The Full Catastrophe (30 page)

The Voice of the Residents of Agios Panteleimonas
seemed to be preparing Greeks for war. It was for this reason among others that, during my conversation with Giannatou at the café, I found it odd when she told me the media had exaggerated the criminality of the area around the square, portraying it as “totally different from what it is.” I asked her to elaborate. “When you say you can’t walk around Agios Panteleimonas because they’re stabbing and the rest, the other becomes afraid,” she said. “Do you know how many apartments are unrented?” So, I asked, it wasn’t as dangerous as people were making it out to be? “Certainly not,” she said. “Those who were dangerous were those that came against us,” she added. “Against us simple residents.” I asked her who that was. “Anarcho-Syriza people,” she said, conjoining “anarchists” and “Syriza” into a compound word that was reminiscent of the way the military dictatorship in Greece once referred to leftists as “anarcho-communists.” These people weren’t real Greeks, Giannatou told me. They just happened to speak Greek.

It was noteworthy, I thought, that an apolitical organization like the Committee of Residents would have a particular problem with Syriza. Giannatou’s husband tried to explain the reason for the antagonism to me. “All of them are creating these problems
and calling us racists and fascists, because they couldn’t enter these squares inside here to create a core group,” he said. “They couldn’t do it. Because there was resistance from us. They couldn’t enter, because wherever else you go, they go in and talk and make speeches, meetings. Here, they can’t do those things,” he said. “We won’t accept it and there’s no way we ever will.” Why, I asked, couldn’t they ever accept it? “Because we don’t accept them,” he said. “Because they are against the Greeks. It is racism against the Greeks. Can I make you understand? Someone hits an immigrant. They get together and make antifascist and antiracist chants and demonstrations. Greeks die, and no one demonstrates. We simply can’t tolerate something like that.”

The indignant residents therefore opened up a second battlefront against Syriza politicians. In October 2010, in the run-up to municipal elections, Alekos Alavanos, a former Syriza leader, visited Agios Panteleimonas with a group of supporters and an escort of riot police who didn’t do a particularly good job of protecting him from what was about to happen. Video and photos taken of the incident show what occurred. As Alavanos, a gray-haired economist, approaches the steps of the church, he and his supporters are pelted with yogurt, eggs, and tomatoes. Committee of Residents member Giannatos walks up the church steps and picks up a blue plastic bag already lying there. Inside are flyers advertising Michaloliakos’s mayoral candidacy as part of “Greek Dawn for Athens,” the name of Golden Dawn’s local ticket. As Alavanos is pelted in the face with yogurt, Giannatos begins throwing the flyers in the air over the leftists. His wife, Giannatou, arrives beside him and joins the leaflet tossing. Alavanos calmly wipes the yogurt off the left side of his face as his companions begin to shout. “Greeks, foreigners, and workers united!” In response, their opponents begin to chant: “Greece belongs to the Greeks,” and afterward a few people yell: “Blood, honor, Golden Dawn.”

Some of the people captured on camera protesting Alavanos’s
presence would later become known as famed members of Golden Dawn. Among them, on the megaphone leading the indignant resident chants, was Ilias Panagiotaros, long a key Golden Dawn figure and a future parliamentarian for the party. Panagiotaros, a plump, bald man with a goatee, had the kind of fieldwork experience that could qualify him for this kind of action. He had long been the leader of Galazia Stratia, or Blue Army, an organization of nationalist football hooligans implicated in beatings of Albanians and other foreigners. The Blue Army was essentially a wing and recruitment tool of Golden Dawn, though Panagiotaros, in a 2004 interview, maintained they were two distinct organizations, albeit with a “very good” relationship. Giannatou, during our talk, had kind words for Panagiotaros, and smiled fondly when I mentioned his name. He was always there and on our side, she said. “He gave us courage.” Her endorsement of the man, however, did not mean an endorsement of the party. Giannatou told me her political allegiance was deeply New Democracy. Her husband, too, told me he was not affiliated with Golden Dawn—“Our party is Agios Panteleimonas,” he said. I later asked Giannatou why, then, if they didn’t support Golden Dawn, they were seen throwing Golden Dawn leaflets at Alavanos and his supporters that day. “I wasn’t holding any leaflets,” she said, though a photo of her holding the leaflets appeared in one prominent Greek newspaper. She also suggested the leftist visitors to the square that day had framed them by planting Golden Dawn leaflets on the steps. The leftists, she said, did this to make it seem like she and her husband were Golden Dawn supporters.

