Did A Rapper’s Murder Bring Down Greece’s Neo-Nazi Party?
In September, a rapper known as Killah P was stabbed to death on a
busy Athens street by a member of Golden Dawn, Greece’s thriving
fascist party. For a country torn apart for years by nationalist
violence and economic austerity, this was either a breaking point or the
beginning of a whole new wave of trouble.
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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%. Panagi Tsaldari feels different. The broad, well-lit avenue is lined with bars, cafés, boutiques, and chain stores. Crowds of young people drink at sidewalk tables while cars cruise past blasting hip-hop and Europop.
No. 60 is a narrow doorway between a children’s clothes store and an upscale patisserie. This is the unlikely spot where, just after midnight last Sept. 18, Greek rapper Pavlos Fyssas, aka Killah P, was stabbed to death. “It was a big shock because we never have something like this here,” the patisserie owner tells me a few weeks after the murder. “It happened when people were walking around. It’s very weird, the whole thing.”
One of Fyssas’ signature songs, “Piraeus on My Back,” was a boisterous celebration of the place where he spent every one of his 34 years. It was here where he left high school and began working in The Zone. It was here where he formed his first group, Kaka Mandata, or Bad News, with fellow metalworker Petros Pountidis and became an unusually well-liked figure in Greece’s restive hip-hop scene. It was here where he also became a union man, community activist, and outspoken opponent of the neo-Nazi party Chryssi Avgi, or Golden Dawn. And it was here where he died.
Despite the visibility of the crime scene, exactly what transpired is unclear: Media reports and witness accounts are incomplete and even contradictory. But the fundamentals, at least, are consistent. On Sept. 17, 2013, Fyssas was enjoying a night out with his girlfriend Chryssa and seven other friends and spent some time in a side-street bar during a soccer match between local heroes Olympiacos Piraeus and Paris Saint-Germain. Petros Pountidis, who has spoken to some of Fyssas’ companions since that night, claims that the rapper only ventured into the bar with two of his friends so that one of them, who was ill, could use the bathroom and get some water. Either way, a handful of the bar’s customers were members of Golden Dawn, and one of Fyssas’ group was overheard saying something disparaging.
The match finished just after 11:30 p.m., around which time Fyssas and his two friends left the bar to rejoin the rest. They saw a group of Golden Dawn members, including the men from the café, observing them ominously while calling and texting for reinforcements. Dozens of men began arriving quickly, some on motorcycles, shadowed by eight members of the Greek police’s DIAS motorcycle force, who had been alerted to the gathering crowd by a member of the public. The new arrivals were dressed in the familiar Golden Dawn outfit of black T-shirts and camouflage pants, and they were armed. “Baseball bats with nails and screws at the end — like Viking weapons, the stuff you see on Game of Thrones,” says Pountidis.
The mob began taunting and threatening Fyssas’ group, which ran toward Panagi Tsaldari. According to the account Pountidis heard, once his friends were at a safe distance, Fyssas, who had a muscular laborer’s build and a strong nerve, stood his ground and confronted the mob. Some of the Golden Dawn members set upon him while Chryssa pleaded, in vain, for the DIAS officers to intervene. According to one witness, the assailants “were acting as if there was no police around. They just did not care at all.”
At this point, a gray Nissan crossed lanes at high speed and pulled up a few feet away. The driver, a pudgy middle-aged man, got out. At least one witness claims that Fyssas’ attackers pointed him out to the driver and shouted, “It’s him! It’s him!” The driver walked straight up to Fyssas with a calm expression, moved in close as if to embrace him, stabbed him twice in the chest, and returned to his car. Fyssas remained on his feet just long enough to lift his shirt to show the police his wounds, and indicate his assailant. At last, a young policewoman sprang into action and handcuffed the driver, but it was too late. Fyssas was taken by ambulance to the local hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
One doctor who treated him said the wounds had the hallmarks of a “professional hit,” but everything else about the murder was bafflingly inept. The killer, a 45-year-old unemployed truck driver named Giorgos Roupakias, acted in front of dozens of witnesses, threw the knife bearing his fingerprints on the ground, and made no attempt to escape. He told police that he had been driving home after watching the second half of the soccer match with a friend when his car was ambushed by a mob and he struck out in self-defense. He also denied any connection to Golden Dawn. Within hours, it was established that none of this was true.
