Golden Dawn supporters demonstrate outside the Greek parliament in 2013, demanding the release of the group's leaders from detention. Photo: Milos Bicanski/Getty Images
They didn’t just work out together. The cops loved to vote for Golden Dawn as they rose to become the third biggest party in Greece in 2012, with police voters giving Golden Dawn heavy support in some areas, according to a 2012 analysis by Al Jazeera. But after the one-time street gang achieved a huge electoral breakthrough to win about 7 percent of the votes, which got them into the Greek and European Parliaments, the situation changed massively, said Parras.“When Golden Dawn was the biggest far-right party, then we had also a semi-open collaboration between [mainstream] government parties,” he said.And it's that sense of collaboration between the centre-right and far-right in Greece that has Golden Dawn’s victims wondering if these ties – between the parties, the powerful and conservative Orthodox church that often considers itself the arbiter of what is truly Greek, and the security forces – will allow Pappas to never serve his prison term. Six months after Pappas disappeared, the official line is he’s in Greece and will be found. But several people, from Greek security officials to regional intelligence officers who have worked war crimes cases in the Balkans, told VICE World News of their suspicions of more official involvement in his disappearance.Every weekend there were attacks on immigrants, hundreds of them never reported from what we can determine because of fear of having wrong papers.
An orthodox priest stands by a police van during a Golden Dawn-led protest against the construction of a mosque in Athens. Photo: LOUISA GOULIAMAKI/AFP via Getty Images
Asked how many people he personally knew who were attacked in such a manner, Ali suggested at least six personally and says he’s known of dozens more. It was common in a community with few Greek friends.“It’s safer now but the police I don’t like,” he said, complaining of pandemic lockdown checks. “They treat people in a very bad way.”We were protecting immigrants from the Nazis that the cops had sent after us.
A man helps a fellow protester during scuffles outside court in October 2020 as Golden Dawn's leaders are sentenced. Photo: ANGELOS TZORTZINIS/AFP via Getty Images
A mural depicting Pavlos Fyssas in Athens. Photo: LOUISA GOULIAMAKI/AFP via Getty Images
A silhouette of a man is seen walking in front of a fire during a rally to mark the fifth anniversary of the murder of Pavlos Fyssas. Photo: Ayhan Mehmet/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
Warrants were issued, and raids on offices and members’ homes found the hard drives and mobile phones that proved the longstanding but not publicly admitted ties between Golden Dawn and the mainstream parties.“There was millions of euros in the hands of a criminal gang,” said Skarmeas of the period between the 2012 elections and the murder of Fyssas, whose slaying he said represented Golden Dawn’s shift away from targeting immigrants to “focus[ing] on attacking the Greek Antifa-Communist movements.”Starting to understand why we figure Pappas won’t get caught? At home these guys are protected by the government but they can travel because they have lots of friends in the Balkans.
Police escort Giorgos Roupakias to court in 2013. Photo: Milos Bicanski/Getty Images
A monk looks toward Dionysiou monastery from a ferry boat before arriving on to the holy mountain of Mt Athos in 2016. Photo: Rick Findler/Getty Images
Vartholomaios, who like the Greek police, intelligence services, justice ministry and prime minister’s office, refused to speak on the record for this story, is the legally assigned abbot to the monastery and the cult of radical monks has been occupying his belfry since the 1970s. He cheered the October verdicts against Golden Dawn because he claimed the group had been using the place as a hideout and training camp, with even rumours of people being held prisoner. The legal battles and church schisms involved are literally too Byzantine to explain in detail, but Mt Athos, an isolated, rocky peninsula in northern Greece, is legendary or infamous depending on your religious point of view. Filled with more than a dozen monasteries and cut off from the mainland, it’s basically been controlled by monks in near-complete religious rebellion against mainstream church authorities since 2002. The community is so extreme that it can’t reconcile with the already hardline Greek Orthodox Church, which itself refused to stop offering communion from the same silver spoon to elderly people during the pandemic. The stated reason was Satan poses a bigger threat than COVID. Police did actually raid the monastery in February but missed Pappas. A Greek police official, speaking on background, believed Pappas had used the area as a hideout after he first went missing following his last October check-in with police before he was due to be jailed.We will of course look for him with any lead here in Greece. But I think that’s only if he comes back. He’s being hidden by his Serb friends.
Photo: Christos Pappas pictured in 2018, attending a rally marking the fall of the city of Constantinople. Photo: Panayotis Tzamaros/NurPhoto via Getty Images
“That's the official line and it's the truth,” said the Serb diplomat. “The unofficial line is we know that these radical friends of his helped him escape Greece and while he probably passed through Serbia, I don’t see much evidence he stayed, the most logical and safest thing for him would have been to move to remote areas of [Serbian-held] Kosovo or [the Bosnian Republika Srpska] to hide with the crazy monks. If we find him in Serbia we will arrest him but in those places I don’t know who can do it.”The Serbian political entities in Republika Srpska and Kosovo are considered much more nationalistic and work harder to protect fugitives than Serbia proper, according to multiple war crimes investigators who worked in the region.All three officials agree that, using monasteries in Mt Athos as a support hub, Pappas had moved to the area around the beginning of October.“By the time of the sentencing two weeks later we have intelligence that indicates he’d passed through [North] Macedonia into either Serbia or Kosovo, with repeated mentions he was dressed as a monk,” said the Greek police official. “This is consistent with Pappas having grown a beard while on trial and awaiting sentencing, we used to joke he was doing it for the church,” said Parras, the reporter who followed Golden Dawn for years.The Central European official agrees that Serbia wouldn’t kill itself looking for Pappas, but with enough pressure it would be perfectly willing to arrest him.Serbs really don’t like to give up Serbs. And Pappas might be popular with radicals but he’s not Serb.
Police deploy water cannons during a protest marking the verdict in the trial of Golden Dawn's leaders in 2020. Photo: ANGELOS TZORTZINIS / AFP) (Photo by ANGELOS TZORTZINIS/AFP via Getty Images
Photo: Milos Bicanski/Getty Images

