The appeals trial of Revolutionary Organization 17 November is over.
Five senior Greek judges and three alternates spent one year and six
months of continuous session. An army of witnesses paraded through, their
memories now hopelessly tainted by one another's prior testimony. The
defense lawyers repeated impassioned arguments the first-instance panel
had ignored. And in the end, the judges confirmed the previous verdicts
with token adjustments.
Six of the defendants will serve life sentences, 25 years in practice,
unless the European Court of Human Rights grants them a new trial without
the disputed confessions. Another three will serve several more years in
jail. Three minor militants will be released shortly based on time already
served. It is unclear whether school teacher Kostas Telios can stay
depressed enough to keep out of jail. The others, already out of jail,
stay free.
The logic of the court was imperfect but pragmatic. The punishments
tracked reasonably well with the seriousness of the harm the defendants
did to innocent families and Greek national interests. Few Greeks are sad
that 17N is history. But history books can be as vicious and unedifying a
battleground as the mean streets of central Athens.
I watched a skirmish in that war on April 19. Musical instrument maker
Christodoulos Xiros briefly suspended his boycott of the trial. Entering
the courtroom, he sniffed the air and happily remarked, "Something
stinks in here." Defense lawyer Ippokratis Mylonas responded
heatedly. The chief guard wrapped Christodoulos in his arms and coaxed him
back to the cell block.
The previous evening four young men had walked into Mylonas's law
office with a camera and plastic buckets of something brown. "This is
for Koufodinas," they said as they fouled his suit, broke his
glasses, kicked him, and left. They posted their picture and statement on
the Indymedia alternative web site.
Mylonas was defending a man Greek authorities are certain was the
founder of 17N and murderer of CIA station chief Richard Welch in 1975.
Alexandros Giotopoulos claims he is the innocent victim of a transatlantic
conspiracy. Mylonas also represented Vasilis Tzortzatos, a humble
electrician who admitted to having helped 17N in a minor capacity from
1985 until 1992. The two defendants sat together at the trial and
whispered back and forth.
No credible witness could place Giotopoulos firmly at any 17N attack.
Still, Giotopoulos had done something to earn one of three known sets of
keys to the group's hideouts. If he is to rot in hell, it will most likely
be for furnishing the lies about the victims that let his associates kill
strangers with a clean conscience. Telling similar lies in court did not
save Giotopoulos from spending the rest of his life in prison, but perhaps
it discredited the Greek legal system to the benefit of future generations
of revolutionary leftists.
Hiring the most obsessive lawyer in Greece to help him do so was a
gamble. Mylonas spoke eloquently for 13 days, collapsing occasionally from
exhaustion. He deployed every argument imaginable. Many of his arguments
were logical and several were even true. He did a good job of ridiculing
the court's insistence that Giotopoulos was the autocratic leader of 17N.
But in the process he demolished the character of his clients.
Koufodinas, who has admitted little but denied nothing, is the hero of
an ardent revolutionary group. Their website eksegersi.gr and monthly
magazine Kontra disparaged the prosecution's case and promoted 17N as
Robin Hoods. There was a rival faction, however, with a magazine called
Minyma Antistasis sponsored by Giotopoulos's companion Maithe Peynaud.
This faction jeered at Koufodinas as a quixotic "crystal
revolutionary" who played into the hands of the imperialists and
their Greek lackeys by taking political responsibility for 17N's actions.
But why their animosity?
Koufodinas was the only person in a position to document Giotopoulos's
guilt or innocence. His stance was clear enough to give his rare,
carefully worded statements credibility in the eyes of the judges. Letting
an innocent man rot in jail for life would violate his or any moral code.
Koufodinas's silence was thus an argument for Giotopoulos's guilt. Mylonas
blithely explained it away by suggesting a secret deal with prosecutors to
save Koufodinas's wife from prison.
