akbar!”
yelled some Afghans. Riot police, in an act that would become routine over the following years, created a barrier—albeit a permeable one—between the two camps.

Reinforcements for the indignant residents soon arrived. A formation of black-clad men carrying Greek flags marched past the shops and cafés, emerging before the Committee of Residents’ supporters. “Foreigners out of Greece,” these entrants onto the scene yelled. “Greece belongs to the Greeks.” Many residents greeted the formation with cheers and whistles. “Bravo! Bravo!” some yelled, and joined in the chants. “Foreigners out of Greece!” The entrants tossed leaflets pledging their intention to defend the homeland and urging Greeks to “wake up” and “resist the ghettoization of our neighborhoods.” The black-clad men held up their flags and sang the national anthem. Some raised their arms in a manner that looked to newspaper reporters present like a Nazi salute, but was, rather, as least according to the group the men belonged to, an ancient Greek salute. Before the men departed, they chanted: “Blood, honor, Golden Dawn. We will return and the earth will tremble.” On this night the political party Golden Dawn, until then a very marginal group of neo-Nazis, was finding a way to establish itself. Agios Panteleimonas Square would be its first big conquest.

“Blood, honor” seemed like a strange phrase to many locals who had never heard it before. The words happened to be those in the motto of the Hitler Youth—
Blut und Ehre
—but the drawing of such parallels was typical of the slanderous media campaign against Golden Dawn, or so the party would repeatedly assert in the following years, as its political popularity soared (it later
changed “blood” to “country”). For those at the time who might have been confused about its ideology, Golden Dawn published a statement on its website titled
Nationalists or Nazis? A Reply.
“We are nationalists and not Nazis, first and foremost, for purely linguistic reasons. Because we are proud to use the language of the Gods, the language of Plato and of Aristotle, and not a foreign language, like German, from which the term ‘Nazi’ originates.” The statement also elaborated on the party’s ideas about World War II, adding: “We deny the historical falsehood of the ‘good democratic’ allies and the ‘bad’ fascists,” rejecting too the “postwar propaganda of the Zionists.” The so-called liberators, capitalist and Bolshevik alike, had bestowed spiritual desolation, crime, ignorance, drugs, and corruption on the people of Europe. “With respect to our country, which gave a heavy toll of blood to the so-called Allies, the case is glaring and screams in every direction that we were wronged and we continue to be wronged by those who were the victors of the Great War.”

Other party texts at the time linked the National Socialist ideology expounded by Hitler’s press chief, Otto Dietrich, with the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus, the “harbinger and the philosophical father of National Socialism.” A follower seeking the underpinnings of Golden Dawn’s philosophy in Ancient Greek thought, however, was also to heed an important caveat. Hellenism did not represent a set of ideas or cultural works but was “primarily a term of racial substance,” Nikolaos Michaloliakos, the party’s general secretary—or chief, as his followers called him—wrote in his book
For a Great Greece in a Free Europe.
Anyone wanting to read more about Golden Dawn’s racial theories could also visit the Internet portal of the party’s “Women’s Front,” where one could read about motherly responsibilities: “We must ensure the existence of Our Race and the future of our children,” a take on the “Fourteen Words” of David Lane, the American white nationalist militant who died in prison in 2007.

This party of not-neo-Nazis-for-purely-linguistic-reasons took great interest in the residents’ seemingly spontaneous expression of indignation. With the arrival of the “Greek fighters of Golden Dawn, who stood dynamically at their side, the residents broke out in loud applause, feeling visibly encouraged,” the party said in a statement following the demonstration on Agios Panteleimonas Square. Golden Dawn would “continue to support such efforts, which are not party-political in nature, as our Struggle is above all the Struggle for the Enlightenment of our people.” The party chief, Michaloliakos, a portly man with a babyish face and ample black eyebrows that stood out in contrasting defiance of his graying head of hair, also appeared on a news television program to express his support for the residents’ demonstration, which, he underscored, “abstained from political parties and organizations.” On the other hand, he added, the counterdemonstration was of a purely partisan, Marxist nature.