Shortly after the Alavanos incident, another then Syriza-affiliated politician, a mayoral candidate named Eleni Portaliou, also visited Agios Panteleimonas with a police escort and was greeted with a similar bombardment of edibles. Following the two pelting incidents, a series of Greek media reports wholly embraced the narrative that residents, propelled by their profound indignation,
were behind the attacks. One television news report on a now-defunct channel began with a Committee of Residents member, Loukia Rizou, a woman in her late fifties who was a retired employee of the Hellenic Statistical Authority. “Residents threw it,” Rizou told the camera. “Indignant residents.” The reporter then summarized the meaning of the incidents: “The yogurt for Alekos Alavanos and the eggs for Eleni Portaliou pulled back the curtain and showed the depth of the problem at Agios Pantaleimonas.” On the screen again was Rizou. “We simply can’t live,” she said. A woman with a puffy face then appeared on camera. “There aren’t any extreme elements here,” she said. The reporter’s narrative continued: “Most of them were born in Agios Panteleimonas. They’ve had their homes here for decades. In the last years, however, their lives, as they say, have become insufferable due to criminality, the insecurity, and the degradation at their every step.” The woman with the puffy face reappeared. “Can’t they leave us in our pain?” she said of the leftist politicians who’d come to visit. “We can’t even go outside.”

Another example of the Greek media’s embrace of the indignant residents’ story came when the egged mayoral candidate, Portaliou, a middle-aged woman, appeared on Mega, one of the main television channels in Greece, and was interviewed by two men in suits and ties of various shades of blue. The host of the program, Nikos Stravelakis, who appeared to be heavily caked with television makeup, asked Portaliou if she hadn’t been wary of going to Agios Panteleimonas given that Alavanos had just been egged before her. Portaliou told him that the attacks by “extreme racist elements” had not discouraged her from reaching out to her fellow citizens in the area. Stravelakis interrupted, displeased with her characterization of the attackers. “Why, Ms. Portaliou, are you talking about extreme racist elements?” he said. She answered: “They are extreme racist elements because they are in a time of crisis and poverty and real problems involving a large section of
the working class trying to—” Stravelakis interrupted her, and read a statement from Syriza that called the attackers “thugs”; he took issue with this: “I don’t see thugs, or racists, I see retirees, old people, men and women,” and they say, “We are afraid to leave our homes, and people can’t come here to support the rights of the immigrants and not the rights of the residents.” He later added: “Is a retiree who is afraid to leave his house, who they’ve robbed three or four times, an extreme racist element? Or rather a resident who wants to disagree with the positions of the candidates?” It was “an issue of security,” Stravelakis told her, but Portaliou, it seemed, just didn’t get it.

General fear of crime, a criminologist will tell you, does not necessarily correlate to actual crime levels. The perception of risk is greatly influenced by the information people receive from their neighbors or from the mass media. It is also influenced by faith in the competence of the police. (The Greek police rank near the bottom of the European Union when it comes to citizen faith in their job performance.) Fear of crime can also be caused by nebulous feelings of insecurity. It so happens that Greeks, when compared in surveys to their European Union peers, express a relatively high degree of insecurity and are among the most afflicted by fear of crime.

Despite the comparatively high level of fear, there is less reported crime in Greece than there is on average in the European Union, and compared with other European cities of its size, Athens is considerably less violent. That is not to say crime has not been a problem. Beginning in the mid-1990s, robberies in Greece began to increase, and there was a sharp rise in burglaries as the debt crisis set in. Drug trafficking has also been a growing scourge. In Athens, there are rough and seedy neighborhoods where, in the shade of abandoned buildings, one can find groups of junkies
pricking the parts of their bodies they estimate will most efficiently ingest the contents of the syringe. While this has gotten worse of late, in great part due to the prevalence of new cheap drugs and cuts to social services, it’s largely been that way since the 1980s. Prostitution, technically legal within a licensed establishment, most often occurs in unlicensed establishments, and a few streets near Agios Panteleimonas Square are known as main drags for this kind of business.

