Anti-Americanism by Andrew Ross

Author:Andrew Ross [Ross, Andrew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780814775660
Publisher: New York UP
Published: 2004-09-15T05:00:00+00:00

10

The Beekeeper, the Icon Painter, Family, and Friends

“November 17” and the End of Greek History

Vangelis Calotychos

ON THE EVENING OF JUNE 29, 2002, an icon painter and a beekeeper took a stroll on the quayside at Piraeus, the port of Athens. The bomb in the icon painter’s hands exploded unexpectedly. He fell to the ground, critically wounded. The beekeeper fled into the night. Soon, it became clear that this was no ordinary bomb but a Pandora’s box that would bring to trial Europe’s most enduring terrorist organization, the Revolutionary Organization November 17 (17N).1 Since its appearance in 1975, 17N had been linked to twenty-three killings, including those of four Americans, countless bombings, rocket attacks, and a series of robberies. Twenty-seven years later, no member of the organization had been apprehended.

A gun dropped at the site was traced to a police officer shot in a bank robbery carried out by the notorious 17N on Christmas Eve, 1984. Two days later, the published photograph of the icon painter led Greece’s Anti-Terrorism Unit to two Athens apartments, which were raided and found to be stocked with rockets, guns, grenades, and revolutionary proclamations. In the meantime, police had announced that the icon painter’s fingerprints matched ones found on a bag left at the scene of a 17N assassination of a ship owner in 1997. The authorities pressed the hospitalized icon painter for a confession and informed him of provisions provided for by the Anti-Terrorism Law of April 2001, which foresaw the exchange of leniency to remorseful terrorists for cooperation in identifying colleagues and rooting out of a terrorist group.

In the days that followed, news reports maintained that the bomb in the dark was not a shot in the dark for Greece’s Anti-Terrorism Unit, which had reputedly been closing in on the group after twenty-seven years. The release of East Germany’s Stazi files in 1993 had revealed information about another terrorist group, ELA (an older, more prolific but far less deadly group that had collaborated with Carlos the Jackal), and this information had effectively forced ELA to cease operations since 1995. Lower cadre members of 17N had also been under surveillance since 1993, and consultations with French police had provided authorities with a convincing profile of the man eventually identified by police as the group’s leader. Events unfolded dramatically. Within days of the bombing, the police arrested the icon painter’s youngest brother, who was herding goats at the time, 2 and an older brother, a maker of traditional Greek musical instruments (bouzoukis), who, for days, had been accompanying his parents on hospital visitations to the icon painter. Both provided confessions to the authorities. A fisherman was hauled in; a schoolteacher, two cousins, three friends from the same village near Albania—seventeen in all—and, finally, in a careful police operation, one Alexandros Yotopoulos was apprehended on a quiet island in the Dodecannese, where he owned a conspicuous pink summer house. The son of Mitsos Yotopoulos, or “Witte,” who was second only to Trotsky in the worldwide Trotskyist movement

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