Roupakias was proven to be a Golden Dawn member who worked part-time at the cafeteria in the party’s office in neighboring Nikaia. His own wife told police that he had been at home watching the soccer match on television for most of the evening before he received a phone call and got into his car. Inspection of cell phone records found that Roupakias had spoken several times that night to Giorgios Patelis, leader of the Nikaia branch. Shortly after the murder, Patelis called Ioannis Lagos, parliamentary deputy for Piraeus, who then contacted Golden Dawn’s leader, a squat, bulldog-like 56-year-old former commando named Nikos Michaloliakos. It remains unclear who decided to eliminate Fyssas, and exactly when they decided, but it backfired spectacularly.
At the time of the killing, Golden Dawn had 18 deputies in Greece’s 300-member parliament and a poll rating of almost 15%. 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 Samaras told 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.
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.
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, 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: Around 50% voted for Golden Dawn in the 2012 elections. They believe the media has a heavy conservative bias that means many stories go unreported, and they are correct. They believe political corruption is commonplace, and not without reason: To give just two examples, last year, a former defense minister and a former mayor of Thessaloniki, Greece’s second biggest city, were jailed for embezzlement and bribe taking to the tune of several million euros each. There are so many documented outrages in Greek society that there is no need to invent new ones.
“The state itself has historically had a very low degree of legitimacy,” Jerome Roos, a Dutch academic based in Athens, tells me. “There’s still this climate of extreme opposition.” We are sitting at a sidewalk café in Exarcheia. The neighborhood has many of the hallmarks of any bohemian enclave — lively cafés alongside hip stores selling vinyl, books, and organic food — but this is an anarchist neighborhood unlike any other in Europe. Contrary to their media reputation as masked thugs, most of Exarcheia’s anarchists spend their time building an alternative society in microcosm. One café off the main square houses a community radio station. Another, based in a squatted government building, raises money for political prisoners and offers free health care from a clinic in the basement. Since the economic crisis, many unemployed anarchists have set up DIY farmers’ markets, urban gardens, soup kitchens, and food cooperatives.
Away from the bustling main square, the devastation wrought by the crisis is spelled out in rows of metal shutters on once-busy shopping streets. I’m given a guided tour by a 38-year-old anarchist filmmaker who asks that I call him simply Alex. “Just empty streets and closed shops,” he says as we walk. “It gives you a feeling of loneliness and isolation. And this is in the heart of Athens. If you go to other areas, it’s like a ghost town.”
On almost every wall, graffiti makes Exarcheia’s political affiliations vibrantly clear. As you enter, slogans declare it an “ANTIFA [antifascist] AREA.” A stencil of Jamie Foxx and Christoph Waltz from Django Unchained reads: “Django: bullets and dynamite to every cop and fascist.” One narrow street, Mesologgiou, is dominated by an ornately calligraphed “FUCK THE POLICE” and “3121,” alphanumeric code for ACAB, as in All Cops Are Bastards. A few feet away, a somber black plaque marks the spot where Alexandros Grigoropoulos died and all hell broke loose.
Molotov cocktails in the streets, protesting the death of a 15-year-old student in Dec. 2008 Kostas Tsironis / AFP Photo / Getty Images
The unrest put to the torch the impression that Greece had spent billions of euros projecting to the outside world — a stable, responsible, prosperous country that could hold its own in Europe — but then that was always an illusion. In order to meet the targets required for entry into to the eurozone in 2001, Greece had cooked the books to a mind-boggling degree, concealing billions in debt, waste, tax evasion, cronyism, and corruption. Its determination to punch above its weight led to vast overspending on the Athens Olympics in 2004, after which then-Prime Minister Kostas Karamanlis admitted, “The public debt exceeds even the most pessimistic of estimations.” But as long as the money taps were running, the country and its citizens continued to live in the red. “It used to be a country that consumed a lot: new cars, new cell phones, new clothes,” Alex says with contempt. “We’re Europeans! We have to buy things! And of course the bank system was giving loans. Christmas? Have a loan. Holidays? Take a holiday loan.”
Olympic Stadium, Feb. 2012 Oli Scarff / Getty Images
In Greece, even before the crisis, very few people made a living from hip-hop. Of those, a minority recorded political material. At the point where the Venn circles overlap stands the imposing figure of Michalis Mytakidis, aka BD (as in Big Daddy) Foxmoor, founder of the group Active Member. Pretty much everyone in Greek hip-hop has an opinion about BD Foxmoor.
