This is our weekly round-up from Greece.
 

The Golden Dawn trial at second degree has resumed after a summer break. This week’s hearings were marked by the testimony of the murdered antifascist Pavlos Fyssas’s mother, Magda, and the nazi salute of a Golden Dawn defense lawyer. On the same day, neonazis attacked leftists and pupils in an Athenian suburb.
 

Two boats carrying migrants sank off the shores of two Greek islands on Wednesday night. Dozens were left dead, with bodies floating at sea even two days after the shipwreck.
 

At Kythira island, though, a rescue operation set up by citizens and local authorities, who literally improvised, managed to save some 80 lives. The contribution of one citizen, in particular, proved most critical.    

Nazi salute in courtroom goes unpunished

It was on 15 June that the Golden Dawn trial on second degree had started. It shall be remembered that dozens of neonazis had been sent behind bars when, in October 2020, the court concluded in a landmark decision that Golden Dawn was a criminal organization. 

The trial resumed on 27 September, after the summer break. On Friday, a most important testimony took place: that of Magda Fyssa, the mother of the victim,  anti-fascist musician Pavlos Fyssas. Mrs. Fyssa has turned into an antifascist symbol due to her multifaceted, tireless, persistent, and courageous fight against her son’s murderers.    

In her testimony, which continues on Monday, Magda Fyssa described what happened the night of 17 September 2013, when Golden Dawn murdered her son in the Piraeus suburb of Keratsini. 

She described how she ran into the hospital where her son had been taken, the doctor took her aside, gave her a pill, and told her he was dead and they couldn’t do much as he had been stabbed by a professional.   

“With all the courage I had been left with, I asked to see him. They took me to the mortuary. I went and saw my son. I tried to warm him up so that he would get up. He was not scared, he was asleep. Unfortunately, he was dead.”

Then, Mrs. Fyssa described the scene of the murder according to what she was told from two eyewitnesses: Pavlos’s girlfriend, Chrysa, and his friends. 

As to the police stance, Mrs. Fyssa testified what she knew from Chrysa. 

“Chrysa was dragging the policemen to go to the spot [of the stabbing]. At some point one of them went there. Pavlos had already been stabbed and they tried to arrest him. He rolled his T-shirt up and said ‘he stabbed me, will you also arrest me?’ And then the policeman turned to the murderer and said: ‘OK, but knives are just too much.’ Eight policemen were there, they did not act at all earlier.”

In an incident that marked the hearing and caused outrage, convicted Golden Dawn member and MEP Yannis Lagos attorney, Konstantinos Plevris, gave a nazi salute in the courtroom, in front of the presiding judge. He was looking Magda Fyssa straight in the eye when he did that.  

Plevris is a unapologetic fascist and Holocaust denier. He has always participated in and led fascist political parties and associations and written relevant books. He is the father of Health Minister Thanos Plevris.   

His salute was triggered when Mrs. Fyssa stated: “Do you really mean it, that Lagos is a political prisoner? Political prisoners would be turning in their graves.”

The courtroom applauded. Plevris said there would have been no such ridiculous applause in a courtroom if it was a trial taking place abroad. 

“Would you dare to do the nazi salute if abroad?” Mrs. Fyssa asked him, and then Plevris gave the nazi salute. 

What did the judges do? Well, nothing. They left the courtroom for things to calm down, then they returned, pretending to have seen nothing. 

Plevris then asked the court to protect him, as “they threaten me and wait for me to leave to attack me.”

Prosecution (lawyer Papadakis): Did you forget the nazi salute?

Plevris: What I did is not forbidden by law.

Presiding judge (to the audience): Applauding is forbidden. Whoever applauds will be expelled. 

Prosecution: Nazi salutes, also [are forbidden].

Presiding judge: I didn’t see anything like that… Everybody should facilitate the procedure. There is tension. Let’s proceed. 

Plevris had also done the nazi salute in the previous hearing. 

Only the Athens Barristers Association has ordered an investigation into Plevris Nazi salutes. 

Plevris' act has been captured on camera and went viral on social media, with people reacting strongly.   

His son, the minister, did not make any relevant statement. 

Friday’s hearing concluded with the court rejecting convicted Lagos request to suspend his prison sentence. On Monday, Mrs. Fyssa’s testimony will be continued, while Pavlos Fyssa’s father and sister will also testify.  

Meanwhile, the day Mrs. Fyssa testified, a group of 15 neonazis had attacked leftists, anti-racists, and pupils when the latter were distributing leaflets calling people to the anti-fascist march which took place outside the court. They verbally attacked journalist and Marousi local council member Afroditi Fragkou, while they kicked and punched another person.

They were shouting “Golden Dawn,” “Fuck KNE” (the Communist Party’s youth wing) and “Greece only.” 

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Two deadly shipwrecks

Two new tragic incidents took place this Wednesday night at the Aegean Sea.

