Billy Briggs is an award-winning journalist based in the U.K. He is co-founder of investigative website The Ferret.
ATHENS — Thanasis Kampagiannis, who has spent the past five years prosecuting one of Greece’s most high-profile political trials, has seen his fair share of disturbing footage.
“Do you want to see a video?” he asks during an interview in his office, turning to his laptop and clicking on a link. On the screen, a man instructs a group clad in black t-shirts how to assault migrant workers at an open market in Athens.
“We will cleanse [Panagitsa Square]. Nothing will be left standing. Nothing! Everything that moves gets slaughtered,” he tells the men. “Golden Dawn has now entered our lives — whatever we are told we must do.”
Thanasis Kampagiannis in his law office | Angela Catlin for POLITICO
Kampagiannis presses pause. The footage was found on a hard disk belonging to a member of Golden Dawn, a far-right political party has MPs in the Greek parliament, and shows one of its hit squads — the so-called Nikaia battalion — preparing to carry out on attack, he says.
In April 2015, 69 members of Golden Dawn — including its leader Nikos Michaloliakos and the entire 2013 parliamentary group — went on trial accused of orchestrating murder, arson, assault and weapons possession. The indictment describes a political party that is “working as a cloak [for] a criminal conspiracy” authorizing attacks against political opponents, migrants and anti-fascists, Kampagiannis says.
In the years since, prosecutors and defense attorneys have called hundreds of witness to the stand and combed through vast amounts of evidence — the digital files related to the trial amount to an estimated 1.5 terabytes, according to Kampagiannis. Initially held at Korydallos Prison in Athens, it is now being heard by three judges at the Criminal Appeals Court in Athens.
This spring, five years since it started, the trial was supposed to finally come to a close. The coronavirus epidemic, which has brought life to a standstill in all of Europe, has interrupted the proceedings, delaying the verdict and heightening the anticipated sense of closure.
“It’s probably the most important trial of the last decade, probably one of the three most important trials in modern Greek history,” says Lefteris Papagiannakis, deputy mayor of Athens and a member of Golden Dawn Watch, a human rights group that has monitored the trial since it began.
* * *
Golden Dawn first arrived on the scene in 1980. Initially a fringe group of far-right nationalists, it grew its support by exploiting people’s concerns over immigration after the Greek economy started to nosedive as a result of the 2009 economic crisis.
The party entered parliament in 2012, when 18 members were elected to the assembly. In 2014, it also sent members to the European Parliament in Strasbourg, after it got 9.4 percent of the vote in the European Parliament election.
More recently, it’s seen a dip in the polls, likely in response to the lengthy court trial, which has exposed the violence of its MPs and paramilitary wing. In last year’s European election, it received less than 5 percent of the vote. And in Greece’s national election in July, it failed to pass the 3 percent threshold it would have needed to stay in parliament.
The party’s rhetoric has always been extreme. In a 2010 manifesto, Golden Dawn talked about a civil war. In a 2000 text called “Wolves Among Sheep,” it compared itself to a “pack of silent, red-eyed wolves” who want to sink their fangs into the “big fat necks” of a “herd of big, arrogant beasts.”
A Greek flag flies atop the Golden Dawn building in Athens | Angela Catlin for POLITICO
Fascist rhetoric and symbols are a regular feature among Golden Dawn’s members. Party leader Michaloliakos is referred to as “Arhigos,” the Greek translation of the German word Führer. He has predicted a race war and written books praising Aldolf Hitler and exculpating the Nazis for their occupation of Greece during World War II.
Ilias Kasidiaris, a former MP and party spokesman who is also on trial, sports a swastika tattoo on his arm. Christos Pappas, also an ex-MP, was filmed encouraging children to say “Heil Hitler” and give Nazi salutes. He is also on trial, alongside Giorgos Germenis, the alleged head of Golden Dawn’s paramilitary hit squads.
The party, notoriously anti-immigrant, is thought to be behind hundreds of attacks on Muslims, Jews, immigrants, trade unionists, anarchists and political opponents.
