Greece: the Persistence of Political Terrorism

Greece: the persistence of political terrorism GEORGE KASSIMERIS* It was 10.25 p.m. on Saturday, 29 June 2002 when the extraordinarily long run of luck of Europe’s most elusive terrorist group, the Revolutionary Organization 17 November (17N), finally ran out. A strong blast ripped through the warm evening air near the ticket office of Hellas Flying Dolphins in the port of Piraeus. One man was seriously injured in the face, hands and chest. It seemed that the bomb he was carrying, concocted from alarm clocks, common detonators, 9-volt batteries and dynamite, had gone off prematurely. Port authorities rushed to the scene and the man was taken to the emergency unit of the nearby Tzanneio hospital. Early reports speculated that the bomber was a member of one of the country’s smaller terrorist groups, such as the Revolutionary Cells or Popular Resistance, both of which had been fairly active. But the contents of a rucksack (a .38 handgun and two hand grenades) found near the injured man, soon identified as Savvas Xiros, proved much more tantalizing. Three days later, the chief of police announced that the .38 Smith and Wesson had been identified as the gun stolen from a police officer killed by 17N on Christmas Eve 1984 and was the same weapon subsequently used in the assassinations of a shipowner and a prosecutor as well as in a number of other incidents involving the group. Suddenly, a member of the terrorist organization that had often been referred to as organossi phantasma, ‘phantom organization’, and had acted with impunity for 27 years, was in police custody. Xiros’s arrest marked the beginning of the end for 17N. From his hospital bed, apparently fearing for his life, the icon painter and—as it turned out—senior 17N gunman Xiros gave the prosecutor in charge of the counterterrorism inves- tigation critical information that fuelled a chain reaction of arrests as a result of which the group was dismantled in a matter of weeks.1 The final nail was knocked into 17N’s coffin on 5 September 2002 when the group’s leader of operations, Dimitris Koufodinas, gave himself up to the police after two months on the * The author is grateful to the Leverhulme Trust, the Nuffield Foundation and the British Academy for funding different stages of the research on which this article is based. 1 Xiros’s information also led to the discovery of the group’s main arsenal in three flats in central Athens. The flats—one of them rented by Xiros himself—contained a number of the 60 anti-tank rockets stolen by 17N from an army base in northern Greece in 1989, the typewriter used to produce the group’s early communiqués and 17N’s red flag with the trademark five-pointed star, as well as grenades, wigs and posters of Che Guevara, Karl Marx and Aris Velouhiotis, a Greek Second World War resistance fighter. Among the weapons was the G-3 rifle used to kill the group’s last victim, the British defence attaché in Athens, Stephen Saunders, who was shot dead in June 2000 as he was driving to work. International Affairs 89: 1 (2013) 131–142 © 2013 The Author(s). International Affairs © 2013 The Royal Institute of International Affairs. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford ox4 2dq, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. George Kassimeris run. Koufodinas pulled up at police headquarters in a taxi at 2.35 p.m., dressed in jeans, a black T-shirt, sunglasses and a jockey cap. ‘I am Dimitris Koufodinas and I have come to turn myself in,’ he told the startled duty officer. Koufodinas had been on the run since the premature detonation of the bomb Savvas Xiros was carrying on 29 June. Xiros later told counterterrorism officers that he had urged Koufodinas to flee the scene. Koufodinas, who had more than 24 hours to get away before police realized that Xiros was connected to 17N, ran first to one of the group’s hideouts in central Athens where, according to Greek counterterrorism sources, he destroyed evidence before going on the run. In December 2003, after a marathon nine-month trial (the longest in modern Greek history) held in a purpose-built courtroom in Athens’ largest maximum-security prison, Koryd- allos, a three-member tribunal convicted 15 members of the group of terrorist activity and several other charges. Dimitris Koufodinas received 13 life sentences and 25 years in jail, and Savvas Xiros six life sentences. The capture and imprisonment of 17N, however, did not mark the end of the story for political terrorism in Greece. It is probably fair to say that at the time a considerable number of senior officials at the Greek Ministry of Public Order to whom the author of this article spoke seriously entertained the theory that the dismantling of 17N was tantamount to the final elimination of terrorism in Greece, insisting that any remaining small, stubborn splinter groups posed no real security threat. If only it were