Greece Struggles to Outlaw Its Golden Dawn Fascist Party

Conservative Government Mounts Risky Effort to Declare Group a Criminal Organization

By MARCUS WALKER and MARIANNA KAKAOUNAKI

Updated Dec. 4, 2013 11:37 p.m. ET
The Wall Street Journal

PIRAEUS, Greece—At a dark crossroads here in September, Greek police kept a safe distance while black-clad activists from the fascist movement Golden Dawn chased and attacked Pavlos Fyssas, a 34-year-old rapper.

The police had long been in the habit of standing by while Golden Dawn's paramilitary squads rolled into action, mirroring the hesitance of Greece's political leadership to deal with the growing movement's muscle. Only after a Golden Dawn member fatally stabbed the rapper did police officers make an arrest, according to 15 police and witness depositions.

The arrest was the start of a risky crackdown on a party steeped in street violence and neo-Nazi rhetoric, whose surging support since last year symbolizes how Europe's economic crisis has fueled the Continent's most radical forces. From Spain to Finland, extremes of left and right, regional separatists and antiestablishment populists are on the march. Golden Dawn, once a fringe group known for stiff-arm salutes and Holocaust denial, rose to nearly 15% support in opinion polls by this fall.

Violence in Greece hasn't come only from the far right. On Nov. 1, two men on a stolen motorcycle stopped at a Golden Dawn branch in an Athens suburb and shot two party activists dead. An extreme-left group took responsibility, saying it was revenge for the killing of Mr. Fyssas.

The Golden Dawn crackdown the government is attempting takes the form of an effort to prove it is a "criminal organization" in which membership is a crime, a charge the party denies.

Golden Dawn was initially cowed by the move against it but is starting to regain its swagger. On Saturday, thousands of party activists held a defiant rally in Athens' Constitution Square, waving a forest of flags and denouncing the prosecution as persecution. Opinion polls published in recent days suggest that the party's public support, which fell after the rapper's killing, has stabilized and may be rising again.

Legal experts say proving the speedily assembled case will be hard. Many observers say that if the prosecution fails, the radical party could hit new heights of popularity.

Golden Dawn says the effort is a conspiracy against it, led by "the European Commission, the U.S. government and the Israeli lobby," in the words of party spokesman Ilias Kasidiaris, a lawmaker who has a swastika tattoo on his shoulder. Mr. Kasidiaris said Golden Dawn wasn't responsible for the rapper's killing.

For most of its 30-year history, Golden Dawn was a small sect of Hitler enthusiasts. Its founder and leader today, Nikos Michaloliakos, was an army commando who praised the Third Reich and Greece's former military junta. The party won a skimpy 0.3% of the national vote in 2009 elections, on the eve of Greece's economic meltdown.

When the crisis began, street violence came mainly from far-left anarchists. The gathering depression shifted the balance of violence. Human-rights groups began documenting scores of attacks on the immigrants who flood into Greece from poor or war-torn lands such as Afghanistan and Pakistan. Often the attackers were black-clad gangs patrolling cities with clubs and knives.

In 2012 elections, Golden Dawn, which vowed to "clean" Greece of immigrants, shocked many Greeks by winning 7% of the national tally, as numerous voters abandoned mainstream parties. Greece's conservative party, New Democracy, held on to just enough support to head a new government, led by Prime Minister Antonis Samaras.

Interviews with investigators and politicians, as well as members and alleged victims of Golden Dawn, show how the authorities hesitated to respond to the party's growing violence, amid fears for their voter base.

An important factor, say some officials and analysts, was the prime minister's split political personality. Mr. Samaras was reared by a liberal mother from Athens' commercial aristocracy and a right-wing father from a poor anti-Communist village. His career has swung between fiery nationalist rhetoric and statesmanlike sobriety.

Mr. Samaras loathed neo-Nazis. His great-grandmother Penelope Delta, a patriotic children's author, committed suicide in 1941 on the day when invading Germans raised the swastika over the Acropolis.

But his base was a faction on New Democracy's right wing, which grew alarmed as supporters drifted into Golden Dawn's arms. To win them back, some of his advisers argued, New Democracy needed to shun any antifascist drive and show it was the true home for voters who favored clamping down on immigration and unruly left-wing protests.

