Nikos Plakias:
“I heard what you said, Kostas Bakoyannis, about what would happen if you or your children encountered Giotopoulos on the street. Imagine what I myself could do if I met Kostas Ach. Karamanlis or Christos Triantopoulos on the street. Giotopoulos served 24 years in prison; the two aforementioned individuals have not served even a single day.”
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Justice ceases to be a true institution when it is applied selectively. And when citizens realize that the state punishes the weak while protecting the powerful, the dangerous instinct of vigilantism is born. Yet vigilantism does not heal injustice; it merely multiplies violence and perpetuates the vicious cycle of revenge. The real political solution lies neither in terrorism nor in impunity, but in the universal and impartial application of justice to all.
Nikos Plakias lost two daughters and a niece in the Tempi tragedy. A terrible price. And, aside from his refusal to accept that the commercial train involved in the fatal collision carried some flammable substance — hence, logically, the massive fire that cannot be explained solely by the crash itself — he approaches with precision the other issues concerning this crime. And certainly, he did not become another Karystianou. He did not “play games where games should not be played”; he did not bargain with the dead bodies of his children for a handful of votes.
And today once again, he struck the target dead center. His remark about what he himself might do if he encountered on the street those he considers responsible for the murder of his daughters is indeed a correlation of substance and reflection. And with this as our starting point, we too shall comment today on the issues surrounding precisely this immense question: the administration of state-institutional justice (that is to say, professional justice) and that of vigilantism.
First and foremost, and once again as we have clarified so many times here, we do not accept as a political response to the absence of the rule of law, to injustice, and to crimes committed by members of the system, the selective assassination of those individuals. The reason is simple and understandable: such killings are not, and do not constitute, political solutions.
The ancient myth of the Lernaean Hydra, which grows another head each time one is cut off, is characteristic and sufficiently instructive. Particularly striking is the case of the assassination of Pavlos Bakoyannis, one of the most crushing examples against the arguments of the supporters of armed popular violence. The New Democracy MP at the time should have been the last person on any “execution list” of systemic state figures. Especially considering that, during that same era, one of the leading representatives of the elite “white-collar” establishment was the notorious fraudulent banker George Koskotas. Yet the “Koufontinas-types” literally chose a “lamb” to lead to slaughter merely to issue a proclamation. There is no need to repeat here what we have already exhausted in our analyses concerning the significance — and whether it can truly be called political — of the actions of those self-described as “urban guerrillas.”
On the other hand, the case and the timing of the release from prison of the alleged leader of 17N, who served nearly 24 years in prison as the mastermind behind 17 murders, and the impunity of the government culprits, also the masterminds behind nearly 700 murders of our fellow human beings in Tempi and Pylos are indeed shocking matters. Chief among them, in our estimation, is the fact that the lives of the 57 dead GREEKS in Tempi are not valued equally with those of the 600 (and perhaps more) dead NON-GREEK MIGRANTS in Pylos. No one speaks about them. Not even the relatives of the dead from Tempi. As though the “failure to rescue from mortal danger” — as defined by the Greek penal code itself — were not a crime. THE CRIME OF PYLOS IS EQUAL TO, IF NOT WORSE THAN, THAT OF TEMPI.