Ilias Kasidiaris of the Golden Dawn party is escorted by police to a swearing-in ceremony in 2014 | Panayiotis Tzamaros/NurPhoto via Getty Images
Naim Elghandour, an Egyptian who has lived in Greece for over 40 years and heads the Muslim Association of Greece, said in his testimony at the trial that police were complicit in the party’s activities.
Elghandour, who said he had suffered multiple attacks and threats, recalled an incident in which a mob of Golden Dawn members locked 40 Bangladeshis inside an Athens mosque in October 2010, and attempted to burn them alive.
“They were inside praying and were locked in,” Elghandour said during an interview in Athens. “They were calling the police and the embassy and Golden Dawn were outside and would not let firemen through.”
The party sowed terror in migrant neighborhoods in the city, he said. “Golden Dawn had guards dressed in black in metro stations, and they were checking immigrant’s papers and taking their money. They spread terror in the neighborhoods and we had no help.”
* * *
Farm workers on the outskirts of Athens tell equally grizzly tales of attacks carried out by far-right paramilitary groups thought to be associated with the party.
Hooded men armed with sticks would arrived in trucks and chase migrant workers across fields, several recalled. Those not quick enough suffered vicious beatings and dreadful injuries.
Latif Abdul, who is originally from Gujrat, Pakistan, said he nearly died during one such assault. He works on a farm at place called Goritsa just outside Athens and lives alone in a hut with his cats and dogs.
Latif Abdul, a Pakistani migrant working in Goritsas, Greece, was attacked by Golden Dawn members | Angela Catlin for POLITICO
“It was October 2017. Three people came. They had a very big knife and a metal stick,” he said in an interview. “They beat me very badly and I ended up in hospital for four days. I had a broken nose, broken leg and a broken arm. But the police were no help.”
Ashfaq Mahmoud, who works on the same farm as Abdul, was kicked in the back and slashed with a knife below his right eye. “There were five men in black wearing masks and they came to our field when we were working on a Saturday afternoon,” he recalled of his attack, which happened the same month. “My friend managed to run away but they caught me. They said, ‘We will cut your throats and burn you alive in your homes.’”
Mahmoud Ashfaq, a Pakistani migrant, was violently attacked by members of Golden Dawn. Now he works on a farm in Goritsas, Greece. | Angela Catlin for POLITICO
There was a steady stream of assaults in the area at the time. Between April 2016 and October 2017, Javid Aslam, the president of the Pakistan Community of Greece, said he documented more than 70 attacks on migrant laborers. From 2010 to 2013, it had been even worse, with up to 800 assaults, he said.
“I had three notebooks filled with victims. They would beat people around their faces and heads so that injuries were visible to others,” Aslam said.
He, too, accused police of complicity, claiming they were present at some assaults and did nothing, sometimes even arresting victims instead of the perpetrators.
Greece’s Jewish community has also been the target of alleged Golden Dawn assaults, including an arson attack on a synagogue in Corfu and the desecration of dozens of cemeteries. In Thessaloniki, a memorial to the Holocaust was vandalized four times last year, daubed with graffiti that reads Chryssi Avghi (Golden Dawn).
“We are concerned not only as Jews but also as Greeks, because the threat of Golden Dawn is not just a threat against the Jews, but also against democracy, against the human values of our society,” Victor Eliezer, the general secretary of the Central Board of Jewish Communities in Greece, said in an email.
* * *
After years of violent incidents with alleged links to the party, leading members of Golden Dawn were eventually arrested in September 2013, some 10 days after Pavlos Fyssas, a rapper whose stage name was Killah P, was stabbed to death.
The killing was initially portrayed by some as a fight that got out of hand, and Golden Dawn denied any direct connection with the incident.
Stefanos Levidis and Christine Varvia in front of a mural of Pavlos Fyssas, an anti-fascist Greek rapper who was murdered in 2013 | Angela Catlin for POLITICO
Giorgos Roupakias — allegedly a member of Golden Dawn’s Nikaia battalion — later confessed to stabbing Fyssas, but was released from detention in 2016 and placed under house arrest. Party leader Michaloliakos eventually said the party accepted “political responsibility” for the murder.