Mylonas knew better. There was no hope of convincing the judges that
Greek police had fabricated the entire case against Giotopoulos. The only
plausible defense was that Giotopoulos could not possibly have exerted the
moral authority over the other 17N members necessary to qualify him in the
Greek penal code as the "moral perpetrator" of 17N's attacks.
Knifing Koufodinas would strengthen the case for Giotopoulos's lack of
leadership potential. As an ordinary 17N member he would be eligible for
release after a few years.
Vilifying as a police collaborator the one 17N figure who commands any
sympathy outside the radical fringe was a major blow to 17N's claim to a
place in history. That Mylonas's clients permitted him to make this
argument and denounce Koufodinas as "Laspocheris" ("Mudhand",
a play on his alleged sharpshooter nickname of "Poisonhand")
underscores their poor grasp of human nature.
The eyes of Greek radicals glaze over reading 17N proclamations almost
as quickly as mine do. In ten years what will remain of 17N, if anything,
is not its conventional leftist rhetoric but rather Greek perceptions of
the character and motives of its members. Giotopoulos seems to have been a
competent anti-junta militant back in 1972. Today's self-absorbed
gentleman in the tweed coat is no role model for revolution in Greece or
anywhere else.
Koufodinas quoted the Greek poet Palamas to summon a new generation of
activists to take up where 17N left off. So far his stance has inspired
three buckets of slop against one overzealous lawyer. "Revolutionary
Struggle," the latest group to take up arms against the Greek state,
has done little better in translating "armed propaganda" into an
ideology that commands more than passive, fleeting attention.
Ultimately it is likely that the epitaph of 17N will turn out to have
been written in 1935 by a much more famous diplomat than I, George
Seferiadis, in the deadly, unanswerable last line of his poem
Argonauts:
"Κανείς δέν
τούς θυμάται.
Δικαιοσύνη."
"No one remembers them. Justice."
Top of Page
Dowdy business suits are the rule at the special courthouse in
Korydallos prison. On March 22, however, 17N terror trial buffs caught a
flash of more exotic plumage, the black robe and white bib of Maitre
Antoine Comte. This tall French lawyer had been enlisted by the defense
team of Alexandros Giotopoulos to fire a shot across the bows of the Greek
legal system.
Comte listed six questions the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) at
Strasbourg would ask about the pre-trial treatment of the 17N suspects. He
wondered whether the Greek government really wanted to defend its behavior
to a panel of black-robed foreign judges.
Possession of bombs is illegal. When one exploded in the hands of 17N
militant Savvas Xiros on June 29, 2002, Greek authorities were supposed to
place him under arrest and charge him within 48 hours. His being
unconscious and bleeding gave police more time, but once Savvas woke up he
was entitled to a lawyer. That lawyer would have told him to keep his
mouth shut until they had cooked up a plausible story.
In 1993 a security team spotted two men on a motorcycle shadowing the
U.S. Army attaché. Police questioned the motorcycle's owner, an
electrician named Vasilis Tzortzatos. He gave them a thoroughly
implausible story, but there was no evidence to charge him. Correctly
convinced he was a member of 17N, they let him go. For the next nine years
they watched him in vain.
Greek authorities lived 27 years of such frustrations. They were
determined to persuade their wounded bomber to talk. There were medical
reasons to keep Savvas isolated. Meanwhile, informal
"conversations" with prosecutor Giannis Diotis and antiterrorism
chief Stelios Syros were all the substantive human contact he was allowed.
Isolation is a powerful tool. Savvas described his reaction in a 2006
book, "That Day: 1560 hours in Intensive Care; Testimony on Our Own
Guantanamo." He was heavily medicated - with what drugs he did not
know. In the grip of vivid hallucinations, he fantasized about suicide,
voluntary or assisted. In fact the doctors were fighting hard to save him.
He was not tortured. But his rights had indeed been violated.
There is a legal cliché, "fruit of the poison tree."