that simple. But, on the contrary, European experience has repeatedly shown that when a major terrorist organization is broken up, after a period of time a new generation of terrorists emerges. This new generation may lack the operational capabilities and scope of the group they aspire to imitate, but that does not render them any less dangerous. Tellingly, in the Greek context, a new group calling itself Revolutionary Struggle (RS) picked up the baton of violence from 17N before the trial of Koufodinas and Xiros had even come to an end. RS was joined in 2008 by a second anarchist-oriented guerrilla group, the Conspiracy of Cells of Fire (CCF), which has gone on to become the most active of Greece’s new generation of urban guerrilla groups. It is worth remembering that it was CCF’s parcel-bombing campaign in November 2010 that caused a major security scare across Europe, forcing the Greek government to take the unprec- edented step of suspending international airmail for 48 hours owing to a barrage of parcel bombs (14 in all), targeting the offices of the German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi and the French President Nicolas Sarkozy as well as a number of foreign embassies in Greece. This article argues that Greece has one of the most persistent problems of political terrorism anywhere in Europe. From the mid-1970s to the present, the country’s political and socio-economic institutions have been confronted by a rising tide of systematic terrorist violence, perpetrated for the most part by revolutionary guerrilla groups. Even more unpalatable is the fact that there is no sign of any escape route from what has become a permanent fixture of national public life. 17N’s dismantling and imprisonment, rather than demoralizing and emasculating the country’s armed struggle movement, led instead to the 132 International Affairs 89: 1, 2013 Copyright © 2013 The Author(s). International Affairs © 2013 The Royal Institute of International Affairs. Greece: the persistence of political terrorism emergence of new urban guerrilla groups and the increase and intensification of revolutionary violence. In the context of this analysis, the article places Greek extremism and violence in a broader political and cultural perspective and offers an exposition of what these new militant groups seek to achieve, what motivates their actions and how they compare with their predecessors. Greek political violence in context Revolutionary behaviour cannot be studied apart from its socio-political and ideological environment. Revolutionary terrorism in Greece arose from a complex set of political conditions and long-standing cultural influences that drew politi- cally active individuals towards the utopian world of revolutionary protest and violence. These conditions and influences, which provided the foundations upon which extreme left-wing terrorism took firm root in the mid-1970s, require in-depth analysis and consideration within the wider context of the evolution of Greek political culture over the past four decades, especially the years immediately following the collapse of the colonels’ dictatorial regime in 1974. The civil war of 1946–9 between communists and anti-communists cost over 80,000 Greeks their lives and 700,000 their homes. The fanaticism and ferocity of this conflict not only generated a passionate and profound political division within a country already devastated by the ravages of the Second World War and the brutal German occupation but also cast a long shadow over the politics of the 1950s and 1960s. The deep political and social wounds it inflicted upon the national psyche have not yet fully healed even today. The institutional legacy of the civil war survived, largely, until 1974, through systematic discrimination by the victors (the right) against the vanquished (the left). This discrimination was enforced through what became known as the ‘paraconstitution’, a draconian set of emergency laws (modelled on US anti- communist legislation) and political control techniques (used extensively in America during the Truman–McCarthy era) aimed at the political and economic exclusion of the Greek left and the consolidation of the anti-communist state.2 This system was applied by a large police bureaucracy which kept files on every Greek citizen, in which they would underline in red pen critical information about citizens labelled ‘communist’, ‘leftist’ or ‘sympathizer’, and about their relatives. The police files and the certificates of ‘civic-mindedness’ issued by the police imple- mented a brand of totalitarianism which involved collective family responsibility and mass political surveillance through police informers, of whom there were more than 60,000 by the early 1960s.3 Until the fall of the dictatorship in 1974, no one was above suspicion and everyone had to prove their innocence time and again.

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