In short, crime and seediness exist in Greece and in Athens, but not at levels that would justify not being able to leave your house, as the indignant residents and people on television often suggested. In fact, around the time the Committee of Residents began their struggle, Greece was experiencing a notable drop in the total number of reported penal crimes, with a reduction of about 28 percent from 2006 to 2010. For Golden Dawn, however, that didn’t matter much, because dangers can be exaggerated or imagined. The indignant residents fueled the fear, and the fear fed Golden Dawn.

In his Athens mayoral bid in November 2010, Michaloliakos, propelled by vows to undo the “reign of terror from the illegal immigrant criminals,” won 5.29 percent of the vote. Around the polling stations of Agios Panteleimonas, the party won around 20 percent of the vote. The result earned Michaloliakos a seat on the municipal council. In an interview with a Greek news website some months after the election, Michaloliakos credited his success in Agios Panteleimonas and nearby neighborhoods to his party’s “wholehearted support” for the residents’ committees—by then a plural phenomenon, as other such self-declared nonpartisan groups had emerged. The high level of support from those areas created an obligation for the party to stand with the committees in their struggle, he added. The struggle of the residents had reached Attica Square, down the block from Agios Panteleimonas Square. And very soon, he hoped, it would take off on Victoria Square.

These three squares happened to be the places Human Rights
Watch later described as “particularly dangerous areas for anyone who does not look Greek.” The organization documented fifty-one “serious attacks” on migrants that took place from August 2009 through May 2012, more than half of them occurring on or near Agios Panteleimonas Square. Indeed, just before the municipal election of 2010, Ilias Panagiotaros, the bald Golden Dawn leader who helped orchestrate the yogurt attack on Alavanos, told a reporter from the Greek newspaper
Ta Nea
that if Golden Dawn won a seat on the city council, “there’ll be a pogrom.” The party seemed to be making good on this promise, unleashing “assault battalions”—knife- and baton-wielding men on motorcycles—to terrorize and attack migrants. The attacks only accelerated as Golden Dawn’s support grew, and the Greek police and judiciary allowed them to go on with remarkable impunity.

One Afghan mother, Razia Sharife, described to Human Rights Watch how, at the beginning of 2012, her ground-floor apartment in the neighborhood of Agios Panteleimonas had been attacked repeatedly. Once, while she was inside the apartment with her three-year-old and her eleven-year-old twins, a group of men entered and broke beer bottles over the furniture, she told the organization. She’d complained to the police three times, she said, and wondered why, when she could identify some of her attackers frequenting a café on the square, the police did nothing to stop them. At one point, while a Human Rights Watch researcher was visiting Sharife in her apartment, a group of people outside started beating the glass front door with some kind of blunt object. For three minutes, the researcher said, everyone inside watched as the thick glass was cracking. After the banging stopped, the researcher said, they called the police, who arrived and took statements, but they did not find the attackers. The next day, the researcher and Sharife went to file an official complaint at the Agios Panteleimonas police station. There, an officer initially informed them there was a 100-euro fee in order to file a complaint, though the officer eventually processed one without a charge, according to
the report. The following day, Sharife said, a neighbor broke her front window and sprayed tear gas inside the apartment. Police came twice to take her statement, Sharife said, and both times they urged her to relocate.

One Afghan man, Safar Haidari, told Human Rights Watch he was punched, kicked, and beaten with clubs by a group of ten to fifteen men wearing helmets and hoods roughly two hundred meters away from the Agios Panteleimonas police precinct. Afterward, Haidari said, he called the police, and about fifteen or twenty minutes later, two motorcycle cops rolled by and asked for his papers. The officers, he said, then told him to go to the police station. There, other officers told him they were busy, Haidari said, despite the fact that he could see five policemen sitting in an office drinking coffee and chatting. Haidari said he waited for twenty minutes and then left.

Mina Ahmad, a twenty-year-old Somali woman, was six months pregnant and walking near the Agios Panteleimonas church with her infant daughter near the end of 2011 when a group of men in black stopped her and asked where she was from, she told Human Rights Watch. They then hit her on the head with a wooden club and ran away, telling her to “get out of the country.” She said she fell down bleeding, thinking only of the well-being of the baby inside her, and of her infant daughter, who was crying beside her. No one in the neighborhood helped her, she said; rather, she called friends who came to her assistance, but with no documents at the time, she didn’t go to the hospital.