A family affair
The November 17 story is the stuff of legend. In the right hands, it may one day rank as a minor myth, a small, deformed but distinct twig on the huge tree of Greece’s boundless collective unconscious. At heart, it is a family story. Like most family stories it is a tragedy, like most tragedies it is a family story. But the family can be detected at several levels: On one, several brothers and their close friends were at the heart of the terrorist group’s operations. On another, Greece, because it is a small country occupied by busybodies, is like a large clan, where many individuals are shaped by their family history, by the sorrow sown among the relatives of the victims. On yet another level, Greece is like the wretched family with a violent, psychopathic son whose activities cannot be kept within the confines of the home after he has gone out and killed several friends and neighbors, all in the name of some dark mission. Let us look at the protagonists of the play as it has emerged over the past three weeks, 21 days that changed Greece and may allow it to finally put behind it many of the complexes left by the military dictatorship of 1967-74. Through the mists of mystery that had swirled round the founding members of November 17 since 1975, Alexandros Yotopoulos emerged suddenly on Thursday. Police detained the tall, white-haired 58-year-old on a hydrofoil as he was about to leave the little island of Leipsoi, where he and his companion of many years, a French woman, had a holiday home. He was going under the assumed name of Michalis Economou, but this turned out to be fake. He admitted his identity to anti-terrorism squad officers before dawn the following day. But he confessed to no crimes. His fingerprints were found in one of the November 17 hideouts, the one in Kato Patissia, Athens. It is fittingly ironic that they were on some proclamations with which the terrorist group would vilify its victims and try to justify its murders. In other words, Yotopoulos was caught by his proclamations. Similarly, the family ties of many gang members kept the gang safe while no one was caught, but when the first mishap occurred, police could quickly race through the group because, in the end, everyone seemed to know everyone else. Police had plucked out the brains of November 17, even if other founding members might still be at large and some current operatives on the run. Yotopoulos’s identity became known on the same day that two Xeros brothers, Christodoulos, a 44-year-old maker of traditional musical instruments, and Vassilis, a 28-year-old motorcycle mechanic, had confessed to their involvement in dozens of attacks by the group, including 11 murders. A third alleged operative, a 26-year-old musician who had recently joined the group, also confessed to a bombing, a robbery and the renting of one of November 17’s hideouts. These three were the first suspected members of the group to be formally arrested and charged, after nearly 27 years and 23 murders by November 17. But they were just the hands and the feet of the beast that appears to have been created by Yotopoulos. For nearly two years, police had been trying to locate this man, because his profile (to use a fashionable term) made him a likely candidate for starting an extreme left-wing terrorist group. As a student activist in France, where he was born in 1944, Yotopoulos was a proponent of the armed struggle against the Greek dictatorship. That was a credible option at a time when the regime in Greece was illegitimate, the result of a violent overthrow of the government in 1967. A Greek military court sentenced Yotopoulos to five years in prison, in absentia, after finding him and three other comrades guilty of trying to recruit people for a resistance group in 1971. Many other young people committed to democracy chose to organize themselves in groups and work against the dictatorship. The biggest and most spontaneous of these uprisings was the occupation of the Athens Polytechnic which ended on November 17, 1973, when the junta used tanks and troops to break into the grounds of the building, killing many. The heroism of these students is commemorated annually and every city and town has its own Iroon Polytechneiou – Heroes of the Polytechnic – street. But for Yotopoulos and a few others, the fall of the junta and the restoration of democracy in July 1974 was nothing more than a changing of the guard of the bourgeois regime. They formed «armed groups» to punish those involved with the junta and to work toward a revolution along the lines of a Third World liberation movement, leading to the end of the US military presence in Greece and the country’s withdrawal from NATO (this was before Greece joined what is now the EU, another bugbear). One of these groups usurped the name November 17, about a year after its first members murdered the CIA’s station chief in Athens, Richard Welch, in December 1975. The pattern was set – this new group was both deadly and wise to the use of symbols. It knew that Welch’s murder would be seen by many as a strike against injustice and «imperialism,» feeding off the popular anger at Washington’s support of the junta. The choice of the next targets, security officials who had been cashiered because they had tortured prisoners during the dictatorship, was a further sign that November 17 would work to appear as a popular avenger. Other groups were active at the time, notably the Revolutionary Popular Struggle (ELA), which had started operating before November 17 and which was quickly jolted by public reaction to its burning down department stores in central Athens in which many people lost their jobs and three guards were burned. This may have gone down well in Germany when the Baader-Meinhof gang set off bombs in department stores, but in Greece terrorism could get away with murder only if the victim was seen as a symbol. November 17, for the most part, managed to do this, achieving a level of public tolerance that was quite stunning. In the late 1980s, 6 percent of respondents in an opinion poll said they would vote for the group if it contested elections, and last year about 24 percent said they agreed in general with its positions. The group did this by selecting its targets, by making an effort to prevent injury to bystanders (killing the first one, Thanos Axarlian, in July 1992) and by sending long proclamations to an eager press, trying to justify its actions by demonizing the victims. All this time, Alexandros (or Alekos) Yotopoulos had disappeared. And the most amazing thing was that while November 17 went on its merry way, killing people, intervening in the country’s domestic and foreign policies, alienating allies and constituting a sinister, mysterious force on the social and political landscape, no one was looking for Yotopoulos, or anyone else who might have been the gang’s leader. Communism collapsed, the revolution never came, urban guerrilla groups in the rest of Europe had been wiped out. In Greece, almost everybody (not least members of the proletariat) had a cell phone, a holiday home and a huge debt to the bank, and still November 17 hung in there. Alexandros Yotopoulos, living under the name Michalis Economou, was leading the charmed life of a middle-class Greek. He and his charming French companion had an apartment in the middle-class district of Vyronas and a lovely holiday home on Leipsoi in the Aegean. He probably did not owe anything to the bank, though, because unlike those in whose name November 17 claimed to speak, November 17’s gang members would simply rob banks and cash delivery vans whenever they had a liquidity problem. They were wallowing in cash, with even junior members apparently buying property whenever they fancied. The power granted by the illusion of being invincible and important had corrupted them beyond the norms of even the corruption that they claimed to be fighting. But what kept Yotopoulos going when democracy was blossoming in Greece, when any sane person would have known that his war was over? When his former comrades in arms were trying to make do in a changed world? Perhaps the only answer can come from the sphere of psychology. Those who knew Yotopoulos in France said that he was arrogant and egocentric and obsessed with the legacy of his father, Dimitris Yotopoulos, a leading Trotskyite in the early 1930s. Leon Trotsky had used similar words to describe the elder Yotopoulos when the Greek was international secretary of his movement. Dimitris Yotopoulos died alienated and shamed by his former comrades because he had sided with the Greek National Army against the Communists in the civil war of 1946-49. In other words, the left-wing leader came to congratulate the nationalist forces on their victory, which was achieved with massive American aid. Alexandros Yotopoulos appears (in an adolescent moment of self-assertion that seems never to have ended) to have decided never to compromise, never to lay down his arms and change sides as his shamed father had. On his own, with the Xeros brothers and other junior partners rampaging across Athens, Alexandros Yotopoulos comes across like an isolated angel of death living a heroic life of his own imagination. Like Milton’s Lucifer, he chose to reign in hell rather than serve in heaven. Our collective madness, and our responsibility, is that for too many years, no one thought to deflate his dream, to stop the killing, to let justice and democracy into the darkest corner of our land. Turkey needs to pass some of the reforms before October, when the EU is due to issue a report on Turkey’s progress and before December when a EU summit could set a date to begin membership talks with Turkey.
