There is a place by the sea in Piraeus, the port of Athens, that is named “Tourko-limano” [“The Turkish Port”,  in Greek, accent on “i”]. In essence it is a small almost circular cove at the foot of a low hill. The diameter of the cove is about 174 yards. The top of the hill 280 feet above the sea level.

The history of the cove and the hill, as all history, is quite complicated. Part of that history concerns the name of he cove. In ancient  Greece, the name of the hill and the cove was “Mounichia” [Moonichia, accent on the second “i”]. In the time of the Bysantium the name was “Fanari”, as there was a kind of a lighthouse at the entrance of the cove, similar to one in Constantinople. After the Turks were driven  out of Greece in 1821 the name was changed to the above mentioned “Tourkolimano”. Then in 1925 for the Greek intelligentsia that name was considered intensely unpatriotic and they returned to the “sacred” ancient name of “Mounichia”. Unfortunately, for those fervent “patriots”, the name could not stand in the contemporary Greek society, as the first part of the name “Mouni-” in modern Greek means “vagina”. Finally, during the 1967-1974 military dictatorship the Mayor of Pireus, the owner of an advertising company, decreed that the name should be “Micro-limano” [“The Small Port”].

Given that the cove is a very picturesque and nice place, through the ages it has attracted the Greek inhabitants and the occasional conquerors of Athens, especially on sunny leisure days, for example the conquerors Nikanor and Kassandros, two rather brutal Macedonian associates of Alexander the “Great” [the aggressive conqueror par excellence]. By the way, the recent almost daily hullabaloo that the tomb excavated in Macedonia at Amphipolis could belong to one of the above two conquerors of Athens, that took place about three hundred years before the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ, putting aside the effort to disorient the Greeks politically, is a sign of the sad condition of the world.

For most of the twentieth century the rim of the cove had been occupied by nice small restaurants that offered fresh fish of all kinds. The clientele were mostly upper middle-class Athenians, as well  as powerful people of the economic and political elite who usually hosted foreign dignitaries, etc.

[Parenthesis: About 48 years ago, as I was driving on a street just above the “Tourkolimano” cove, I noticed on my left an excavation in progress for the erection of a multistory apartment building. The slope of the hill above the cove is quite steep, reaching close to 45 degrees. As a soils-civil engineer, I was, instinctively, terrified  by what I was observing, stopped the car, approached the foreman, and told him that the house, immediately above the area of the excavation was going to slide and topple into his work-site. I do not know what went through the foreman’s mind. Maybe he thought I was just a busybody. Anyway, not very many days later, a lady called me on the phone and in a panicky voice informed me that the house  had indeed toppled into the work-site beneath and would I please help her as an expert in the upcoming trial that inevitably was going to take place. There were no people in the house.

The lady was a rather rich woman who had become an entrepreneur building multistory apartment buildings. To this day I do not know how the lady found who I was and which was my phone number. I helped her at the trial. She said she was grateful.

The lady built the apartment building, sold the apartments and probably made a couple of million dollars. The people that bought them for about 200,000 dollars per apartment most of the time got a bank loan. Today to survive they have to sell that home for peanuts. The buyers inevitably will be international funds, as out of 10.5 million Greeks about six million are at or below the poverty line. Athens today is almost a continuous horizontal concrete slab consisting of the roofs of multistory apartment buildings like the one mentioned above. For more on this matter there is a ZNet article of mine, “The MIT Offspring”, of December 10, 2011. End of the Parenthesis.]

Today, to be part of the, “made in the USA”, modern times the “Tourkolimano” cove was enriched with those extremely noisy and dangerous establishments called “recreation centers”, or “bars” or even “cafeterias”.

On November 21, twenty-two days ago, an Albanian man, in his early thirties stood in front of such a “cafeteria” at Tourkolimano, which was full of about 100 young Greeks, aged from 16 to 26 and started shooting at the young people with a Kalashnikov assault rifle. There were more than 15 people injured. Also, while shooting he exclaimed, “I will kill you all” and shouted insults at them; people who were unknown to him.

