“The only way to stop the destruction of our nation is to fight hard in order to make our Fatherland a nation state again, a Greece that will belong to Greeks,” wrote Nikolaos Michaloliakos, the leader of Golden Dawn, in an article in March 2019. The racist crimes of his neo-Nazi organization, however, go way back, even before the killing of Pavlos Fyssas in September 2013, after which the Greek police arrested the leadership of Golden Dawn, as well as tens of its party officials and members who were suspected of being involved in criminal activities.
According to Golden Dawn Watch, an initiative to monitor the trial that began on 20th April 2015 against Golden Dawn, the neo-Nazi organization is trying to establish a regime of fear and keep its actions secret. The proceedings of the trial, though, have brought to light dozens of racist crimes, mostly against migrants and refugees.
To pinpoint and highlight the unseen criminality related to racist attacks in public, the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation-Office in Greece and HumanRights360 collaborated with 25 artists to create the campaign ‘X them out! A Black Map of Athens’. On 13th March we visited the opening of their exhibition at Technopolis City of Athens to find out what this map is about.
First, we talked with Mrs. Electra Alexandropoulou, Project Manager at the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation-Office in Greece. “Our concern was to make visible and to spotlight the racist attacks that have happened in Athens, Piraeus, and the suburbs,” she said. “We started with 50 assaults which included three murders, one of Fyssas, one of Alim who was murdered in 2011 in a big spate of violence, and the murder of Shehzad Luqman who was murdered one morning while he was going to work by bicycle. We wanted to spotlight the racist attacks so we started with 50 cases. We designed a QR code which is printed on a big orange sticker and we posted it on the street in the area where each assault happened. If you scan the code with your smartphone you are transferred to the webpage of the attack,” she added.
Then we asked Mrs. Louiza Karageorgiou, designer and cartoonist at the daily newspaper ‘I Efimerida Ton Sintakton’, what she felt while creating her illustrations for the campaign. “The attack that I illustrated reminds me of the murder of Zak Kostopoulos, which shocked me equally, because nobody intervened while it was happening. I wanted to highlight how important is to respond in incidents of violence. Nothing would have happened if people had intervened. In my opinion, that’s more shocking than the attack itself, the fact that people didn’t want to get involved. That’s why it’s very interesting to have a reminder in the city that such attacks happen all the time and that we must have our eyes open to prevent them,” she replied.
Lastly, we met Mr. Michalis Kountouris, cartoonist at ‘I Efimerida Ton Sintakton’ since its first publication. He told us that the image is a very powerful medium, it conveys the message easily, it helps us not to forget. “What must we not forget from today?” we asked. “That’s an exhibition about racism and xenophobia. We must not forget that,” he concluded.
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