Greek far-right parties could end up with as much as 20 percent of the vote in Sunday's elections. The neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party has intensified the xenophobic atmosphere in the country. Those who confront them are threatened with violence, journalist Xenia Kounalaki recounts.
At night, the streets leading to Omonoia Square are
empty. That wasn't always the case. The area was the premier multicultural
neighborhood of Athens and one of the first quarters to be gentrified. Jazz
bars and Indian restaurants lined the streets, separated by the occasional
rooms-by-the-hour hotel. It was a quarter full of immigrants, drug addicts and
African prostitutes, but also of journalists, ambitious young artists and
teenagers from private schools.
Today, the immigrants stay home once night falls. They
are afraid of groups belonging to the "angry citizens," a kind of
militia that beats up foreigners and claims to help the elderly withdraw money
from cash machines without being robbed. Such groups are the product of an
initiative started by the neo-Nazi Chrysi Avgi -- Golden Dawn -- the party
which has perpetrated pogroms in Agios Panteleimon, another Athens neighborhood
with a large immigrant population.
There are now three outwardly xenophobic parties in
Greece. According to recent surveys, together they could garner up to 20
percent of the vote in elections on Sunday: the anti-Semitic party LAOS stands
to win 4 percent; the nationalist party Independent Greeks -- a splinter group
of the conservative Nea Dimokratia party -- is forecast to win 11 percent; and
the right extremists of Golden Dawn could end up with between 5 and 7 percent.
My name is Xenia, the hospitable. Greece itself should
really be called Xenia: Tourism, emigration and immigration are important
elements of our history. But hospitality is no longer a priority in our
country, a fact which the ugly presence of Golden Dawn makes clear.
A Personal Attack
Shaved heads, military uniforms, Nazi chants, Hitler
greetings: How should a Greek journalist deal with such people? Should one just
ignore them and leave them unmentioned? Should one denounce them and demand
that they be banned? One shouldn't forget that they are violent and have
perpetrated several attacks against foreigners and leftists. I thought long and
hard about how to write about Golden Dawn so that my article was in no way
beneficial to the party.
On April 12, the daily Kathimerini ran my story under the
headline "Banality of Evil." In the piece, I carefully explained why
it was impossible to carry on a dialogue with such people and why I thought the
neo-Nazi party should disappear from media coverage and be banned. Five days
later, an anonymous reply to my article appeared on the Golden Dawn website. It
was a 2,500-word-long personal attack in which the fascists recounted my entire
career, mocked my alleged foreign roots (I was born in Hamburg) and even, for
no apparent reason, mentioned my 13-year-old daughter. The unnamed authors
indirectly threatened me as well: "To put it in the mother tongue of
foreign Xenia: 'Kommt Zeit, kommt Rat, kommt Attentat!'" In other words,
watch your back.
Most Greeks believe that Golden Dawn has connections to
both the police and to the country's secret service. Nevertheless, I went to
the authorities to ask what I should do. I was told that I should be careful.
They told me that party thugs could harass me, beat me or terrorize me over the
phone. It would be better, they said, if I stopped writing about them. If I
wished to react to the threats, they suggested I file a complaint against
Golden Dawn's service provider. That, however, would be difficult given that
the domain is based somewhere in the United States.
Like Weimar Germany
A friend told me that I should avoid wearing headphones
on the street so that I can hear what is going on around me. My daughter now
has nightmares about being confronted by members of Golden Dawn. Three of her
classmates belong to the party. The three boys have posted pictures of party
events on their Facebook pages. For their profile image, they have chosen the
ancient Greek Meandros symbol, which, in the red-on-black manifestation used by
Golden Dawn, resembles a swastika. The group's slogans include "Foreigners
Out!" and "The Garbage Should Leave the Country!"
The fact that immigration has become such an issue in the
worst year of the ongoing economic crisis in the country can be blamed on the
two parties in government. The Socialist PASOK and the conservative Nea
Dimokratia (New Democracy, or ND) are running xenophobic campaigns. ND has said
it intends to repeal a law which grants Greek citizenship to children born in
Greece to immigrant parents. And cabinet member Michalis Chrysochoidis, of
PASOK, has announced "clean up operations" whereby illegal immigrants
are to be rounded up in encampments and then deported. When he recently took a
stroll through the center of Athens to collect accolades for his commitment to
the cause, some called out to him: "Golden Dawn has cleaned up
Athens!"
Yet, Chrysochoidis is the best loved PASOK politician in
his Athens district, in part because of his xenophobic sentiments. His party
comrade, Health Minister Andreas Loverdos, is just as popular. Loverdos has
warned Greek men not to sleep with foreign prostitutes for fear of contracting
HIV and thus endangering the Greek family.
High unemployment of roughly 22 percent, a lack of hope,
a tendency toward violence and the search for scapegoats: Analyses in the Greek
press compare today's Greece with Germany at the end of the Weimar Republic.
"We didn't know," said many Germans when confronted with the truth of
the Holocaust after Nazi rule came to an end. After elections on May 6, no
Greeks should be able to make the same claim.