Information obtained by illegal means taints any evidence gathered on the
basis of that information. Applying that principle rigorously would have
meant excluding Savvas's and other tainted confessions from the trial.
Without them, it would have been impossible to establish specific roles in
specific crimes. Families of the victims might well have seen the
murderers of their loved ones set free after a few years.
Greek authorities accepted this risk. Experience told them Greek judges
would not challenge prosecutorial missteps. The basic facts were
reasonably clear, and the 2001 counterterrorism law meant there was no
jury for defense lawyers to confuse. The first 17N court ignored legal
protests and treated the retracted confessions as gospel.
The one time I saw Savvas Xiros, he was plodding from the ambulance to
his cell, trailing his good hand along the wall for guidance. A single
police guard walked casually ahead of him. The maimed bomber, now harmless
and discredited, has rebuilt himself with scraps of old religious
training. His almost sightless gaze and wild brown hair recall one of the
desert fathers he used to paint. To the disgust of 17N supporters, in 2004
Savvas withdrew his legal appeals, citing the New Testament's admonition
to avoid lawsuits and proclaiming his faith in God as his only judge.
Savvas's lawyers are making a new appeal to the ECHR, arguing that his
deteriorating health makes life in jail cruel and unusual punishment.
Meanwhile, the appeals court verdict on Giotopoulos and the other 17N
defendants, due next month, again makes full use of his confession. That
verdict, therefore, will be appealed to the Greek Supreme Court and
thence, in a year or two, to Strasbourg.
The debacle at Guantanamo, where presumption of torture stripped the
confession of accused al Qaeda mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohamed and other
terrorists of any legal utility, sparked more cynicism than outcry in the
United States. Greeks do not condemn their own more nuanced violation of
the rule of law. When human rights are defended, it is not by the public
but rather by a handful of idealistic lawyers often protecting people of
unpalatable views from punishment for genuine crimes.
Terrorists violate the rule of law by definition. Because protecting
them is an ungrateful task, hometown legal systems routinely shirk it.
Many police are perfectly content, like Savvas Xiros, to let God be their
judge. But the courts have a higher duty. That is why the ECHR puts on its
black robes, to overawe selfish national counterparts. Once a judicial
system becomes complicit in violating the rule of law, then none of us can
count on any rights at all.
Top of page
This past Tuesday at Korydallos prison, a compact, quiet man named
Thomas Serifis left his solitary corner of the defendants' pen to explain
himself to the judges. One elderly couple sat in the hall to watch him,
his parents, I suspect, though I was too embarrassed to ask them. The
other defendants ignored him.
This is the appeals trial of "Revolutionary Organization
17N," with five judges rather than three. The seventeen defendants
are the same (minus two acquitted in 2003), the exhibits and witnesses are
the same, and most of the arguments are the same. There is, however, some
logic to retrying a case once no one cares. In 2003, with the Olympics
looming, the Greek state was desperate to prove to the world that it had
solved its problem of domestic terrorism. By sentencing those involved to
life imprisonment, Greece satisfied its British and American allies and
most of the Greek public. But key questions were swept under the rug.
When 17N unraveled in July 2002, few of its members withstood all-night
interrogation. Threatened with extradition to Guantanamo, coaxed with
pledges of leniency under the 2001 anti-terrorism law, and led to believe
their colleagues had already testified against them, they waived their
right to a lawyer and their right to remain silent. They signed detailed,
sometimes inaccurate statements naming their friends and co-conspirators.
And then they compared notes in the prison courtyard and realized how
little evidence the authorities really had. They had convicted one another
with their own confessions. Their lawyers fought to prevent their
confessions from being used in court, to no avail. Now doomed to prison,
the 17N defendants struggled in court to redeem their tarnished character,
some in the eyes of their revolutionary peers, others in their own.
Thomas Serifis was proud that he worked two full-time jobs, days as a
bus driver, nights as waiter at a taverna in Pendeli. He lived alone, sent
money to his parents, and never asked or needed anything from anyone else.