Michaloliakos was born in Athens in 1957, though he traces his origins to Mani, the central of the three peninsulas that jut southward into the Mediterranean from the bottom of the Peloponnese. In Greece, the region of the country your ancestors come from is thought to say a lot about you. For instance, if you are born and raised in Athens, but have Maniot parents, you are a Maniot. Michaloliakos certainly thought of himself as a Maniot, and Maniots often think of themselves as the direct descendants of the ancient, warrior Spartans. A regional flag bears the Spartan phrase
“E tan e epi tas,”
the Spartan mother’s command to her battle-bound son to either come back with his shield or be carried dead upon it. Mani, isolated by the towering Taygetus Mountains, was until recently known for its recalcitrance and blood feuds between clans. Its name is often thought to derive from the
mania,
or fury, of its occupants, though scholars doubt that etymological explanation.

Michaloliakos, himself a devotee to the power of fury, joined the neo-fascist, anti-Semitic party 4th of August—named after
the authoritarian regime that controlled Greece in the years leading up to World War II—while still in high school in Athens. He studied math in university and served for a while as an army commando. As part of his youthful activities, he was arrested a few times, once for beating journalists and another time for his involvement with a “nationalist revolutionary subversive organization with the aim of overthrowing the democratic polity,” as he once put it. This was in the years following the collapse of the right-wing military dictatorship, the Regime of the Colonels, which ruled Greece from 1967 to 1974. Neofascist groups, displeased with the democratic direction the country was going in, were at the time bombing theaters deemed leftist and unpatriotic. Michaloliakos was sentenced to a year in prison for providing explosives for this purpose. In 1980, he started a periodical called
Golden Dawn.

One 1981 article, titled “We,” which described the magazine’s values, praised the “German revolution of 1933.” In that revolution, “we saw the strength that will redeem humanity from the Jewish rottenness, we saw the strength that will drive us to a new European regeneration, we saw the bright revival of the primordial instinct of the race, we saw the dynamic flight from the nightmarish industrial mass man to a new and simultaneously ancient and eternal type of man, a mankind of heroes and demigods, the pure naive and violent mankind of myth and of instinct.” Regarding religion, it stated: “We are pagans because we are Greeks, because it’s impossible for us to acknowledge values other than those that arise from the miracle of the Greek Spirit. We are pagans because we can never put dark prophets and bloodied kings of a crass nomadic people in the place of our heroes and philosophers.” In a 2006 issue, Hitler’s deputy Rudolf Hess was featured on the cover, and a year later, the magazine featured the Führer himself, performing an ancient Greek salute. By the time Golden Dawn had come to the side of the residents of Agios Panteleimonas, though,
the party was toning down the Third Reich veneration and paganism for the sake of its electoral viability.

Golden Dawn’s very public declarations of support for the Committee of Residents were anomalous. The party, which employed the frequent motto “against everyone,” was typically reluctant to so publicly and enthusiastically support an organized entity other than itself. This was partly the reason observers of the extreme right in Greece from early on questioned whether the Committee of Residents was indeed driven by an unprompted expression of indignation, or whether it was a veiled extension of Golden Dawn. These suspicions grew with time and for many were validated when one of the most vocal committee members, Themis Skordeli, a middle-aged former bank clerk with blond hair and a shrill voice, later became a parliamentary candidate for Golden Dawn. Before that, Skordeli often appeared on Greek television above the caption “indignant resident.” She was also repeatedly captured on video berating migrants and leftists on Agios Panteleimonas Square and in its immediate vicinity. In September of 2011, she was charged along with two others of inflicting dangerous bodily harm on three Afghans, one of whom was stabbed in the thorax and stomach. By the time I sat down with members of the Committee of Residents at the beginning of 2014, Skordeli’s trial on that charge had been repeatedly postponed. She maintained her innocence; so did the party on her behalf.