Issue No. 594
International
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11 - 17 July 2002 Issue No. 594 International |
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End of the line
The collapse of one of Europe's most notorious terrorist organisations is furnishing rare insights into the world of international terrorism. Iason Athanasiadis reports
As Greece's police continues its aggressive dismantling of the infrastructure of 17 November (17N) -- until now Europe's most elusive terrorist organisation -- new revelations are emerging about the group's possible links to other international terrorist organisations such as Al- Qa'eda, the Turkish Yev Sol group and even arch-terrorist Carlos the Jackal.
Savvas Xeros
An extraordinary photograph showing one of the key members of 17N dressed in traditional Muslim garb and scull-cap at a Muslim Brotherhood-organised event in Sudan has been splashed across the front pages of the Greek press in recent days. The man in the picture is Savvas Xeros, the son of a Greek Orthodox priest who worked as an iconographer and had travelled to Sudan at least three times before he was arrested last week.
Xeros was detained when a bomb he was carrying in the Greek port of Piraeus blew up prematurely, severely injuring him. He is suspected of being one of the top members of 17N and a massive arms stash -- comprising most of the anti-tank rockets, grenades and explosives that formed the organisation's arsenal -- was discovered in his house. His fingerprint records also match those found on the car used in the assassination of a prominent Greek-English shipping magnate a few years ago.
Aside from being an intriguing figure -- an iconographer and son of a Greek Orthodox priest who nevertheless thought nothing of sitting in the company of fundamentalist Islamists -- Xeros' links with Muslim Brotherhood members in Sudan raise all sorts of questions over who 17N's allies are and the level of cooperation between international terrorist organisations. The fact that terrorists such as Osama Bin Laden and Carlos the Jackal also sought refuge in the war- ravaged country has led to fevered speculation in Athens over whether 17N might have been infiltrated by Al-Qa'eda operatives or received ideological and logistical support from the Islamic group.
Greek newspapers have run rampant with conjectures over whether 17N worked alongside Carlos the Jackal in his assassination attempt on the Saudi ambassador to Greece in 1983.
The respected Kathimerini daily claimed 'impeccable sources' in saying that Xeros visited Sudan using his business activities as a cover and appeared to have been setting up an ice- importing operation there. He was in contact with a Sudanese businessman who is married to a Greek woman and, according to Kathimerini, "managed to spend a considerable amount of time in a camp run by the Muslim Brothers, an Islamist organisation from which the Palestinian group Hamas emerged as did leading cadres of Al-Qa'eda." So far, the Sudanese authorities have been wary in responding to contacts initiated by Greece's intelligence services.
Nikolas Voulelis, managing director of the Athens News Agency, strikes a note of caution. "It's an organisation that has been accused, at times, of having links with ETA, the Red Brigades and Stasi. But nothing has been proven."
The Marxist organisation has claimed 23 victims in three decades of killing with virtual impunity. Greek authorities have never arrested, killed, injured or even publicly identified a single member of the organisation. The name 17N alludes to the day in 1973 when Greek students barricaded themselves in Athens Polytechnic to protest against the CIA-backed right-wing junta that was viewed in US intelligence circles as a crucial bulwark against the Soviet Union's expansion into the Mediterranean. The colonels sent in tanks and carried out a massacre against the students. The dictatorship soon collapsed under the pressure of public anger.
17N emerged shortly after. Initially pursuing a radical Marxist agenda calling for an armed revolution against US imperialism, its targets were broadly in line with a public that was aggrieved by the links between the colonels' dictatorship and the American administration. 17N communiqués portrayed the organisation as a modern Robin Hood, punishing the rich on behalf of the poor. The organisation has increasingly complained about the insidious foreign influence supposedly corrupting Greek culture. Although its strike-rate has been low -- N17 has claimed credit for the murder of 22 American, Greek, Turkish and European diplomats, army officers and industrialists since gunning down Richard Welch, the CIA station chief in Athens in 1975 -- it is the only group, apart from Al-Qa'eda, never to have been successfully infiltrated. In 27 years of operations, none of its members has ever been captured, nor have there been any credible leads.
Voulelis suggests that the authorities' low success rate may be because of 17N's moderately high popularity with the Greek public. "To a great extent, 17N have been tolerated by the Greek public who were satisfied, after seven years of dictatorship, with the organisation's choice of targets," he says and warns that "Even the political establishment did not dare to oppose them openly for fear of courting the public's wrath. There were Gallup polls where approval rates for 17N's policies reached as high as 10 per cent. In some of their communiqués 17N even claimed to be the country's fourth political party."
But Greece's poor record in dealing with terrorism -- the most recent terrorist attack was the fatal shooting of a British brigadier called Stephen Saunders by 17N operatives in June 2000 -- may not be just due to Greek sloppiness in following up leads. Saunder's assassination was preceded, in early 1999, by the high-profile interception and arrest by Turkish special forces of Kurdish Worker's Party member Abdullah Ocalan while he was being escorted by Greek diplomats. In the summer of 1987, the United States accused Greece of harbouring Abu Nidal and other members of the Al-Fatah Revolutionary Council sparking off a row between the two governments.
The evidence of high levels of terrorist activity in Greece and 17N's uninterrupted action over three decades has led to persistent rumours that Greece's ruling socialist PASOK Party is linked to the organisation and that uncovering the identity of its top operatives would open a Pandora's box implicating most of the top echelons in Greek political life.
This conjecture was most recently aired this January by Thomas Niles, a former US ambassador to Greece, who claimed on the CBS programme 60 Minutes that the baffling lack of arrests so far can only be attributed to close top-level cooperation between the terrorist group's leadership and prominent Greek politicians.
Last week's breakthrough is bound to satisfy vocal critics in Britain and the United States who have criticised Greece's apparent inaction on the subject of domestic terrorism and who have questioned the country's ability to safeguard the 2004 Olympic Games.
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