Did A Rapper's Murder Bring Down Greece's Neo-Nazi Party?

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The first thing that strikes you as you approach 60 Panagi Tsaldari Ave. in the Athens suburb of Keratsini - before the in memoriam graffiti, before the modest shrine of candles and flowers - is that you wouldn't murder anybody here unless you were convinced you could get away with it.

The street is an oasis of commercial activity in a neighborhood brought low by Greece's economic crisis. Piraeus, of which Keratsini is one of five municipalities, used to be a separate city, and it remains economically and culturally distinct: a tough, blue-collar region, reliant on heavy industry and the shipyards known as The Zone until the crash came and pushed unemployment over 90. Conservative pundit Babis Papadimitriou had even suggested that the ruling center-right party New Democracy welcome 'a more serious Golden Dawn' into its coalition government.

So the whole country was astonished when, just two days after the murder - the first of a native Greek following many similar attacks against immigrants - the minister of public order requested that the Supreme Court declare Golden Dawn a criminal organization under anti-terrorism legislation, and produced files outlining 32 separate criminal cases against party members.

Police arrested key figures in the Golden Dawn leadership, including Patelis, Lagos, and Michaloliakos. Raids on deputies' homes uncovered caches of weapons and Nazi paraphernalia. With breathtaking speed, the government moved to transform the party that might have been its ally into a pariah.

Twelve days after the murder, Prime Minister Antonis Samarastold an American Jewish Committee reception in New York: 'We are dedicated in completely eradicating such a shame.

We must do it within the context of our democratic constitution. But we have to go all the way and do whatever it takes.'

There is little doubt about what happened outside 60 Panagi Tsaldari Ave. The puzzle is why it happened and how Golden Dawn made such a catastrophic miscalculation.

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Angelos Tzortzinis/AFP / Getty

I visit Syntagma Square, in the heart of Athens, on an ordinary weekday afternoon in late autumn. The square slopes gently up toward a flight of steps, at the top of which a plaza leads to the impressive parliament building. At the foot of the steps, commuters and shoppers pour into the metro or idle in the shade of lemon trees. A trio of young men break-dance to Prince.

Two dogs lie on a patch of grass, dozing in the sun. Syntagma Square is a modest, welcoming space surrounded by chic boutiques and fine hotels, but whenever tempers boil over in Athens, which is often, it becomes a noisy hub of protest.

For several weeks in summer 2011, the square was occupied by thousands of Greeks protesting the austerity measures demanded by the troika of the European Union (EU), the European Central Bank (ECB), and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Beginning in May 2010, the troika had agreed to bail out the teetering Greek economy with billions of euros in emergency loans in return for dramatic concessions, including cuts to public spending, labor rights, and the minimum wage. If Greece had defaulted on its debts, it would have dragged the entire eurozone down with it. The deal averted a collapse, but the fiscal starvation diet pushed the Greek economy even deeper into recession and led many citizens to feel as if the troika, not the government, was running the country. When you're trying to save a currency shared by 18 nations, the living standards and democratic rights of the people who are threatening it are secondary concerns.

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Riot policemen clash with demonstrators at a protest in Athens on October 19, 2011, during a two-day general strike against new austerity measures.Louisa Gouliamaki / AFP Photo / Getty

So, on May 25, 2011, Syntagma Square sprouted a ramshackle village of tents, banners, and PA systems - a forerunner to the Occupy movement. The occupants called themselves theindignados, after the anti-austerity protesters who had thronged public squares across Spain earlier in the month. Broadly speaking, the square itself was dominated by protesters on the left, many of whom had never participated in political action before, while the plaza outside the parliament building was home to nationalists waving Greek flags. After the encampment dispersed in August, newly energized leftists allied themselves with the anarchists or the radical left coalition Syriza; many of the nationalists found a home with Golden Dawn. This bifurcation was a case of history repeating itself.