Unwilling to burden others with his troubles, he called only three
witnesses. He spoke calmly, except to deny fiercely that he had ever taken
money from 17N.
Serifis was arrested with his two childhood friends, Iraklis Kostaris
and Kostas Karatsolis. They had grown up together in Thesprotia, in a poor
village where the men all worked in Germany. After secondary school and
military service they moved together to Athens. All of them cared about
social justice, but Kostaris was the most radical. In 1988 he recruited
his two friends, then age 22, to join him in an organization that would do
more than simply block traffic with protest marches.
Serifis and Karatsolis confessed the night following their arrest. They
then discovered that Kostaris had refused to admit anything. Karatsolis
denounced his confession as false, the product of exhaustion and threats.
At the trial, he and Kostaris presented witnesses and documents to
undermine the confessions. But Serifis was too locked into his code of
personal responsibility to deny his actions. He refused to implicate
anyone but himself, but he freely admitted his own participation. That
stance indirectly destroyed the alibis of his friends and with it their
friendship.
Serifis helped bomb an empty house, his initiation to "armed
propaganda." He helped plunder the Greek Army arsenal at Sykourio and
steal two relic bazookas from the War Museum. Then he realized that the
group was 17N. He was skeptical such attacks could rouse the masses, and
did not appreciate taking part in operations he had no part in planning.
And so he left in 1990. Many 17N stories are similar: anti-authoritarian
personalities recruited on the basis of personal trust and then drifting
away.
Thomas Serifis and his colleagues pose a moral problem. Before the
first arrests, law enforcement authorities were certain Alexandros
Giotopoulos was the founder and mastermind of a tightly organized,
hierarchical group of conspirators. That certainty shaped the confessions
of two peripheral figures, on the basis of which Giotopoulos was sentenced
to 2109 years in prison as the moral instigator of all the crimes ever
committed by 17N. But Giotopoulos's alleged minions were unaware of his
supreme status as First Murderer. Their confessions, retracted or not,
make clear that 17N was four to six members casting about for targets all
could agree on. Sympathetic friends occasionally lent a hand.
17N is finished, but there is still good reason to try to understand
the group and its origins accurately. No one has been charged with the
1975 murder of CIA station chief Richard Welch, the first 17N victim, or
of U.S. Navy Captain George Tsantes, killed in 1983. The statute of
limitations has expired in Greece but not in the United States.
It is hard to keep a terrorist group together. Getting intelligent
people to agree that murder and theft will advance their political cause
is no easy task in a democratic society that recoils from violence. The
rare individuals willing to risk life and freedom for an abstraction seek
respect for their rigid principles from their leaders as well. This second
trial is the opportunity to study 17N as real human beings and not as the
product of our theories. Such study is the only realistic basis for
defeating any such group.
Top of Page
The January 12 rocket-propelled-grenade in the
executive washroom was not the first such attack on the U.S. Embassy. Late
one night in 1996, the Greek terror group 17 November fired a stolen
anti-tank rocket from the lower slopes of Lykavitos. Fearful of
overshooting the Embassy and hitting civilians on the far side, Savvas
Xiros aimed too low: the rocket clipped the top of a wall and fell
harmlessly into the parking lot. A bit higher and he would have made a
terrible mess of my future office.
There was no proclamation at the time. Fifteen months
after the attack, 17N explained in a postscript to the Peratikos murder
proclamation: "We of
course launched the rocket against the American Embassy on 15 February,
1996. The reasons for this action were so evident and understandable that
we didn't send a proclamation. The spontaneous guffaws, squawks and
general derision, even from members of parliament, prompted by the public
thanks of Prime Minister Simitis to the Americans were amply
eloquent."
