tion site. But, despite the minister’s order, at the crucial moment these platoons were not where they were supposed to be. On 25 September 2013, a few days ater Fyssas’ assassination, in an interview to BBC, the manifestly most right-wing minister of Samaras’ (already very rightwing) government gave the following answer to a journalist who asked directly if there are ailiations between Golden Dawn and the police: “Very unhappy to say that to some point it’s true”.17 Of course, the minister added to this astonishing statement the remark that “some people within the police, thought they are not Nazis themselves, are fond of this particular party, because they have not realized how dangerous it is”. Obviously, he was trying to mitigate the disgrace of this political ailiation by downplaying the police oicers’ accountability. In other words, the problem was the public confession of the crime, not the crime itself. There is no point in trying to hide it: a rot had taken hold inside the Hellenic Police for quite some time. The mourning of the conservatives had to be profaned, and a Greek lad, “one of us”, had to be killed (the murder of a Pakistani a year earlier was not enough), before the boil could be lanced. Moreover, a police oicer who only happened to be at the crime scene had to identify the murderer and, above all, his motives. As she testiied: “[At some point, someone approached us, told us that he was a colleague and that] things had settled down. When we asked him what happened, he told us that there had been some kind of quarrel in a cofee shop between some people who were watching the football match, Olympiakos vs. Paris St. Germain, but they had already let and there was no problem. Let me add that the person who presented himself as a colleague was not a police oicer, but an external guard at Korydallos Prison”. This member of the special guards is the emblematic personiication of the Greek State: although he had witnessed the coordinated action of a Golden Dawn attack battalion (consisting of 30-40 people, according to the police oicer’s testimony), he saw it as “a quarrel between football fans”. This is exactly how it was reported the next morning by a private TV station that, through its keynote commentator (a fervent supporter of the neo-liberal restructuring) had a few days earlier advocated for a more “proper” Golden Dawn. A week ater the assassination, the developments in the Hellenic Police are shattering: irst, there is the sudden resignation of the police Inspector General for Southern Greece and the chief of the General Division of Sterea Hellas Region, both “for personal reasons”, according to the Hellenic Police communiqué. But the same communiqué also reads: “Following an order by the Minister of Public Order and Citizen Protection, the Chief of Police assigned to the Director of the Division of Internal Afairs, Police Brigadier General Panayiotis Stathis, shall conduct a thorough investigation regarding complaints published in the press about an active implication of police oicers in the activities of the party Popular Association – Golden Dawn and their possible participation in the perpetration of crimes ... The Chief of Police communicated to the Chief Oicer of the 17. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Z60O2QED4c MAPPING ULTRA-RIGHT EXTREMISM, XENOPHOBIA AND RACISM WITHIN THE GREEK STATE APPARATUS | 21

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