ATHENS — Andreas Papandreou has been dead since 1996, but his ghost still haunts Greek politics.
These days, prominent Greeks insist that their nation has abandoned the radicalism of the 1980s, when Papandreou was prime minister and seemingly bent on ruining Greece's relations with the West. An avowed Marxist, Papandreou routinely denounced the United States and went out of his way to embrace the world's pariahs. Within weeks of taking office in 1981, he opened an embassy in Cuba and invited terrorist Yasser Arafat to Athens. He flirted with Moscow. He courted Libyan dictator Moammar Khadafy and Wojciech Jaruzelski, Poland's military strongman. He periodically threatened to pull out of NATO, was unequivocally pro-Arab in the Middle East, and supported Serbia despite its atrocities.
 As prime minister of Greece, Andreas Papandreou courted numerous thugs and dictators, including PLO terrorist chieftain Yasser Arafat. |
But that was then, Greeks say; things are different now. Today Greece craves stability and warm relations with Washington and the European democracies. "Our main agenda," says Thanos Velemis, president of the Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy, an Athens think tank, "is to integrate into the European Union."
Greek politics have been roiled ever since Turkish commandos captured Abdullah Ocalan, leader of the Kurdish terror group PKK. Ocalan had been secretly sheltered at the Greek Embassy in Kenya; when the embassy put him in a vehicle and sent him to the Nairobi airport, the Turks seized him. Greeks were outraged — not that Greece had been protecting a savage killer but that it had failed to keep him out of Turkish hands. Three government ministers were sacked, and there were calls as well for the head of Prime Minister Costas Simitis.
Try to talk to Athens policy mavens about any of this, though, and they push the conversation back to Greece's drive to join the new European currency, the euro. They point with justifiable pride to the Simitis government's economic achievements: Inflation is sharply down, the growth rate is up, and both the deficit and the public debt have fallen as a share of GDP. And they insist that Greece's key foreign-policy goals are stability in the Balkans and close integration with the West.
Yet if it is clear that Greece has turned its back on the worst excesses of Papandreou, it is equally clear that Papandreouism is not quite a thing of the past.
As the Ocalan affair suggests, Greece continues to carry a torch for some of the world's bloodiest villains. Government officials refuse to label the PKK a terrorist organization, despite its long history of murder and mayhem. Some 30,000 people have died in PKK attacks; it has killed teachers, journalists, and children; its methods range from setting homes on fire to pulling drivers out of cars and machine-gunning them. Yet Greeks persist in seeing Ocalan as a freedom fighter, a stance that puts them sharply at odds with the United States and Western Europe.
There is no evidence that the PKK operates training camps on Greek soil, as Turkey routinely alleges. Still, no one disputes that the PKK raises substantial amounts of money in Greece, or that its political support runs deep. At the national convention of the ruling Socialist party earlier this month, delegates chanted, "Freedom for Ocalan."
The same party congress welcomed a special foreign guest with a thundering ovation. That guest was not one of Europe's left-leaning leaders, such as Britain's Tony Blair or the new German chancellor, Gerhard Schroeder. It was Papandreou's old favorite, Yasser Arafat. Granted, the PLO boss is no longer the international leper he was in 1981; he would receive a polite reception even in some Israeli circles. But there was no mistaking the delirium in the hall as the delegates cheered. This was not politeness; it was hero worship.
Greek policy in the Middle East is not as bitterly anti-Israel as it was in the 1980s. "We have good relations with the whole region," says George Papandreou, the soft-spoken foreign minister (and son of the late prime minister). "We want good relations with Israel."
Yet he does not say no when asked if Greece is moving closer to rejectionist Arab and Muslim states like Syria and Iran. Instead he asks, "Shouldn't we try to help encourage the forces of reform in Iran?"
But there is more to it than that. In an influential article in Commentary last November, American scholar Daniel Pipes wrote: "Greeks hate and fear Turks. And so, in the time-honored fashion of the Middle East, they seek to befriend other enemies of Turkey, whoever they may be."
Hence Greek military cooperation with Syria, which includes the exchange of information and sale of equipment. Hence the Syrian prime minister's description of Greece as the country friendliest to Damascus outside the Arab world. The previous Greek foreign minister said in 1996 that Greece's position on the Israeli-Arab question is nearly identical to Syria's. The close ties between Turkey and Israel, on the other hand, he called "an alliance of malefactors." That's the sort of remark Andreas Papandreou would have made.
Greeks, in short, feel tugged in two directions. There is no mistaking their commitment to European unity and economic reform. At the same time, they still despise the Turks, still chafe at American predominance, and still make common cause with rogues and dictators. Papandreou may be gone, but the politics he nurtured live on.
(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe).
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