BD Foxmoor 8ctagon / Via lowbap.com
1994’s Stin Ora Ton Skion
Like many hip-hop scenes, Greece’s is fractious, but it divides along ideological rather than regional lines, with the political rappers disdaining the pop stars and the gangsta wannabes. Some anarchist emcees, such as EKM, are so purist that they refuse to make money from their music or speak to the media. “Foxmoor wanted to talk about Greek issues while other rappers were like, ‘No, I’m gangsta’ — bitches and cars and stuff,” says Pountidis. “I was like, ‘Dude, you work in a warehouse. You don’t have anything to do with that stuff.’ That’s how the friction started. Then some other bands came out and did diss songs and it was all battle rap.”
John D. Carnessiotis / AP Photo
Pavlos Fyssas joined Freestyle Productions in 1997, during its glory days. He was born in Keratsini on April 10, 1979. After high school he became a metal worker like his father, starting out as an assistant welder at a factory manufacturing tanks. Pountidis, whose father was the president of the metal workers union, met Fyssas when he was recruiting new members for the union’s youth committee. He encouraged him to take a better-paid job in The Zone, and for the next few years they were co-workers as well as fellow rappers. As junior members of Freestyle Productions, Kaka Mandata played regular shows but only recorded a couple of songs, including “For Uncle Sam,” a stern critique of the NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999. “If we recorded one song and people can relate to that, they don’t need more,” Pountidis says with a shrug. “We were more like friends and colleagues than actually a band.”
Leonidas Oikonomakis, a Florence-based academic who belongs to the Greek leftist rap group Social Waste, met Fyssas while they were both in Freestyle Productions. They bonded over politics and the soccer team Olympiacos. “He was a very smart and funny person,” he tells me via Skype. “He was always the heart of whatever group was there. Of course we had different camps, but he had good relations with everybody.” Nikitas Klint remembers Fyssas as “a vibrant, funny bloke — a free spirit.”
In 2001, Fyssas left Kaka Mandata and Freestyle Productions and rechristened himself Killah P. The alias was not as fearsome as it seems. It meant “kill the past” — let go of negative experiences and don’t repeat your mistakes. He was known as a peacemaker, facilitating collaborations and organizing festivals and shows. He had a financial incentive too. After leaving the shipyards in 2003, he struggled to make money from his music and had better luck promoting other people’s shows. “He wasn’t famous but everybody knew him in the hip-hop scene,” says Klint. His songs sometimes dealt with corruption, consumerism, police violence, and fascism, but he wasn’t exactly Chuck D. Pountidis estimates that only one in five Killah P songs were political; the rest were about “love of life.” As an emcee, Killah P had a tough but likable everyman appeal. “Working-class people could relate to him,” says Pountidis.
Graffiti in the Athens neighborhood of Exarchieia Dorian Lynskey / BuzzFeed
Oikonomakis’ partner in Social Waste is a political pollster named Chris Staikos, a tall, skinny man with a warm yet intense manner. I meet him one evening in the courtyard of the central Athens bar that he co-owns, and we talk about his late friend over beer, bread, and olives. Staikos last saw Fyssas at an antifa demonstration several months ago. “He believed what he said. He didn’t write things for the crowd, he wrote things that he believed. When someone dies, people always say, ‘He’s a nice guy,’ but Pavlos was a nice guy, believe it.”
He frowns as he recalled another conversation with Fyssas when they were among the indignados occupying Syntagma Square in 2011. “He told me that he doesn’t like violence in general. He prefers to change the world through songs, through love. And I disagree. I’m not a terrorist, but sometimes we need violence to avoid the attack. When I heard that Golden Dawn killed Pavlos, I thought about that. It was something like a sacrifice. I hope a lot of people wake up from all this. He wanted to fight fascism, and he still fights through his death.”
In one of his best-known songs, “I Won’t Cry, I Won’t Fear” Fyssas rapped: “To those that threatened me with burning chains / I want them to know that I will not bother with fear / Let them come and find me at the mountain top / I’m waiting for them and I will not bother with fear.”
“It says: If you want to find me, you know where I am. Let them come,” says Pountidis. “So they came.”
