NGO (Greek Helsinki Monitor) Report on Greece - Part 7
The dark side of the moon:
Greece’s human rights record

- Greek Helsinki Monitor and Minority Rights Group - Greece have been the first Greek Non-Governmental Organizations (NGO’s) to publicly use the term ‘Macedonian minority’ in Greece, to be followed, in 1995, by some other groups or individuals, too few though.

Greece’s human rights record is very poor when judged by traditional Western, liberal standards, but not very bad by Third World or even post-communist Central European standards. As Greece, though, has participated in the competent Western institutions like the Council of Europe since the beginning, one would have expected her to have adapted her human rights standards to the average Western, liberal ones. This is far from being the case, and the attitude of the other Western countries is partly responsible for it: whereas they were vigilant during the seven-year dictatorship in Greece (1967-1974), they have hardly looked at Greece’s human rights problems since the restoration of democracy in 1974, giving her the impression she can proceed with such a poor record unobstructed.
The first factor explaining Greece’s poor human rights record is historical and can be traced back to the creation and the early development of the modern Greek nation-state in the nineteenth and early twentieth century (Kitromilidis, 1992:50-8):
“Independence was achieved without the civil liberties and the civil rights (...) the vision of freedom remained unaccomplished. (...) In the course of the nineteenth century (there is) an antinomy between modernizing liberalism and pretentious and inflexible nationalism in the furthering of the demand for national integration. The study of this antinomy in the Greek political thought leads to sad conclusions. The deviation from the attachment to the rational examination of political problems and the defense of freedoms and the entrapment, on the contrary, in the authoritarian rationale of a highest bidding national intolerance which does not accept challenges and alternative approaches includes as a price of emagogy an ineluctable national disaster. (...) The passions of the national schism (...) resulted in a terrible intolerance and phanatism in Greek society, with as the first victim naturally the respect of individual rights and the rights of dissenters. (...) The defense of the right of dissent in Greek society often sounded like a cry of despair and isolated protest.”
The second factor is Orthodox Christianity, which has a central role in Greek political culture (Diamandouros, 1983:57):
“The concept of hellenicity in modern Greek history is inextricably intertwined with that of Orthodoxy, and (...) this twin conception of modern Greece has definite implications for the value structure of the society. (...) While, therefore, the overall influence of the Church within Greek society is declining, it still remains an institution which, whether directly or indirectly, continues to have an impact on the attitudes, beliefs, and values of the population and to act as a powerful mechanism of secondary political socialization.”
But, Orthodoxy and human rights are fundamentally incompatible, as Orthodoxy has yet to adapt itself to (in fact lose out to, like Catholicism) secularization (Pollis, 1993; for similar arguments see also Lipovatz, 1993):
“The historical origins of contemporary individual human rights lie in the natural law which (...) has been alien to Orthodoxy. (...) The implication for human rights of these sharp discrepancies between Catholicism and Protestantism on the one hand, each of which, in its own way, values the diversity and recognizes the Church as temporal, and Orthodoxy which dissolves the individualized person into the spiritual organic whole of Ekklisia, are profound. (...) Of crucial importance for the discussion that follows on Orthodoxy, the state and rights, is the contrast between the West where separation of Church and state prevails, even in states such as England where there is an established church, and Orthodox societies in which such a separation is alien. (...) In Western Europe the new nation-states (...) were an affirmation of secularism and liberalism. In sharp contrast in the Balkans and Eastern Europe nationalism and religion, particularly Orthodoxy, became intertwined. The construction of national identities among Orthodox Christians in the dismembered Empires invariably incorporated religion as a crucial component of the newly constructed nationality. The ethnos (nation) and Orthodoxy became a unity. (...) By contrast, in Western Europe nationality and religion are delinked; religion is not a crucial element of national identity. (...) The inexorable conclusion which flows from the above analysis is that individual human rights cannot be derived from Orthodox theology. The entire complex of civil and political rights - freedom of religion, freedom of speech and press, freedom of association, due process of law, among others- cannot be grounded in Orthodoxy - they stem from a radically different world view.”
Such is the influence of the Orthodox tradition even on widely considered ‘progressive’ legal scholars in Greece that (Pollis, 1993):
“It is in fact striking that Greece’s eminent scholar, Aristovoulos Manesis, and a staunch defender of rights, forcefully rejects natural law and its derivative natural rights as constituting the origin of the contemporary theory of rights. It is the state that is the source of individual rights for Manesis and not natural law.”
The consequence of such thinking is that (Pagoulatos, 1992:48):
“If though individual rights are not natural but are granted by the state (...) does this mean that the state (...) has the right to take these rights back? The answer of (...) profoundly antitotalitarian and genuine European intellectual (...) Constantine Tsatsos is - implicitly but clearly-affirmative”.