During World War II, Greece had the most successful resistance movement in Europe. Thanks to the tenacity and ingenuity of the partisans (one of whom, Manolis Glezos, is now a 91-yearold Syriza deputy), one-third of the country remained free of Fascist occupation. But even during the war, there were clashes between rival factions of the resistance. In 1944, after the Nazis fled, Communists mounted an armed insurrection against the new government. When

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that was crushed, they regrouped and prepared for a bigger assault.

So, while the rest of Europe was being rebuilt along Cold War lines, Greece was plunged into a bloody civil war between the U.S.-backed government and the armed wing of the Communist Party (KKE). Between 1946 and 1949, 158,000 Greeks were killed. The conflict destabilized the country so badly that, in the 22 years following VE Day, Greece had 26 different prime ministers. Between 1967 and 1974, a military coup suspended democracy altogether. When the U.S. ambassador in Athens complained that the coup was 'a rape of democracy,' the local CIA chief retorted, 'How can you rape a whore?'

'We didn't get a chance to enjoy peace like everyone else,' the Greek rapper Nikitas Klint tells me, smoking roll-up cigarettes in Exarcheia Square, the epicenter of left-wing dissent in Athens.

'The civil war is a trauma in the Greek soul. That's why we can't get along. That's why we're not tolerant. That's what fucks it all up.'

These long years of conflict and oppression left Greeks with a profound distrust of institutions, and with good reason. The credibility gap between a government and its citizens is often a breeding ground for conspiracy theories, but none of the Greeks I speak to display paranoid inclinations. They believe the police force is overwhelmingly right wing and they are right: Around50. For those under 25, it is 58 of the vote in the 2009 general election. Just a year later, however, it shocked the establishment by winning 5.3. To many Greeks, it appeared to have come out of nowhere.

'They were something like an urban legend,' says Leonidas Oikonomakis of Social Waste. 'You knew they existed somewhere but they were so few and so irrelevant that nobody cared about them. It never crossed my mind that we would have a single neo-Nazi deputy in the parliament.'

The crisis upended the political status quo in Greece. In the 2012 general election, the conservative New Democracy scored a narrow victory and formed a pro-austerity coalition government with the center-left parties Pasok and Democratic Left. But Syriza, a coalition of radical leftist parties united and rejuvenated by its youthful, charismatic leader Alexis Tsipras, became the main opposition party, while Golden Dawn came third with 7 of Europe's undocumented migrants come through Greece and many get no further, turned back by countries with less porous borders. Previously unaccustomed to ethnic diversity, and slow to find practical solutions, Greece has been overwhelmed by the influx. Most newcomers live in virtual ghettos or internment camps, in appalling conditions that have been condemned by Amnesty International and the European Court of Human Rights. Many Greeks, encouraged by the media, blame the new arrivals for rising crime.

The combination of an economic crash and an immigration crisis opened the door to Golden Dawn. In 2009, gangs of far-right vigilantes began terrorizing neighborhoods such as Agios Panteleimonas, eventually making them no-go areas for immigrants. A bomb was thrown at a group of Iranian asylum-seekers on hunger strike. Worshippers gathering for the Muslim festival of Eid were pelted with eggs. Mosques and synagogues were firebombed. 'I've never seen anything like this,' the head of the Muslim Association of Greecetold theNew York Times in 2010. 'I used to be treated like an equal. Now I'm getting death threats.'

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In May 2011, the murder of a Greek man during a street robbery triggered three days of violence as nationalists swept through immigrant communities, looting shops, beating people to the ground with fists and bats, and stabbing Bangladeshi migrant worker Alim Abdul Manan to death.

'These guys operated with full immunity,' says Matthaios Tsimitakis. 'Nobody touched them.'

'I've seen it with my eyes,' says Chris Staikos. 'I've seen members of Golden Dawn hit immigrants and the cops next to them do nothing.'

It's well known that far-right movements flourish during an economic crisis. What's shocking and unusual about the Greek situation is that the establishment chose to tolerate Golden Dawn.