Yorgos Karahalis / Reuters
Until the Greek economy imploded, Nikos Michaloliakos looked like just another impotent extremist destined to spend his political life on the disreputable fringe. In 1974, at the age of 16, he had joined the radical nationalist 4th of August Party, named after Greece’s pre-war dictatorship. Two years later, he was arrested for assaulting journalists at the funeral of a notorious policeman who had been assassinated for his brutality during the junta years. While serving as a special forces commando, Michaloliakos was imprisoned for illegal possession of guns and explosives and dismissed from the army. Upon getting out of prison in 1980, he founded a magazine called Golden Dawn. Five years later it spawned a movement, and in 1993 it became an officially recognized, if insignificant, political party.
Although it purports to embrace democracy, Golden Dawn has values rooted in admiration for Hitler, the junta, and Greece’s autocratic past. Two years ago, during a TV interview, Michaloliakos denied the existence of gas chambers at Auschwitz. In December 2012, the police found on confiscated computers photographs and videos of a 2012 oath-taking ceremony, in which members clearly employed Nazi insignia and salutes. Michaloliakos was filmed declaring, “We are the bad fascists, the nationalists, the truth is they are not wrong, we are all of the above mentioned. Our purpose is not to improve those who are today in the parliament or to rectify the corrupt and exhausted political forces, but to do away with them altogether.”
For years, Golden Dawn was electorally irrelevant, scraping together only 0.3% of the vote in the 2009 general election. Just a year later, however, it shocked the establishment by winning 5.3% of the vote for the Athens city council, polling especially well in working-class neighborhoods with large immigrant communities: In the impoverished area of Agios Panteleimonas, it hit 20%. 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% and entered parliament for the first time.
Chris Staikos has interviewed Golden Dawn voters in his day job at a polling company. “They tell me all the others are the same; this is something new,” he explains. “They say, ‘I like the way they speak. They speak in our argot.’” He sighs. “I don’t think all the voters are fascists. I don’t want to believe it.”
Alex takes a less forgiving view. “After the Olympic Games in 2004, Greece was living the dream. There was money, and money has a tendency to cover up things. What the economic crisis did was to uncover which of us are fascists. The mask fell down and broke. Greeks have this notion that they’re superior to other people — ‘We’re the ancient Greeks!’ and all this crap. The economic crisis wounds their bravado because they don’t have money to spend so they start screaming, ‘Immigrants!’”
Like Syriza, Golden Dawn rejects the bailout conditions imposed by the troika, “the international usurers who are drinking the blood of the Greek people with a straw,” to quote a recent website statement. Unlike Syriza, it seeks scapegoats closer to hand. Because of Greece’s position in the southeastern corner of Europe, it is an obvious entry point for immigrants and asylum-seekers — it is estimated that 95% 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 Greece told the New York Times in 2010. “I used to be treated like an equal. Now I’m getting death threats.”
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. A recent report by a government ombudsman connected 71 violent incidents to Golden Dawn and 47 to police officers.
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
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 launched Operation 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.
Pavlos Fyssas in 2009
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’s Führerprincip, or leader principle, to the letter.
“[Lagos] 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.”
Dorian Lynskey / BuzzFeed
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 man now. If they had succeeded, then most likely I would wear a helmet and a bulletproof vest because it would be a war zone here.”
The police, having hesitated, were jolted into action and arrested dozens of Golden Dawn members: Six deputies are currently in custody and a further three have been charged. An internal police investigation suspended 10 officers for their links to Golden Dawn, while many more high-profile officials, including the head of the special forces and Nikaia’s police chief, either resigned or were replaced. Although legally unable to ban a political party, parliament voted overwhelming to withdraw state funding from any party accused of criminal activities. It’s thought that Antonis Samaras himself, defying his conservative advisers, ordered the U-turn.
Roupakias arriving at the prosecutor’s office Sept. 21, 2013, in Piraeus. Milos Bicanski / Getty Images
“Personally I was surprised,” says Alex. “It was very fast, very harsh. We thought, OK, we’re going to have demos and riots. In a way they took our toy away!” He laughs. “What are we going to do now?”
Even more surprising were the 32 new cases against Golden Dawn, involving murder, assault, blackmail, and money laundering. In recent weeks, three members have been arrested for the assault on the Egyptian fishermen and two have been tried for the murder of Shehzad Luqman. Charges like that don’t materialize overnight. It seems that the government had been simultaneously pursuing two incompatible paths in order to neuter Golden Dawn’s electoral threat. One was to treat it as a reputable party, downplay its violence, and even regard it as a potential coalition partner. The other was to monitor it and assemble enough evidence to crush it with the full force of the law. In the hours after Fyssas’ death, the first option came off the table.