The third factor explaining Greece’s poor human rights records in recent years is the resurgence of nationalism since late 1991, as a result of the way politicians treated the ‘Macedonian problem.’ On the one hand and for the reasons explained above, Greeks grow up within a very intolerant political culture. On the other hand, Western societies in crisis often seek refuge in nationalism in what we have called its ‘primitive’ form (Dimitras & Lenkova, 1995), as Julia Kristeva has convincingly stated (Le Monde des Débats, October 1992):
“The depressed individual covers himself with a kind of shell drawing upon archaic identity values: land, blood, cult of language; whatever is most familiar, most maternal, most hot. For the nations, depression resulting from a fragmentation of the social fiber often leads to an apology of national origins which is fundamentally a discourse of hatred, a discourse unacceptable in Europe after the nevertheless prestigious history of our civilization.”
The combination, therefore of traditional intolerance and the primitive nationalist resurgence in times of deep social and political crisis in Greece, spearheaded by an external stimulus (the issue of the recognition of the Republic of Macedonia) led to nationalist hysteria: as a result, not only any dialogue on minorities could not take place but, for the first time in the post-1974 democratic period of Greece, heralded as the most liberal in its history, people were prosecuted for their opinions on the basis of laws introduced by dictatorships but never repealed since. Within fifteen months, twenty Greek citizens were tried and fifteen of them convicted for voicing dissenting opinions on ‘national’ issues, and the prosecution appealed the acquittal of the remaining five. Eventually, an amnesty law swept away most of these convictions or pending trials, with only two still awaiting their appeals in 1996 (Helsinki Watch et al., 1993; GMHMR, 1994a: 3-6).
These trials have led to growing international reaction, reminiscent of the dictatorship years. Amnesty International has sent letters and published at least two special reports on the trials (Amnesty International, 1992 & 1993); likewise for Helsinki Watch & The Fund for Free Expression (Helsinki Watch et al., 1993). In addition, letters were sent by the Minority Rights Group affiliates in Flanders, France, Denmark, and St. Petersburg, as well as by the Norwegian Organization for Asylum Seekers, Article 19: International Center Against Censorship, International Pen: Writers in Prison Committee. The International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights, as well as its Balkan national committees, has also issued public appeals. Finally, proposals for motions were introduced by the Rainbow and the Green groups in the European Parliament, but were never passed, while in the US Congress, the Congressional Committee to Support Writers and Journalists, made up of 16 senators and 76 representatives, has sent a letter too. It is characteristic that the new socialist Minister of Justice promised, in the fall of 1993, to abolish or amend the articles which led to those trials and convictions; he subsequently never did as he was reportedly told by his colleagues in the government that the major foreign policy problems Greece is faced with necessitate to keep those articles so as to quiet dissent.
More specifically, towards minorities, Greece’s official attitude can be simply summarized in one sentence:
‘in Greece there is only one minority recognized by international treaty, it is a religious minority, the Muslims of Thrace, it is blossoming and enjoying its full rights, and makes up some 1.5% of the total population.’
Naturally, anyone who claims the contrary is suspect, and, if s/he is a Greek may end up in court. Never mind that, implicitly, Greek jurisprudence recognizes as ‘allogenous’ (i.e. of non-Greek origin) all those who do not have a national consciousness, established on the basis of common racial origin, often but not always common language and religion, and especially common history and ideals (Armenopoulos, 1975:10), so that they can be deprived of their citizenship through article 19 of the citizenship code or be refused any job as kindergarten or primary school teachers. Nor that, in the 1950s, the same state ordered all Muslims in Thrace to call themselves Turks and not Muslims, threatening them with penalties if they did not comply (Helsinki Watch, 1990:51-3) and even in the 1990’s some schoolbooks call them Turks (Skoulatos et al. 1990:117).
Likewise, modern Greece has often recognized its Slav minority and its language as Macedonian Slav or just Slav: in the official map circulated in the post-World War I negotiations (Soteriadis, 1918), in at least one official Greek Foreign Ministry document of 1924 (the language was mentioned as Macedonian, Divani, 1995:228), in interwar newspapers (Margaritis, 1993:27) or official notary docu-ments (GHM and MRG-Greece have copies of them), in its publication of the 1920, 1928, 1940 and 1951 census results (Lithoxoou, 1995 - for the 1920 census where the language is mentioned simply as Macedonian and is distinct from Bulgarian (!)- & Dimitras, 1991:62 -for the other), in public statements by leading politicians like Venizelos and Papagos (MHRMG, 1991:10 & 16).
Moreover, when Ambassador Tsamados tried to explain to the Yugoslavs the Politis-Kalfof agreement, he argued that (Divani, 1995:139).
“(Greece’s) Slav populations should rather be considered as belonging to the Bulgarian (and not the Serbian) nation because both of their language and their national consciousness.”
