At 9.15am on Monday March 3, 18 men, and a stony-faced woman, filed into a courtroom erected in Athens’s maximum security prison. By 9.20am this curious group — some suited and clean-shaven, others bearded and in casual sportswear — was seated behind a bullet-proof pane, looking up at a panel of judges behind a wooden bench.
To their left and right sat an array of lawyers; to their rear the widow of a murdered British soldier-diplomat, the widowed mayor of Athens, Dora Bakoyianni, and several hundred other men and women whose lives had allegedly been ruined by this ragged band. This was the moment Greeks had awaited for years — an event most believed they would never live to see.
Nearly 30 years after the leaders of Greece’s hated military dictatorship were tried in the same bunker-like chamber, the trial of November 17 — the Marxist-Leninist terrorist group born out of the resistance movement — had finally begun.
At 9.35am Greece’s ‘trial of the century†kicked off with Dimitris Margaritis, its bespectacled presiding judge, promising a ‘fair, democratic and humane hearing”. An almost palpable surge of excitement charged through the courtroom.
Blamed for more than 100 bombings, a string of armed robberies and 23 cold-blooded murders, no other group in the country’s tumultuous history was as ruthless, impenetrable or as seemingly invincible as November 17.
Unlike Italy’s Red Brigades or Germany’s Baader-Meinhof group, the band of self-styled ‘Robin Hoods” managed to outwit the combined Greek, United States and British counter-terrorist experts.
Aided by local police incompetence, it acted with impunity, targeting US diplomatic and military personnel, supporters of the colonels’ regime, Greek business tycoons, Turkish embassy staff and, in its last attack in June 2000, Brigadier Stephen Saunders, the British military attaché in Athens.
The ability to elude detection and arrest partly explains the extraordinary mystique that surrounded the group by the time one of its hit men was captured in a botched bomb attack that, in turn, ignited a rush of arrests last year.
For years many had marvelled at how the gang — which took its name from the date of the famed 1973 student uprising against the dictatorship — not only survived but survived long enough to taunt the police and goad the crowds.
Before the appearance of al-Qaeda, successive US State Departments had labelled the revolutionaries as the most dangerous terrorist organisation operating in the West.
Now, as more than 50 flak-jacketed police watched over the courtroom, Greek authorities appeared acutely aware that the hearing offered them the opportunity to redeem their reputation.
The trial is expected to take at least six months. About 333 people are lined up to testify for the prosecution and 70 for the defence — including, if he has his way, Carlos the Jackal, who collaborated with the group in the 1980s.
All bar three of the suspects — not least Alexandros Giotopoulos, November 17’s alleged French-born mastermind — have, at some point, admitted membership of the gang in the past six months.
This week the urbane white-haired former academic, who faces more than 1 000 charges but insists he has been set up by ‘the secret services of America and Britain”, sat languidly in the dock, flashing smiles at long-legged female journalists and his French wife.
Giotopoulos’s reserved demeanour was in stark contrast to Dimitris Koufondinas, the group’s chief assassin who has assumed ‘political responsibility” for all the murders, including that of Saunders, whom he shot dead as the diplomat drove to work.
Amid scenes of chaos as lawyers indulged in heated debate with the Bench, the lanky beekeeper defiantly stood up to denounce the level of security. ‘I want to know whether all of this was inspired by the Americans?” he demanded.
‘And so what if it is?” Judge Margaritis shot back. The exchange gave a taste of what is likely to come, diplomats said.
It is a measure of the Greek public’s profound disappointment in those now linked with November 17, that as the trial opened many were still asking who ‘the real powers” were behind the group.
But the same could not be said of the families of the victims — for decades perceived by unsympathetic Greeks to be deserving of their pain.
Few had waited longer for the trial to start than them. But unlike the hundreds who squeezed into the chamber to catch a glimpse of the accused, most said they could not bear to even make eye contact with the curious group in the dock. —