When it attacked the U.S. Embassy, 17N was venting
against a safely impersonal target the anger and humiliation felt by many
Greeks. The month before, Turks had challenged Greece's ownership of the
worthless Aegean islets of Imia. Rather than go to war, new prime minister
Kostas Simitis had expressed gratitude for President Clinton's
intercession. By the inexorable code of nationalism – and in this 17N's
moral instincts coincided perfectly with those of New Democracy leader
Miltiadis Evert – the stain on Greece's national dignity should instead
have been washed clean with the blood of Greek and Turkish young men.
Probably the members of Revolutionary Struggle saw
their motives for last Friday's rocket attack as equally self-evident.
They sent a long manifesto to Pontiki
after the failed May 30, 2006 bomb attempt on ex-Public Order Minister
Voulgarakis. Their program is resistance to an (increasingly implausible)
U.S.-imposed "New World Order" and ultimately the overthrow of
capitalism. By cooperating with the "global war on terror" and
violating the rights of Pakistani migrants, Voulgarakis was enlisting
Greece in a "clash of civilizations" America allegedly intends
to provoke. According to Revolutionary Struggle, mass anti-imperialist
movements, including urban warfare, will make Greece and Europe less a
target of Middle Eastern rage. Such symbolic attacks, carried out with
impunity, will inspire others to resist.
Revolutionary Struggle is bound to be disappointed.
Terrorist acts -- even ideologically coherent ones -- are always
misunderstood because society imposes on us the duty to misunderstand
them. It took decades for Greeks to accept 17N at face value, rather than
as some baroque conspiracy of the CIA or Andreas Papandreou. Rather than
think carefully about the terrorists we have and why we have them, we
prefer to populate the shadows with imaginary terrorists who better serve
our selfish purposes.
Black-market RPGs are easy enough to buy, and an
illiterate twelve-year-old Taliban can shoot one. Journalists exaggerated
the difficulty of striking the U.S. Embassy primarily in order to accuse
Minister of Public Order Vyron Polydoras of incompetence and, through him,
the government. Greek police are hungry for the long-withheld permission
to use as a powerful tool against ordinary crime the sophisticated video
cameras they purchased at enormous expense for Olympic security. They
happily exaggerate the danger posed by Revolutionary Struggle and the fury
of the U.S. government. Security companies seize any excuse to raise their
prices. And U.S. bureaucrats will go to Congress to argue that this
challenge to American omnipotence warrants more money and personnel for
their little empires.
We can dismiss the conspiracy theories. Far from
orchestrating the September 11 attacks, the White House was caught
flatfooted by them. That did not prevent it, a few days later, from making
Islamic terrorism the domestic political basis for a hugely ambitious,
impossible agenda in the Middle East. Fortunately the U.S. government has
no outlet for such opportunism in Athens at the moment. Ambassador Ries
reacted calmly and sensibly to the affront to his washroom. The Greek
police and FBI will work in close cooperation because they cannot catch
the culprits without it. And life goes on.
History suggests a rocket will whistle through a U.S.
embassy window every few years. Sometimes its launchers will leave behind
a proclamation. Few will read it. Healthy societies do not allow small
groups of violent ideologues to set the terms of political debate. They
sweep up the glass and let democratic institutions do their work.
Top of Page
In 1970 it was still possible to park legally in Athens. The blue
Volkswagen Beetle with Swedish plates, purchased from a used-car lot four
days before, had its nose innocently pointed down the grassy slope behind
the U.S. Embassy. Late the evening of September 2, 1970, if all went well,
a timing mechanism would disengage the hand brake. The car would roll
forward. A few seconds later a small but powerful bomb would detonate.
Greeks and the world would take heart from the courage and ingenuity of
the anti-Junta resistance. And Giorgos Tsikouris and Maria Elena Angeloni
would be safely in Italy, back from an innocent three-week Greek vacation.
Something went wrong. Tsikouris was a Cypriot math student at the
University of Milan, not an electrician. At 3:45 pm he was crouching over
the bomb trying to fix the timing mechanism. His old associates suspect he
short-circuited the clock by using the too-powerful battery of the car.
