Among the arrested members of the neo-nazi Golden Dawn party (GD) is the head of the police for the last seven years of a - now notorious - Athenian neighbourhood, St. Panteleimon.
It was in this neighbourhood populated by immigrants that GD gained its breakthrough to political recognition by masterminding a dual strategy of carrot and knife: assaults, bullying, barbarous beatings and the killings of immigrants. At the same time that GD members were directing protection rackets that were using immigrants to sell counterfeited goods in various markets, this was coupled with actions meant to ‘protect' Greeks, by collecting rents in arrears from immigrants, and evicting tenants on behalf of Greek landowners who were charging exorbitant prices, on the threat of turning immigrants over to the police, and delivering some kind of Hezbollah-inspired ‘social services only for Greeks'.
This was a longterm campaign which succeeded in creating a quasi-grass roots local movement of ‘angered Greeks', which after almost a decade resulted in 2009 in a 5.4% vote for GD in the municipal elections. Throughout this period and until yesterday, the chief of the police in the area was arresting victimized immigrants instead of their assaulters; openly cooperating with Nazi thugs providing them with guns; and sending anybody who was complaining about anything to them for protection.
He was arrested yesterday and a whole arsenal of weapons together with bags of counterfeited goods, lists of addresses of immigrants and much more incriminating evidence was seized from his house.
Yet, the fact is, that hundreds of depositions, formal complaints, questions in parliament and reports in the media regarding his actions have been filed throughout the last seven years. But until yesterday when not only him but many police officers from all around Greece were arrested, nothing had happened. Similar longterm campaigns were organized by GD in other working-class Athenian neighbourhoods during which, according to the polls, GD was gaining about 30,000 votes per month, 30% of which were coming from the left. It was in one of these neighbourhoods that a young, left-leaning, openly anti-fascist Greek (not immigrant) musician was stabbed to death two weeks ago, leading to the arrests of recent days.
A widely espoused myth on the reasons for the rise of GD has been based on a reading of events in St. Panteleimon and other neighbourhoods that is not only false but that also exonerates from responsibility successive governments, the police and the judiciary.
It goes like this: the increase in immigration has accumulated social tensions in working class neighbourhoods which were making everyday life almost unliveable for Greek residents who were seeing their standards of life deteriorating and had no other means to express their anger and protect themselves but turn to GD.
Yesterday we found out that this campaign of hate and violence could not have been successful without the active cooperation of those who were supposed to uphold the rule of law. Before yesterday we knew that Greek society has never had a real discussion about integrating immigrants, and has never developed a genuine respect for the Other, any Other. This combines a broad cultural intolerance towards various forms of ‘otherness', with an inability to listen to the other and discuss without unleashing the repellent dogma and hysteria that lies at the root of the neo-nazi phenomenon in Greece. But intolerant, xenophobic attitudes could have been accommodated within traditional or new right wing parties without giving rise to a neo-nazi party that was voted in by 425,000 Greeks.
The real question is not how and why GD was born, but how and why it was radicalized further and gained such an alarming level of support. After all, both Spain and Portugal have had civil wars and even longer dictatorships than Greece, and have been hit in similar ways by the economic crisis in the last five years. But this has not given rise to neo-nazism. Of course, give them time and they might.
But a peculiarity of Greece, besides the cultural factors mentioned above, was that the police in a lot of cases were actively assisting the neo-nazis; the judiciary was unwilling to prosecute them; and successive governments were unresponsive to repeated warnings as they was using an agenda of law and order and a discourse of intolerance in order to make immigrants the scapegoats for their inability to reform a highly clientelistic and corrupt state, amidst the ruins of a productive model which was based on loans and was producing almost nothing.
The arrests of recent days, the remand in custody of some of the leaders of GD, the arrests of police accomplices and the prosecution of GD as a criminal organization, is clearly a crossing of a kind of Rubicon for the government and the judiciary.
These arrests should have taken place long ago, and the inexcusable delay is mainly of their own making. But at last they have acted, it seems partly due to the unofficial pressures of the European Union which seems to have much better democratic reflexes.