There were no deaths by sheer luck and because the young Greeks plunged on the floor while the Albanian kept shooting horizontally.

Ignoring any “professional” analyses of the motives of the man, one thing is immediately obvious. The man was full of hate against ordinary Greeks, but he was not afraid of the police or the Law. Both sentiments are rather easy to interpret. For him ordinary Greeks are “racists” against the Albanians, which is true. The police and the Law, for most crooks, are “familiar” entities, which holds, also, for the Albanian. The Greek police knew who was the shooter, as there was a clear video of him during the incident.

Arber Bako, the Albanian shooter, had a quite rich history of his contact with the Greek police. The police knew that Bako had already done three similar attacks and that in one of these attacks he had killed a man.

What happened next was incredible but not unexpected. First, the police leaked the name of the Albanian, possibly, “warning” him that he better hide. Second, the prosecutor did not allow the publication of the photo of Bako, claiming that the Law demanded that he should be… contacted and be asked if he gives permission to have his photo published, so that his privacy rights should not be violated. Thus, Bako got a couple more days to get out of the country through the porous Greek-Albanian border. The former Minister of Justice, who had introduced the Law, declared that the Law referred to condemned or arrested people not fugitives. Almost a few hours after the publication of Bako’s photo, he was arrested, with the help of people who saw the photo, as he was hiding in Athens.

Bako’s very sincere and very intelligent defense for his act was that he remembers everything but he does not remember the shooting, because he was … drunk, although  there is the video showing him walking proudly and agily as he approached the cafeteria carrying the Kalashnikov.

The present Minister of Justice, Haralambos [Greek Christian name, meaning “shining with joy”] Athanasiou [Greek surname, meaning “immortal”] was a high ranking judge or something, turned politician, is a very conservative person, is a member of the present extremely rightist government, and his prominent physical characterisric is his intensely nasal way of speaking. His way of interpreting the Law, besides the above mentioned case, can be judged also by his handling of the Romanos case [see my next article in a few days].

[Note: In his recent book, “The Nazis Next Door”, Eric Lichtbau mentions that a man  from North Caucasus, named Soobzokov, accused as a Nazi war criminal, who lived in the US and worked for the CIA, “had picked up his CIA code name: Nostril …” while working for the ‘Company’ in the Middle East. Given our great respect for the CIA and its humanitarian work, we borrow the code name “Nostril” to avoid the cumbersome Haralambos Athanasiou for the Greek Minister of Justice, from now on, on the basis of his nasal articulation. End of Note]

The process for “constructing” a criminal like Arber Bako cannot be examined here. It is much too serious a matter which  has to do with deep thinking in fields starting with the social systems and reaching anthropology and what is by now called social psychology. However the behavior of the police, worldwide, is a rather approachable and equally serious matter. A brief description of a policeman, in his own words, can be unearthed from the famous book “Working”, of 1972, by Studs Terkel. The policeman, Vincent Maher, says: “I’m chastised for being brutal. … I’ve been accused of being a bigot, a hypocrite, and a few other niceties. … My sons adore me … When I used the belt on them I’d always  tell them why… There’s no resentment, no animosity. It’s just an understanding that I lay the law down. There are rules and regulations.” However, Studs Terkel, being Studs Terkel, trying to offer some optimism, in closing his book, he has another policeman, Tom Patrick, talking, who says: “I pulled a kid out of the pond, drowned. A woman  asked me, ‘What color was he?’ I said, ‘Miss he’s ten years old. What difference does it make what color he was?’ ‘Well, you pulled him out, you should know.’ I just walked away from her.”

Is this our humanity?

No! The majority of ordinary people are kind, honest and benevolent, even if many of them are apolitical.

The solution: raising their social consciousness.

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