The blast threw his mangled body 10 meters from the car. Angeloni died in
the twisted metal. The windows of the embassy all shattered.
The Junta, however, did not shatter. Its official communiqué gloated
that "the wakeful eye of Divine Judgment annuls the dark plans of the
enemies of the Greek people." The spokesman pointed out that no Greek
-- only a Cypriot and an Italian -- could be found to carry out so
dastardly a deed. Authorities pledged "strictest measures against the
stealthy importation of explosives by tourists."
For diplomats and politicians, tragedy is opportunity. The street of
the explosion, securely fenced off, became reserved parking places for
senior embassy staff. Andreas Papandreou claimed the martyrs to boost the
revolutionary credentials of PAK, his rather academic resistance
organization. But Tsikouris had been the Milan chief of the Patriotic
Antidictatorship Front (PAM), a rival resistance group headed by Mikis
Theodorakis. PAM's student militants had not informed the sensitive
composer and Nobel Peace Prize applicant that they had moved beyond
playing his stirring anthems with the volume cranked up. Still, he would
not yield them to Andreas. He and actress Melina Mercouri tried to fly to
Milan to give a fiery speech at Angeloni's funeral. They were blocked by
the Italian Communist Party, which supported the Greek resistance but
could not afford to associate itself with a bombing.
If Tsikouris and Angeloni had survived, it would have been a disaster.
Blowing up an embassy designed by Walter Gropius is bad manners as well as
a violation of international law. PAM claimed feebly that the U.S. embassy
was "the brain of the military dictatorship" and thus a
legitimate target, but its occupants knew otherwise. Greek authorities,
with help from their shaken U.S. counterparts, would have solved the
puzzle of Angeloni's forged Swedish passport and followed her trail to the
Greek student's club in Milan. Italian authorities would perforce have
agreed this abuse of hospitality needed to be punished harshly.
Wise officials do not delude the public or themselves that they can
divide up the world tidily between good and evil, "with us or against
us," terrorists and freedom-fighters. By dying, Tsikouris and
Angeloni eliminated any political or moral obligation to make the attempt.
Theodorakis, Mercouri, and Papandreou were not kidnapped off the streets
of Milan and sent to Athens or Guantanamo for providing "material
support to terrorists." Instead they toured the United States raising
money for their resistance groups and preaching the downfall of the Junta
to enthusiastic American audiences. When Andreas Papandreou was elected
prime minister in 1981, American diplomats winced at the revolutionary
past of some of his associates, but they did business with them. No one
knows or cares that the Greek Embassy in Nicosia sends a representative
every year to the memorial service of the first man who bombed the U.S.
embassy in Athens.
In August 1972, to honor the memory of Angeloni and Tsikouris, another
young leftist placed a small bomb in the women's lavatory of the U.S.
embassy. It exploded, damaging the washbasin irreparably. Alexandros
Giotopoulos spent the next thirty years in hiding under a false name.
Arrested in 2002 as the 17N terrorist group mastermind, he claimed his
fingerprints and the other evidence against him were planted by the CIA as
retribution for America's wounded plumbing. Based on how Tsikouris and the
PAM leadership were treated, it would be hard to quibble with the judges
who rejected Giotopoulos's argument. Revenge is sweet, but a sensible
state has other priorities.
The wisest advice for young diplomats I ever heard was a poem by
Christopher Logue, put to music by Donovan and then made famous by Joan
Baez:
Be not too hard for life is short
And nothing is given to man
Be not too hard if he's sold or bought
For he must manage as best he can
Be not too hard when he blindly dies
Fighting for things he does not own
Be not too hard when he tells lies
Or if his heart is sometimes like a stone
Be not too hard for soon he'll die
Often no wiser than he began
Be not too hard, for life is short
And nothing is given to man.
Top of Page
Athens
News articles from 2005
Brady Kiesling Home