This new hardline strategy served several purposes at once. It defused the immediate threat of mass unrest. It wrong-footed the left. It proved to disapproving allies such as Germany and Israel that Greece takes the danger of fascism seriously. And it enabled New Democracy to look like a champion of moderation in the face of extremism.
“The government has been propagating this narrative of the two extremes so it can claim to be the responsible alternative,” says Jerome Roos, the Dutch academic. “The problem with the narrative is that the most extreme things we’re seeing are a result of the austerity measures that the government itself has been implementing. The whole idea that you would defend democracy by voting for the center is completely nonsensical.” Manolis Glezos, the Syriza deputy who was imprisoned by right-wing regimes during World War II, the civil war, and the junta, has warned that the laws used to hit the far right today could be turned against the far left tomorrow.
Already, there is a danger that the government’s war on Golden Dawn will backfire. Despite the shock of Fyssas’ murder, support never sank far below its 2012 level and it remained the country’s third biggest party. Its popularity has rebounded since two Golden Dawn members, Manolis Kapelonis and Giorgos Fountoulis, were shot dead in the north Athens suburb of Neo Irakleio on Nov. 1. A new guerrilla group calling itself the Militant People’s Revolutionary Forces claimed that it had carried out the killings in retaliation for Fyssas’ murder.
Since the December 2008 unrest, far-left terrorism has seen a revival, with revolutionary groups such as Conspiracy of Fire Nuclei carrying out dozens of arson and bomb attacks on politicians and businessmen, and there are fears that such violence against Golden Dawn will help the party’s image recover. Although Golden Dawn’s leadership are committed fascists, many of its supporters vote based on vague anti-establishment sentiments and see the crackdown as a plot by a cowardly, corrupt elite. Already embracing its new role as a victim of extremism, Golden Dawn mounted a large rally in Syntagma Square on Nov. 30. Woman-slapping deputy Ilias Kasidiaris denies the party had a hand in Fyssas’ murder and blames the government crackdown on a conspiracy organized by “the European Commission, the U.S. government, and the Israeli lobby.”
Under Greek law, George Roupakias can remain in custody for 18 months before being brought to trial, and prosecutors have their work cut out proving that he was acting on orders from the leadership. If the case collapses, Golden Dawn will appear vindicated. “Quick or slow doesn’t matter. The correct way matters,” says Elli Zotou, a crime reporter for the Syriza newspaper Avgi. “They have to uncover a whole network that led to this guy opening a car door and taking a knife and taking a life.”
Pavlos Fyssas was laid to rest on the morning of Sept. 19 at the Schisto-Keratsini cemetery. Among the hundreds of mourners gathered around his white coffin were members of Greece’s hip-hop scene, many of whom had not spoken to one another in years. They agreed to present a united front and scheduled a press conference for Sept. 24, chaired by BD Foxmoor.
“That was the first day ever that all of us just sat at a table and found some common ground,” says Nikitas Klint. “It was heavy, it was sentimental. Everybody spoke really mature, even though they were rappers.” He gives a wry smile. “It’s different than before. It’s harder to call each other names. I’m not saying something magical happened, but for one day it was great. Pavlos was a guy who loved hip-hop, and he knew everybody. He really had this dream of one day everybody being cool with each other.”
Petros Pountidis, however, came away disappointed. “Officially, it was a monumental historical event,” he says with sarcasm. “Unofficially, it was kind of pointless. Most of the rappers decided not to talk politics but it was a political murder. Pavlos didn’t die from an avalanche or cancer. He was murdered by fascists.”
Everyone in Greek hip-hop has lost a colleague. Some have lost a friend. “It’s something that will stay with us forever,” Social Waste’s Leonidas Oikonomakis tells me. “For everyone else, Pavlos was just someone who was killed by Golden Dawn. For us, he was one of us.” But perhaps nobody knew Fyssas as well as Pountidis. They were friends for half their lives. They rapped together; they worked together; they were union activists together. Pountidis says that Pavlos’ family is “devastated” and doubtful they will ever get the justice they crave.
“Nobody’s connecting the dots,” he says angrily. “If Roupakias gets life and the guy who called from the bar gets 25 years, is that justice? What about the employers union who paid Golden Dawn to set foot in these neighborhoods? What about all the politicians who did nothing about Golden Dawn? So justice is relative.”
Antifascist demonstrators after Fyssas’s death on Sep. 18, 2013. Aris Messinis / AFP / Getty Images
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