Forensic investigator Stefanos Levidis, a member of the group Forensic Architecture at Goldsmiths University of London, said he had determined the rapper’s murder was premeditated and that police saw the incident unfold and did not intervene. The results of the investigation, which took 12 months to complete, were presented as evidence at the trial.
“The police were there five minutes before the murder, and [they] lied about it in an organized manner again,” Levidis said in an interview in Athens’s National Technical University, standing beside a mural of Fyssas, painted as a tribute to the late singer.
“This was not an altercation over football,” Levidis said. “No, it was a very well-orchestrated attack following the modus operandi of Golden Dawn hit squads as we have come to know it.”
Athens, as seen from the Parthenon | Angela Catlin for POLITICO
The murder is one of the four main charges that make up the prosecution’s case. The others relate to a 2012 attack on Egyptian fishermen that left one seriously injured; an attack on 20 trade unionists in 2013, and a charge of membership and direction of a criminal organization leveled against 20 people, including 16 former Golden Dawn MPs.
The party’s members are being tried under what Kampagiannis describes as “the mafia clause” of the Greek penal code. Alleged crimes in a long list of related cases include arson, murder and weapons possession.
The party has repeatedly dismissed the trial as “political persecution” and denied the charges. In a statement on its website, Golden Dawn calls the case a “vast judicial and political conspiracy” against the party, and says the detention of its leader and six other MPs is “unlawful.” It also claims that it “fights for a Greece that belongs to the Greeks.” The party did not respond to a request for comment.
But since the start of the trial, a number of former members have flipped and testified against Golden Dawn.
In November 2017, a protected witness said he took part in violent attacks on members of the Greece’s communist party and attended weapons training sessions. He alleged that attacks carried out by his chapter in Nikaia were approved by a party official.
* * *
At the party’s former headquarters in Athens, a large banner of leader Nikos Michaloliakos with both arms raised hangs from the top floor. On the ground floor, a shop sells party memorabilia, including a black cap with a white power logo, a statue of a Greek warrior and various books including one written by Golden Dawn’s Ilias Kasidiaris. The front cover shows him naked from the waist up kickboxing, showing off his swastika tattoo.
The party has since moved out of the building, and many of its local offices have closed as a result of its waning influence. Some members have left, alienated by the party’s antics since the trial began, according to Papagiannakis, the deputy mayor of Athens.
The shop window at Golden Dawn headquarters in Athens | Angela Catlin for POLITICO
“We’ve had many times … when something happened during the [trial] which was damaging for the case, then they react on the streets, they go and beat up some anti-fascist activists, some migrants, whatever,” said Papagiannakis. “Now we see a pattern and the court sees a pattern. People see that whenever the fascists and Nazis are pissed off and, you know, cornered, they react violently.”
Although the trial didn’t initially deter voters, support for the party has fallen dramatically over the past few years. The party’s violent past, it seems, might finally be catching up to it.
Kampagiannis, the prosecutor, said he is confident the verdict will deliver the final blow. “After the evidence that has been provided to the court, there is no way that you cannot have a conviction — not just of the people who perpetrated the crime but also the instigators or the directors of the criminal organization,” he said.
Naim El Ghadour is president of the Muslim Association of Greece and a witness at the Golden Dawn trial. He says he has suffered multiple attacks and threats. | Angela Catlin for POLITICO
Pressure is mounting as the case, meeting yet another delay, drags on. Athenians, especially, are keen to see it closed.
Before public gatherings were banned as a result of the coronavirus epidemic, protesters regularly gathered outside the court, which sits on a busy main road in Athens, to hand out leaflets and make speeches.
A typical banner reads: “Smash the neo-Nazis of Golden Dawn — Life Sentences for the murderers.”
Until the epidemic is under control, it seems they will have too wait.