I had promised to write about Golden Dawn and unfortunately it did not take them long to give me an extreme incentive to write. Yesterday in the middle of the night a member of GD stabbed to death Pavlos Fissas, a 34-year-old singer who was considered 'leftist'. This followed an argument about football but was probably politically motivated. The 45-year-old murderer (he admitted his guilt to the police) received a mysterious phone call and rushed to the café where he, along with about 15 other GD members, ambushed the singer and killed him. The perpetrator phoned his wife to get rid of his Golden Dawn party card, GD leaflets, a taser and a folding truncheon, but the police found them in the rubbish bin near their home. The GD spokesperson Kassidiaris appeared on TV last night to dissassociate the party from the murderer, but photos are emerging showing him at GD events,
This is the culmination of a recent series of increasingly outrageous stunts by GD this month, such as preventing a female member of parliament from laying a wreath at Vitsi civil war commemoration, a torch-lit display of power at Thermopylae which this article compared to the Ku Klux Klan, 50 Golden Dawn members beat up a group of 30 Greek Communist Party members who were putting up posters at midnight, hospitalising eight, and disrupted another civil war commemoration at Meligala, where they attacked the mayor and elderly survivors (in Greek, but lots of photos).
426,025 Greeks voted for GD at the last elections in June 2012, giving them 18 Members of Parliament. Recent opinion polls (before the murder of the singer) gave them 15% popularity. In 2009 they only received 19,636 votes. This enormous rise in popularity coincided with the growing number of Greeks losing their jobs in the recession. Immigrants were seen as taking jobs from Greeks--never mind that these were menial jobs that nouveau-riche Greeks had grown too proud to do. The immigrants became the easy scapegoat, and GD's anti-immigrant rhetoric exploited this to garner votes.
Immigrants are easy targets, especially when they are children, like a 15-year-old Afghan boy. Gangs of members, wearing black T-shirts with the Golden Dawn insignia, roam the streets in packs on motorbikes, attacking immigrants. As many immigrants are illegal these attacks are not often reported unless they are fatal (Greek reports at the time said that Golden Dawn pamphlets had been found at the home of one of the murderers).
Now they are widening their attacks to include Greeks whose political orientation they do not agree with, such as the Communists and Civil War memorials I described in my second paragraph. Women are another favourite target, most famously last year when two left-wing female politicians were attacked on live TV by Kassidiaris, a GD Member of Parliament.
According to the Human Rights Watch report attacks are on the rise, but the police do not do much about them. This may be because many police officers support GD--I've seen figures estimating them at between 40% and 60% of the police force.
If you would like to read more about this, there is a detailed article in Pandora's Box, an overview of their last 33 years, and an entire blog about them. I hope that the murder of the singer will open the eyes of some GD supporters who possibly did not realise how dangerous these people are.
Once again Greece is in international news headlines for all the wrong reasons. Personally, as an expatriate I am growing increasingly afraid of living in Greece. Will I be attacked by GD members in the street because I do not look Greek, or even because I wrote this blog entry? The serpent's egg has hatched, I do not know where this will end. The frightening rise in popularity of a neo-fascist party with swastika-like insignia, black shirts and other nazi trappings is unconscionable in a country that suffered so deeply at the hands of the German army during WWII. God help us.
This is the culmination of a recent series of increasingly outrageous stunts by GD this month, such as preventing a female member of parliament from laying a wreath at Vitsi civil war commemoration, a torch-lit display of power at Thermopylae which this article compared to the Ku Klux Klan, 50 Golden Dawn members beat up a group of 30 Greek Communist Party members who were putting up posters at midnight, hospitalising eight, and disrupted another civil war commemoration at Meligala, where they attacked the mayor and elderly survivors (in Greek, but lots of photos).
426,025 Greeks voted for GD at the last elections in June 2012, giving them 18 Members of Parliament. Recent opinion polls (before the murder of the singer) gave them 15% popularity. In 2009 they only received 19,636 votes. This enormous rise in popularity coincided with the growing number of Greeks losing their jobs in the recession. Immigrants were seen as taking jobs from Greeks--never mind that these were menial jobs that nouveau-riche Greeks had grown too proud to do. The immigrants became the easy scapegoat, and GD's anti-immigrant rhetoric exploited this to garner votes.
Immigrants are easy targets, especially when they are children, like a 15-year-old Afghan boy. Gangs of members, wearing black T-shirts with the Golden Dawn insignia, roam the streets in packs on motorbikes, attacking immigrants. As many immigrants are illegal these attacks are not often reported unless they are fatal (Greek reports at the time said that Golden Dawn pamphlets had been found at the home of one of the murderers).
Now they are widening their attacks to include Greeks whose political orientation they do not agree with, such as the Communists and Civil War memorials I described in my second paragraph. Women are another favourite target, most famously last year when two left-wing female politicians were attacked on live TV by Kassidiaris, a GD Member of Parliament.
According to the Human Rights Watch report attacks are on the rise, but the police do not do much about them. This may be because many police officers support GD--I've seen figures estimating them at between 40% and 60% of the police force.
If you would like to read more about this, there is a detailed article in Pandora's Box, an overview of their last 33 years, and an entire blog about them. I hope that the murder of the singer will open the eyes of some GD supporters who possibly did not realise how dangerous these people are.
Once again Greece is in international news headlines for all the wrong reasons. Personally, as an expatriate I am growing increasingly afraid of living in Greece. Will I be attacked by GD members in the street because I do not look Greek, or even because I wrote this blog entry? The serpent's egg has hatched, I do not know where this will end. The frightening rise in popularity of a neo-fascist party with swastika-like insignia, black shirts and other nazi trappings is unconscionable in a country that suffered so deeply at the hands of the German army during WWII. God help us.
Update: The Supreme Court of Greece has been handed 32 case files of crimes, including two murders, involving GD members and supporters since last year. They will decide whether to apply the law for criminal organisations, meaning any misdemeanors would be "upgraded" to felonies, with stiffer sentences.
ReplyDeleteAlso, GD MPs will no longer receive the police protection that all MPs are entitled to.