Four Years After The Assassination That Shook Greece
September 2017 marks four years since antifascist rapper and shipyard worker Pavlos Fyssas was murdered.
Photos: Panayotis Tzamaros / FOS PHOTOS
“Pavlos lives, smash the Nazis”, the crowd shouted every time a band went on stage to perform and technicians had to pause the music to make all the necessary adjustments in the setup.
On Monday evening, a small vacant lot opposite the port of Piraeus was filled with music and antifa slogans, in the memory of the late Pavlos Fyssas AKA “Killah P”, who was stabbed to death by Golden Dawn member Yorgos Roupakias, a night like this, four years ago.
Hundreds of people attented the concert, organised by Fyssa’s family and sang together in a compilation of rock and hip hop rhythms.
Fyssas wasn’t murdered as a result of “football disagreements” between fans, as established Greek media reported the first morning hours after the assassination. Nor he had any personal issues with his assassinators. The truth is that he was a shipyard worker and a rapper, who often through his songs degraded fascism.
The killers, the one who stabbed him and the rest that assisted the manslaughter, are members of the neo-Nazi party “Golden Dawn”. The stabbing resulted to major crackdown on Golden Dawn by justice and a total of 69 GD members are now on trial, for Fyssas’ murder and other crimes including the “formation of a criminal organisation”.
During the concert, campaign spots made by the initiative GoldenDawnWatch.org, a watchdog that reports from the court since day one, urged people to get informed about the course of what has been characterised as the “trial of the century” in Greece.
Earlier on Monday, a march took place in the narrow streets of Fyssas’ neighborhoods. It started from the spot of the murder, where a monument has been erected with Fyssas’ bust and carved lyrics from his songs on the stone.
A graffiti with his hip hop avatar was made on Sunday evening next to the memorial. His family and friends keep his memory alive by all means, not just to deal with the sorrow of their loss, but also to constantly remind the public that his assassination was a Nazi crime that affects Greek society as a whole.
As Fyssas’ mother, Magda, puts it in her interview for newspaper Kathimerini, “This trial is not for me, but for all of us”. Magda Fyssa, a heroic figure, is always present, standing bravely opposite to the killers of her child, defending his memory and consequently the memory of all the Nazi victims.
The march, organised annually by the Greek antifa movement, an unofficial anti fascist alliance of anarchists, leftists and trade unions, gathered this time more than 3000 people who demonstrated passionately.
Few clashes between police and young rioters took place during the demo and later close to the concert’s place. The tension ended with 3 injured TV crew members, a broken coffee shop’s window, and lots of tear gas that for a while brought tears and coughs to the concert’s attendants.
“We don’t need tear gas to cry”, said on mic one of the musicians on stage at that moment. However, this concert, organised solely by Fyssa’s family without any affiliations to political organisations, wasn’t a commemoration event. The poster that announced it, read: “How can you tolerate living with Nazis?”
Luckily, there are people who can’t. Some of them were gathered yesterday in Piraeus to honor Pavlos Fyssas and all the victims of Nazism, fascism, racism or white supremacism –equally absurd and dangerous notions and sadly re-emerging on a universal scale.
All of them, like Pavlos Fyssas, Heather Heyer from the US and Shehzad Luqman from Pakistan (who was also killed by GD in Greece, on January 2013) are always going to remind us the atrocities of the Nazis, whether they act like a gang, an army or a legitimate political party.
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