Boats carrying refugees sank off the shores of Lesbos and Kythira islands. Dozens of people died. 

Eighteen people died after a dinghy carrying circa 53 refugees in total sank 100 meters off Lesbos around 11 o’clock Wednesday night: sixteen women, a man, and a teenager. Ten people are missing. 

Another ten women were rescued - four of them had been trapped in a rugged spot. They were transferred to Lesbos hospital. In total, 18 people had been rescued. 

The dinghy is estimated to have left the Ayasmat region, close to Aivalik, Turkey, late Wednesday night, under strong gales.  

Turkish fishing boats allegedly escorted the dinghy carrying migrants into Greek territorial waters, survivors of the wreck told Greek authorities on the island of Lesvos.

The dinghy was escorted by two or three fishing boats from the moment it set off from a village near Ayvalik on the Turkish west coast into the Greek territorial waters off Lesvos, survivors said.

The fishing boats had flanked the dinghy thus cutting off wind and strong waves and they could not perceive that there was the rough sea, they reportedly said.

Just two hours before the Lesbos shipwreck, another boat sank off the island of Kythira, south of Peloponnese, in a scene that reminded me of a horror movie.

The boat crashed onto a notoriously rocky area east of the island’s main port of Diakofti as winds were up to 63mph (101km/h). Local media said about 100 people were thought to have been crammed onto the sailboat, and that passengers screamed for help as the boat foundered and sank.

By Thursday morning, in a dramatic operation carried out by local citizens and authorities, 80 had been rescued, of whom at least 13 were taken to Kythira’s hospital: 62 adults (55 men and 7 women) and 18 children. 79 of them are from Afghanistan and one is from Syria.

Later, the man from Syria was considered to have been the trafficker and was arrested.

“The sea was beating them as we do with octopuses,” Kythira mayor Stratis Charchalakis said in an interview. “I have no words, five people died in front of my own eyes.” 

He said the dinghy sent SOS around 8 pm, under dreadful weather conditions. The migrants were carried away by the waves and the boat crashed onto rocks as high as 15-20 meters. “The waves swallowed them and they were lost within five seconds,” he added. 

The boat had left the Turkish coast for Italy. Survivors said they paid an average of 5,000 dollars for the passage and that they were told that no more than 40 people would be on board.

Two days after the tragic shipwreck, bodies of dead migrants were still floating in the sea - and anyone could see them. Locals reported to the daily EfSyn that they could see the corpses of seven people - most of them women, from what they could tell.  

Port Authorities told EfSyn that they could not yet collect the bodies due to adverse weather conditions.  

Meanwhile, relatives of the migrants and refugees had arrived on the island from abroad, from countries like Finland and Germany. They could see the corpses of their loved ones floating. 

According to EfSyn, even volunteers had come to the spot stating they were ready to dive and collect the bodies. The newspaper published a video with the brother of one of the dead (his body uncollected), who had arrived from Finland with two relatives and stated that his brother’s wife and three children, 20, 19, and 12 years of age, were rescued.  

“What a hybris for human life,” a local told EfSyn who witnessed the tragedy from the first minute. He accused the Coast Guard of “falling immeasurably short of the circumstances.” 

Finally, the macabre operation started on Saturday evening, when the bodies of four men and two women were collected. It was expected to continue on Sunday. 

The good news of the week 

If 80 people were saved from the dramatic shipwreck in Kythira, it was mainly due to one man: local citizen Michalis Protopsaltis. 

The very minute he heard that a boat with 100 refugees had crashed on the rocks just outside the port, Protopsaltis, who owns a crane, immediately drove the crane to the spot. A makeshift rescue operation was promptly set up with the help of other locals, and it was with this crane that refugees were lifted and finally saved.  

With his eyes misty, he described what he saw and did when he arrived on the spot: 

“I saw people being swallowed, falling from the cliff, drowning. At a ‘shelf’ of the cliff, 90 people were crowding. We managed to save eighty. If we were a bit late, more would have died as the waves were huge,” he said. “We brought a big crane with a lorry, we tied to it a big bag, with which we carry building materials, and with long belts, we were dropping it down. Then one or two castaways would get in, depending on the waves, and we were lifting the bag up to the surface. It was an unorthodox way, yet it saved lives.”

Protopsaltis later wrote on Facebook:

“We have great difficulty in realizing what we experienced that night, all of us that were present at Diakofti. People were being lost in front of our eyes, tragedy, hell! We should shout it out loud so that those who board so many people in these kinds of boats start getting a grasp. We saved 82, we don’t know how many died. We should tell and show people that the Kytherians ran to the rescue, cause we hear that we, the Greeks, sink boats in which unfortunate people have been forcibly boarded. Without the immediate intervention of the authorities and the citizens, all [of these migrants] would have been lost.” 

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