Before Fyssas' murder, citizens had to learn about attacks on immigrants via social media or international news sources because the Greek media practically ignored them. The police made few arrests and blamed the climate of violence on immigrant criminals and leftists as well as fascists. The actual number of racist attacks is hard to confirm because many immigrants are too scared to report them. Arecent report by a government ombudsman connected 71 violent incidents to Golden Dawn and 47 to police officers.

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Leader of the Golden Dawn party Nikos Michaloliakos is escorted by anti-terror police as he exits Greek Police headquarters in Athens, Saturday, Sept. 28, 2013.Angeliki Panagiotou / Fosphotos / AP Photo

So while most European far-right parties endeavor to conceal their more thuggish features behind a mask of respectability, Golden Dawn didn't bother. Michaloliakospraised the 1967 coup on the floor of parliament. Another, Ilias Kasidiaris, read out parts of the anti-Semitic Protocols of the Elders of Zion in parliament and attacked two female left-wing politicianson live television. They hardly look like politicians - Ioannis Lagos, the man suspected of approving Fyssas' murder, resembles a feared club doorman, with a bodybuilder physique and handlebar mustache. Before his election, he was under police surveillance.

Antonis Samaras, the New Democracy prime minister, is no fan of Golden Dawn. On the day the German army conquered Athens in 1941, his great-grandmother chose to commit suicide rather than live under Nazi occupation. He has also been under growing pressure from foreign governments to act. He is, however, brutally pragmatic. After his narrow victory in 2012, when around 4 in 10 Golden Dawn voters were former New Democracy supporters, he was neurotic about losing any more support to the right, and his conservative advisers urged caution. His cabinet includes figures as right-wing as health minister Adonis Georgiades, who has publicly complained of Jews 'controlling the global banking system' and has said that Muslim immigrants have turned Athens into 'Taliban-land.' Last summer, the government blocked a proposed antiracist law that would have penalized Golden Dawn. One unsettlingly candid senior New

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Democracy official recently told theWall Street Journal, 'We didn't pay too much attention to stabbings of immigrants, because they were not in the press, and prosecutors didn't pay enough attention . It was not a priority.'

At the same time, the government has instituted a number of draconian right-wing policies. It rounded up prostitutes,forced them to take HIV tests, and named and shamed any that tested positive. It cleared a well-known anarchist squat called Villa Amalia. It shut down the Greek branch of the left-wing media organization Indymedia. It brutally suppressed protests against the construction of the controversial Skouries gold mine in northern Greece. It launchedOperation Xenios Zeus, named for the Greek god of hospitality, to purge the country of undocumented migrants, housing them in detention camps prior to deportation. The police abused their stop-and-search powers so widely that only 4,200 of the 60,000 people stopped during the first five months were actually arrested.

Yet the harder the government tried to co-opt Golden Dawn policies, the more popular the party became. 'Golden Dawn is something the conservatives created,' says Matthaios Tsimitakis.

'They did so by adopting and legitimizing their agenda. Greece has turned from a welfare state into a police state to an extent. If this is the rhetoric, what do you expect? People turn to the most authentic, genuine political source of that rhetoric. The proper racists.'

'The more power they got, the more cocky they became,' says Nikitas Klint. 'Most of them were plain criminals using this ideological racist thing to get votes from people that were tired of getting robbed.'

Unmolested by the police, Golden Dawn grew bolder. In June 2012 they beat a group of Egyptian fishermen in Piraeus so badly that afterward, one could eat only through a straw. In January 2013, 26-year-old Pakistani market worker Shehzad Luqman was stabbed to death on the way to work and a 17-year-old student was knifed in the face and neck for writing 'antifa' on a classmate's desk. Five days before the attack on Fyssas, Golden Dawn finally turned on native Greeks. A 50-strong group from Nikaia, armed with bats and crowbars, targeted a group of communist union members who were pasting up flyers in Perama. Nine were hospitalized, including Pountidis' father.

'They were practicing on immigrants all that time,' says Pountidis. 'They thought they could get away with it. And they did, because nothing happened.' The next morning, he exchanged Facebook messages with Fyssas. 'He told me, 'You'd better be careful.' And I told him that it wasn't about me, we should all be careful. He said, 'They're getting out of hand and I'm going to tell them next time I see them.'' That was the last time the two friends spoke.