Mr. Samaras's rhetoric for the elections held last year called for inner cities to be "reclaimed" from immigrant "tyrants," who he said brought "many diseases."

Critics charged he was emboldening the far right's xenophobia. At a June 2012 rally in the port city of Piraeus, a senior Golden Dawn official denounced immigrant fishermen from Egypt. "From now on they will answer to Golden Dawn," he said to raucous cheers.

That night at 3 a.m., a gang approached a house occupied by Egyptian fishermen. "Come out and let us show you what Golden Dawn means," one man shouted, according to Egyptian brothers Ahmed and Saad Abou Hamed, occupants of the house who have lived and worked in Greece since the 1990s.

The attackers caught one fisherman, Abou Zeid Mubarak, and beat him so badly he had to eat with a straw for months, the other fishermen said. Six suspects later arrested included a local Golden Dawn leader. Their case hasn't yet come to trial.

Golden Dawn's conquest of 18 seats in parliament in the 2012 elections made probing the group legally and politically delicate. Investigators were reluctant to act without high-level political cover, senior law-enforcement officials said. For instance, the party leader who railed against Egyptian fishermen, Yiannis Lagos, had been under surveillance for suspected criminal activities, but the surveillance ended when he ran for election, the officials said. A lawyer for Mr. Lagos declined to comment.

Mr. Samaras, after winning the premiership in the 2012 elections, focused his law-and-order efforts on undocumented immigrants, Communist strikers and anarchist squatters. He believed Golden Dawn was a fashion that would fade when the economy stabilized, said people familiar with his thinking.

But racist violence rose sharply in the year after the elections, causing hundreds of injuries and several deaths. A recent report by a government ombudsman linked 71 incidents to Golden Dawn and 47 to police officers.

"We didn't pay too much attention to stabbings of immigrants, because they were not in the press, and prosecutors didn't pay enough attention" either, said a senior official of Mr. Samaras's party. "It was not a priority."

A year ago, the head of a human-rights advisory body, Kostis Papaioannou, presented its annual report to a close prime ministerial adviser, Takis Baltakos. Mr. Baltakos opened it at a chapter on racist violence and threw it on the table, saying, "We are not interested in the human rights of foreigners," according to Mr. Papaioannou.

Inside the premier's neoclassical mansion, Mr. Baltakos led opposition to proposals for attempting to criminalize Golden Dawn. He said that would backfire, winning the party sympathy from voters disgusted with the establishment and alienating conservative constituencies such as the army and church. Other aides agreed that confronting Golden Dawn was politically risky.

Buoyed by its seeming impunity, Golden Dawn overplayed its hand on Sept. 15, angering the prime minister.

The small town of Meligalas was holding its annual remembrance of a World War II atrocity in which Communist partisans massacred locals accused of Nazi collaboration. A paramilitary column of Golden Dawn activists marched in, with Mr. Kasidiaris barking "one-two, one-two!"

The town's conservative mayor started giving a speech, in which he suggested that left and right shared blame for the Greek civil war that followed German occupation.

A Golden Dawn member of parliament, Ilias Panagiotaros, erupted at this evenhandedness, grabbing the microphone, shouting and shoving elderly townspeople, a video of the event shows. Riot police sent to prevent trouble were stationed too far away to intervene. According to one officer, police commanders had told them to step in only if anarchists tried to fight the fascists.

Mr. Panagiotaros, asked about his behavior, said, "I got crazy. But some things can't be tolerated."

The prime minister's inner circle was divided on how to respond to the incident. Some aides wanted to ban parades by Golden Dawn. Mr. Baltakos warned against a move that would make its members look like martyrs. Mr. Samaras, angered by an incident that had occurred in his home district and humiliated a mayor from his own party, wanted to do something but was wary of taking steps that would appear politically motivated.

The night of Sept. 17 forced a decision.

Mr. Fyssas, who rapped against fascism, was watching a soccer match with friends in a cafe in Piraeus. Tensions arose with a group of Golden Dawn supporters, who phoned others for backup. The calls spread up the hierarchy, summoning around 30 activists armed with clubs, according to investigators and witnesses. As Mr. Fyssas tried to evade them, he was spotted and attacked.