In reality, the various linguistic, religious and ethnic minorities in Greece make more than 10% of the population, while the (semi) official data implicitly acknowledge 6%. Officially, the Muslims of Thrace are estimated at 120,000; also, the local authorities estimate the Macedonian-speakers at about 100,000, while Greece admits the presence of some 300,000 Roma; moreover, Greek authorities have no problem in acknowledging the presence of some 50,000 Catholics and of some 50,000 Jehovah Witnesses and Protestants, as well as a few thousand Jews: thus, we reach 6% of the population. However, the figures for the Muslims are exaggerated: our own careful estimates on the basis of the 1991 census and the area’s electoral behavior, confirmed by a state official who wants to remain anonymous, indicate that, in Thrace, we have at most some 50,000 Turks, 30,000 Pomaks, and 10,000 Muslim Roma; a few thousand Pomaks, Turks, and Muslim Roma are elsewhere in the country, while there are at least a few thousand Greeks with Turkish as their mother tongue. The official figures for the Macedonian-speakers and the Roma are underestimated according to knowledgeable experts, who put the two communities at 200,000 and 350,000 respectively.
Also, experts estimate that there are two 200,000-large communities of Aromanians (or Vlachs) and Arberor (or Arvanites) (see Banfi, 1994 for a summary of some of these estimates). No estimates exist, though, for the Old Calendarists. All these figures lead us to an estimate of the probable share of minorities at near 11%; to that, one should add at least 500,000 mostly illegal foreign immigrants in Greece, who thus make another 5% of the near 11 million inhabitants of the country.
The confusion is such that the existence of Macedonians with no Greek consciousness is implicitly admitted even in the official propaganda material the Greek state has been distributed in the 1990s. So, for example, one can read that, after the exchange of populations in the 1920s (IIPSS, c1991:8-30):
“the population of that area became purely Greek even though some of the inhabitants were bilingual. In other words, Greek Macedonia became an entirely homogeneous part of the Greek State.”
This homogeneity is belied, though, in the very next sentence:
“This became even more the case in the post-Occupation period (1945-1949), when almost all the bilingual inhabitants of the area whose national consciousness was not Greek moved to neighboring states.”
And a few pages later:
“In Greek Macedonia (...) a smaller group (...) had adopted the Bulgarian national identity or remained non-aligned” or “In the past, there were undoubtedly persons with a Slav national consciousness, who sometimes behaved as Bulgarians and sometimes as Slav-Macedonians.”
Two other booklets, with a very similar content but with interesting omissions, additions and corrections in the most recent one, also acknowledge the presence of Macedonians before the war and, the first, recommends that:
“the various national groups who live in the wide Macedonian space should be called clearly -and especially when abroad- as Slav or Yugoslav Macedonians, Greek Macedonians or Bulgarian Macedonians” (a suggestion omitted from the newest edition) (Christopoulos et al., 1991:26-8 & 45-7; MNER, 1992:32).
On the other hand, the Greek judiciary seems less confused and more determined to set the record straight: so, in rejecting the Macedonians’ demand to accredit their cultural association, the Shelter for Macedonian Culture, the Fourth Section of the Salonica Appeals Court made, in its 8 May 1991 decision no. 1558, sweeping statements ‘beyond any doubt’ about historical truth (exact borders of ancient Macedonia; Greekness and Greek purity of ancient Macedonians and of their language, their religion and their habits; the role of the area of Macedonia throughout history basing their arguments even on a Nazi tourist guide:
“according to a Guide of Salonica prepared by German historians and archeologists during the last (World) War (II)”), linguistics (character of the local ‘idiom’), geography (the city of Skopje belongs not to Macedonia but to Dardania), minorities (absence of particular Slavic culture from the area of Greek Macedonia, the Macedonian minority is ‘ethnologically non- of national independence and human rights cannot be the work of associations’.
These arguments are now part of Greek jurisprudence and can be used to prosecute other dissenters, although the case itself is pending before the European Commission of Human Rights.
There is no question that the Greek state’s human rights record is in violation of the many international conventions it has ratified, i.e. the various CSCE documents on the human dimension, the Council of Europe’s human rights conventions, and the UN human rights conventions. But even in her attitude towards international human rights conventions, Greece is behind all other EEC and West European countries. Namely, Greece has yet to sign or ratify the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights as well as its Optional Protocol (by the end of 1995, Turkey was the only other European country not having ratified it), and was the only Council of Europe member voting against the new Charter of Regional and Minority Languages in 1992 (although in the official record of the vote the Greek representative managed to change the ‘no’ vote to abstention).
To be Continued…
This report was prepared by Greek Helsinki Monitor (GHM) and Minority Rights Group-Greece (MRG-G)