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Pavlos Fyssas in 2009

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Pountidis believes that Fyssas' murder was related to the Perama attack. He mentions longstanding rumors of a 2012 meeting in an Athens strip club at which employers operating in The Zone allegedly agreed to fund Golden Dawn if the party's goons intimidated union members and enabled the employers to curtail workers' rights. A witnessrecently told Greece's Financial and Economic Crime Unit that 'two important Greek ship-owners' financed Golden Dawn. The party's expenses far exceed the 500,000 euros it receives from the state, and the unit is currently investigating the shortfall.

Shortly after Fyssas' murder, an ex-member of Golden Dawn spoke at length to theEthnos newspaper and depicted something between a criminal gang and a paramilitary group. He said that a new member had to participate in half a dozen 'actions' in order to gain entry to the group known as 'the open Nucleus.' Members who impressed the leadership were then admitted to the inner circle called 'the closed Nucleus.' In Nikaia, George Patelis orchestrated these core members into assault groups, dispatching them to attack immigrants, anarchists, and antifascists. They wore black T-shirts and combat pants and were armed with helmets, shields, and clubs. They were macho, looked like steroid users, and were unquestioningly loyal.

This is why most people find it hard to believe that Giorgos Roupakias acted without approval from above. According to the whistle-blower, nothing was meant to happen without the green light from Patelis, who reported to the parliamentary deputy Ioannis Lagos, who in turn consulted party leader Mihaloliakos. It was Hitler'sFĂźhrerprincip, or leader principle, to the letter. ' supported all this,' said the ex-member. 'He was aware of everything. Whatever we said, whatever happened, Lagos knew. Friends who publicly spoke about this were beaten. They went with evidence, beat them, and excluded them afterward. They said that they were liars and undisciplined. If you see something bad and talk about it - this is the end for you, you're out.

Thus, he created the clique of gangsters and assault groups, as he wanted to, which resulted in a murder.'

He recalled Fyssas' name being mentioned during meetings of the Nikaia branch, although he thought it was related to his music rather than his union role. 'I know that he was in the firing line, because he had antifascist songs. There were verses which offended Golden Dawn. He was antifascist and sang about it, and they knew it.'

After the murder, Chris Staikos of Social Waste was interviewing a female Golden Dawn voter for his polling company employers when grief made him snap. 'You have a little bit of responsibility,' he said. 'Because if it wasn't for you and half a million voters, they wouldn't have so much power, so maybe Pavlos would be alive.'

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Dorian Lynskey / BuzzFeed

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Alex, the anarchist, learned about Fyssas' death from a leftist doctor at the hospital in Piraeus before it was officially announced. He immediately spread the word and around 40 antifascists headed to Piraeus in the middle of the night. 'Nothing happened,' he says, shrugging. 'We were so uncertain about how to react.'

For hours, Athens held its breath, waiting to see what the authorities would do. A large, tense demonstration was held in Keratsini the next day with similar rallies in other Greek cities, but outrage didn't immediately translate into violence as it had in December 2008.

The media, which initially framed the murder as the unfortunate result of a fight between soccer hooligans, quickly changed its story and pointed the finger at Golden Dawn. 'I think if they didn't, we would have a far more serious questioning of the political situation than we had in 2008,' says Matthaios Tsimitakis. 'People would believe for good that there's no justice, no equality, that the state is broken, and that we need to rethink it in a fundamentally different manner. It would be a massive crisis.'

Fyssas' ethnicity was a key factor. 'If Pavlos Fyssas was an immigrant, nothing would happen,' says Alex. 'I think Golden Dawn thought,We have the power to kill a Greek m Read more:http://buzzfeed.com/dorianlynskey/how-the-murder-of-rapper-pavlos-fyssas-turned-greeceupside Did A Rapper's Murder Bring Down Greece's Neo-Nazi Party?

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