[ALBSA-Info] The Daily Telegraph

[Agron Alibali]

THE DAILY TELEGRAPH(LONDON) 
November 29, 2001, Thursday 
Pg. 29 

Trust the Greeks to jail the wrong terrorists 

By BORIS JOHNSON 


There is a long history of tourists going to Greece and making fools of themselves. Byron defaced the temple at Sunium. Readers with long memories may recall the German who disgraced himself on Skyros, by punishing the municipality's two mascot pelicans with such affection that they dropped dead. Lawrence Durrell regularly profaned Corfu with his naked form; but nothing, for sheer eccentricity, beats the performance of the 12 plane-spotters at Kalamata. 

Here they were, on a package trip to the isles of Greece - the isles of Greece, where grew the arts of war and peace, where Phoebus rose, where Delos sprung. They had the chance to see the Parthenon in the autumn sunshine. Had their priorities been in order, they could have nodded off, with the help of Bacchus, on the slopes of Parnassus, or wandered the deserted beaches and looked out at the wine-dark sea. And what did they do instead, these crazy English? They packed their Bovril sandwiches and they filled up their vacuum flasks and zipped up their kagouls. They hopped into a minivan and they tooled off to Kalamata, a region distinguished only for its olive trees (many of which do not really exist, since they were invented to attract EU funding); and then they came to a particularly drab airbase, and stood for hours with their noses pressed to the wire mesh, writing down the serial numbers of helicopters. 

Yes, one can forgive the Greeks for a certain initial mystification. What one cannot forgive, three weeks later, when the quaint English habit of plane-spotting has been explained, is the way our harmless nerds have been treated. They have now been held for three weeks without trial, and face a further 10 days in chokey, while one Greek judge defers to another, and the Greek media urge the judiciary on no account to bow to foreign pressure. 

Suppose we were still locked in a Cold War with the Soviet Union; and suppose that 12 blinking English plane-spotters had been arrested at a base in Sverdlovsk. Even then, it is difficult to believe that the Russian authorities would have behaved with such mule-headed brutality. There is a woman among the party, Mrs Lesley Coppin, a grandmother of 51, who now faces another 10 days in the notoriously violent women's jail in Athens, in a dormitory of 14. The men describe their conditions as "filthy", and say they are sleeping on thin mattresses on a concrete floor. 

Look at the pictures of these people, rushed from court to prison, pale, manacled, haggard. Is it really possible to believe that they are agents of the CIA? Are these Greek judges a few olives short of a picnic, or do they really think that Mrs Coppin was on the point of ringing up Ankara? 

The Greeks will presumably retort that they must be extra vigilant after September 11. They will tell us that they are just doing their bit in the war against terror. If only that were credible. Contrast the Greek bullying of the Peloponnese 12 with the Greek passivity towards real terrorists. It is now 18 months since Brigadier Stephen Saunders, the British military attache in Athens, was gunned down by two motorcyclists, as he drove to work through the morning smog. Though responsibility for his murder was claimed by N17, a Marxist-Leninist terror group, there has been no success in tracing his killers. 

More amazing still, there has been no success, over the past 25 years, in finding any member of N17 - and this is a group that is responsible for at least 100 terrorist outrages and has killed 23 people. On the day of Brig Saunders's killing, James Woolsey, a former director of the CIA, said: "I believe there are people within the Greek government who know some members of N17." Given that the terrorists are thought to have emanated from the bowels of Andreas Papandreou's Pasok, whose heirs are now in power, that claim seems plausible. 

In one sense, of course, the Greeks are being outrageously inconsistent: toughing up our plane-spotters and failing to catch the killers of our diplomats. The real sadness, though, is that both are characteristic of the general Greek touchiness: a chronic and childish resentment about the role in the world of America, and of Britain, America's closest ally. 

Greece is the European country most fervently against the current war on terrorism. According to a recent poll, 30 per cent of Greeks believe that the Americans organised for the jets to fly into the World Trade Centre. Their idea, apparently, is that the Americans wanted an excuse to invade Afghanistan. An amazing 30 per cent of Greeks are prepared to express "understanding" for the suicide bombers (though presumably not the same 30 per cent who think the bombers were the Americans themselves). 

At a Uefa match in Athens, not long after the massacre, 30,000 Greek soccer fans jeered through the minute's silence, while the Stars and Stripes was later burnt in the stands. A recent poll found that 78 per cent of Greeks voting for centrist or Left-wing parties were anti-American, while 58 per cent of Right-wing voters were anti-American. 

You may think that a curious way to repay the country that has kept the peace in Europe for 50 years, and prevented Greece from going communist. But that is the way they think. It is time they grew up. 

Why should anyone take Greece's side in the dispute over Cyprus? Turkey is the country that has backed the Northern Alliance and helped to oust the Taliban. All the Greeks have done is burn the US flag, stage demonstrations shouting "Down with Bush the killer", and incarcerate, without trial, a hapless bunch of British plane-spotters. 

The Peloponnese 12 should be sprung, immediately, or else Britain should threaten to boycott the 2004 Olympics, if only on grounds of security. 

Boris Johnson is editor of The Spectator and MP for Henley 



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