His girlfriend pleaded for help from motorcycle police parked across the junction but they didn't intervene, she told investigators. Other witnesses testified that four of the officers approached the scene gingerly.

A Golden Dawn member, Giorgos Roupakias, then arrived by car and almost immediately plunged a knife into Mr. Fyssas's heart, according to police and witness testimony. Arrested after he got back into his car, Mr. Roupakias said he did it because Mr. Fyssas had hit his pals, according to the police. Mr. Roupakias later said he acted in self-defense. He faces murder charges.

Golden Dawn said that the fighting was unplanned, that Mr. Roupakias acted alone and that the phone calls to party leaders were unrelated.

 "It was a murder, but Golden Dawn had nothing to do with it," said Mr. Kasidiaris. The party hierarchy can't be blamed for what followers might do, he said. "Golden Dawn is against violence."

Greece's minister of public order, Nikos Dendias, ordered raids on Golden Dawn offices. He also told aides to collect cases already in the judicial system that suggested Golden Dawn was a criminal organization, and asked the judiciary to bring a case against it.

Police mapped phone connections from the night of the killing. Prosecutors granted witness protection to some ex-members of Golden Dawn. Within days, a prosecutor indicted and arrested six Golden Dawn members of parliament and about 30 activists who were on the web of phone calls. The charge: belonging to a criminal gang.

When police came to the home of Mr. Michaloliakos, Golden Dawn's leader, he was awakened by his wife, who addressed him as "chieftain." In his home, police found guns, bullets and €43,000 ($58,000) in cash, as well as kitchen cutlery bearing the Third Reich emblem of an eagle on a swastika, according to a person familiar with the investigation. Mr. Michaloliakos didn't respond to requests for comment. He has rejected the charge of belonging to a criminal organization.

Prime Minister Samaras flew to the U.S. for a scheduled visit, satisfied that he could now say Greece was moving against the group. But on Oct. 2, a jet-lagged Mr. Samaras lay awake in the Hay-Adams Hotel in Washington when a 4 a.m. call from Mr. Dendias informed him that a judge had released three of the six arrested Golden Dawn lawmakers. What is more, skeptics within the government were trying to obstruct the case by lobbying judges to go slow, and telling conservative blogs that Mr. Samaras was blaming his ministers for giving him bad advice. The case seemed to be unraveling.

Still, the same judge who had released the three Golden Dawn legislators kept the other three in jail pending trial. On returning from the U.S., Mr. Samaras showed his support for Mr. Dendias, the public order minister, by walking with him from parliament to the prime minister's mansion.

To convict those arrested of belonging to a criminal organization, the state must show Golden Dawn to be a hierarchical group that intends to commit felonies. That requires proving its leaders ordered or "morally instigated" felonies.

The evidence so far probably isn't enough, legal experts say. For instance, the phone connections on the night of the rapper's murder are strong clues but don't prove an order to kill, some lawyers say. It isn't known what was said on the calls.

After the killing, the police began phone taps on Golden Dawn. Some calls suggest disorganization. In one exchange, Mr. Lagos chews out an underling who exaggerates the size of the victim's group to make the fight sound fairer. "Giorgos, tell me the truth so I don't f— you, because I'm going crazy here," Mr. Lagos says on the call, according to transcripts filed in court.

Claims by some protected witnesses don't check out. One said Golden Dawn had stashed guns at a monastery. Police found only laughing monks.

In addition, the list of judicial incidents sent to prosecutors shows signs of haste. Some cases are minor. One concerns an attack not by Golden Dawn but on it.

Many say Golden Dawn will be stronger than ever if the case against it comes undone. "Most of us will have to leave" Greece, said Saad Abou Hamed, the Egyptian fisherman.

Greece's government says it acted against Golden Dawn at the first legal opportunity. Mr. Abou Hamed, who hopes he will eventually be invited to testify against Golden Dawn in court, is skeptical: "Before, the attacks were on immigrants, so they just did not mind," he said. "Now that a Greek guy died, they care."

—Alkman Granitsas contributed to this article.

Write to Marcus Walker at marcus.walker@wsj.com