By Alkman Granitsas, Wall Street Journal
Two police officers patrol outside the Chancellery building in Berlin, Germany, 03 November 2010.
If Europe’s leaders didn’t already have enough reasons to worry about Greece these days, they have just found another: the country’s loony, left-wing extremists have discovered a new way to export their form of anarchy and terror abroad.
In the past two days, Greece’s far-left fringe group, the Conspiracy of Fire Nuclei is suspected of sending more than half-a-dozen mail bombs to various leaders and embassies around Europe and the world. They have targeted French President Nicholas Sarkozy, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, as well as a spate of foreign embassies in Athens including those of Switzerland, Russia and Chile, among others.
What they are after—and why they selected those targets–is still not entirely clear: theories abound in Athens these days. But Greece is no stranger to far-left groups and any observer of modern Greek history knows that the tradition of a radical (and frequently violent) left has deep roots in the country.
A bit of history. Soon after the end of World War II, Greece fought a bloody, three-year civil war that ended with the defeat of Communist forces and an outright ban on the Communist party. Despite the victory by the nationalist forces, fears of a Communist takeover persisted in the two decades that followed and eventually led to a military coup in 1967 aimed at forestalling the election of what the military considered a left-wing government–presided over by the grandfather and father of the current Prime Minister, George Papandreou.
The U.S.-backed military junta that ruled Greece for seven years, fell several months after it violently suppressed a student uprising at Athens’ elite Polytechnic University on Nov. 17, 1973 with the death of dozens—and perhaps hundreds—of students and bystanders. To this day, the events are still commemorated by an annual march on the U.S. embassy and many of Greece’s far-left extremists—whether they be anarchists, anti-authoritarians, disaffected, Molotov cocktail throwing youth, or anti-globalization protesters—claim their legitimacy from that uprising.
Greece’s most notorious urban guerrilla group–November 17—drew both its name and its inspiration from that uprising. In its 27 years in existence, the group assassinated 23 people in more than 100 attacks, including the killing of a Central Intelligence Agency station chief in 1975 and British Brigadier Stephen Saunders in 2000.
The group was eventually dismantled in 2002. But since then three other groups—arguably successors to November 17, and possibly with ties between them—have emerged. They include the Conspiracy of Fire Nuclei, Revolutionary Struggle and Rebel Sect. And since late 2008, when the Greek police shooting a 16-year old boy touched off a wave of student unrest, Greece’s motley terror groups have staged a series of bombing and other attacks on targets ranging from politicians, to police, to journalists—some of them deadly.
The groups have little popular support, have generally eschewed attacks on civilian targets or caused innocent deaths, and, in many cases, are still fairly amateurish in their methods. But the years of junta rule and the oppression of the Communists have left deep scars on Greece’s psyche. For example, to this day, Greek police are barred from entering university campuses–something which allows fringe, fire-bomb throwing anarchists to stockpile Molotov cocktails on the campuses before each protest, and to seek asylum on those campuses after the protests to avoid arrest.
Likewise, a series of politically driven police reforms in the 1980s and 1990s effectively eviscerated the police force leaving behind an unprofessional service that, for a time, was effectively confined to police stations and rarely ventured on to the streets.
Slowly, that’s changing. The police’s success in corralling the November 17 leaders (with the help of Scotland Yard and in the run-up to the 2004 Athens Olympics) was one measure of the changing attitudes. At the same time, proposals to end the university asylum laws is now openly discussed by Greece’s intellectuals and politicians, something that was an outright taboo until a few years ago.
And this time round the Greek police were not as feckless as they usually are. The fact that they arrested two of the suspects–red-handed and without bloodshed–is impressive. To their credit, they also managed to inform the embassies in the city in a timely manner and handle the controlled explosions of the suspect parcels with professionalism.
But the latest mail bomb campaign also shows a new direction by at least one of the groups, the Conspiracy of Fire Nuclei, and a new willingness to export their brand of terrorism abroad.
If Greece is to avoid becoming a pariah state of Europe, it’s going to have to stamp out such acts of terror once and for all.
