To Many Greeks, Clinton Visit Is a Slap in the Face

Greeks, who once worshiped a god of hospitality, still take pride in their generosity to guests. But the Anti-Power Reception Committee for Bill Clinton is something else.

When the American president arrives this evening for a state visit, the committee, a tiny band of black-clad anarchists, will join in wider street protests against what its members call U.S. bullying in the Balkans.

“It’s beyond our ability to stop his visit, so we’d like to ensure him a warm welcome,” said Georgios, 20, an engineering student whose group often expresses its views with firebombs.

“An incendiary welcome,” added a fellow anarchist and co-conspirator who was handing out leaflets at Athens Polytechnic University.

Anti-American fever is running high in Greece these days, and not just on the extremist fringe. Fearing large-scale violence, U.S. officials had threatened to cancel Clinton’s visit, then delayed and shortened it in exchange for a Greek government pledge to keep demonstrators far from his entourage.

The uproar over Clinton’s security has embarrassed the Greek government, a close U.S. ally and NATO partner. Many Greeks, including some who oppose American policies, are smarting from the blow to their country’s self-esteem and reputation for hospitality.

Clinton, the third U.S. president to visit Greece, after Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1959 and George Bush in 1991, could not have chosen a more provocative time.

Wednesday marked the still-emotional anniversary of a national grievance against the United States: On Nov. 17, 1973, a U.S.- backed military junta used tanks to crush a student uprising.

On the Polytechnic campus, where the uprising took place, and outside the U.S. Embassy, 15,000 demonstrators marched this year with a new complaint: that Clinton would dare set foot in the Balkans so close to the anniversary and so soon after last spring’s North Atlantic Treaty Organization bombing of Yugoslavia, a campaign that nearly every Greek opposed.

“He basically wants to show that he’s in charge in this part of the world,” said Yannis Papadopolous, a 24-year-old Communist Party youth leader.

Despite strong cultural and family ties with America, Greeks of all ideologies have voiced that same resentment about U.S. leadership off and on for half a century.

Under President Harry S. Truman, the United States intervened in Greece’s 1944-48 civil war to help defeat Communist-led leftist forces, alienating roughly half the Greek population.

Resentment broadened when visiting Vice President Spiro Agnew--who was of Greek descent--embraced the unpopular junta leaders who ruled Greece from 1967 to 1974 and when successive U.S. administrations failed to reverse Turkey’s 1974 military occupation of northern Cyprus.

Last spring, as their own government reluctantly joined in NATO’s campaign against Yugoslavia’s Serbian leadership, many Greeks accused the United States of starting an unjust war that threatened Greece’s fragile economy and uneasy borders.

Greek Archbishop Christodoulos prayed for his fellow Orthodox Christians in Serbia and denounced the NATO bombers as “pawns of Satan.” Greek media depicted a NATO assault on defenseless Serbian civilians rather than an attempt to end Serbian atrocities against the mostly Muslim ethnic Albanians in Serbia’s separatist Kosovo province.

Even so, German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, a key NATO figure, visited Greece last month without opposition. “Greeks hate to be isolated from Europe, so they prefer to believe that it’s the Americans who pull the strings,” said political commentator Nikos Dimou, author of “On the Misery of Being Greek.”

One barometer of the Greek mood is a larger-than-life bronze statue of Truman, erected in 1963 in an Athens park. Protesters have tried 28 times to knock it off its pedestal and succeeded twice, most recently during anti-NATO protests in May.

The statue was put back on its feet last week and surrounded by a few of the 10,000 police officers mobilized to protect Clinton, whose trip to Turkey, Greece, Italy, Kosovo and Bulgaria is aimed at highlighting the U.S. commitment to southern Europe.

Another barometer is polling that shows far less respect for Clinton here than elsewhere on the Continent. A Nov. 8 survey by the newspaper Ethnos found that 80% of Athenians had a negative opinion of him and that 61% would rather that he skip Greece on this tour.

“It’s a matter of philotimo,” said Athens lawyer Alexandros Lykourezos, using a word for inner pride that people say is too intrinsically Greek to translate accurately. “We don’t like to be insulted, provoked or wounded. To some people, Clinton’s visit is such an insult.”

“This is a reaction to the bombing and the feeling that we’ve always been betrayed by U.S. policy,” he added. “But it’s also the fault of our governments, which have cultivated the idea that we cannot promote our interests unless we play the obedient ally.”

Rejecting such criticism, U.S. and Greek officials have championed the visit as a chance to bolster their ties and improve the climate for settling Greece’s many disputes with Turkey, where Clinton has been since Sunday.

“We are living in an independent Greece, a strong Greece,” Prime Minister Costas Simitis said this week. “We don’t need patrons or godfathers.”

Originally, Simitis had pledged to keep protesters away from Clinton, then he reneged under pressure from a Communist-led coalition of leftist parties whose support his governing Socialists are seeking in parliamentary elections next spring.

By threatening to call off the scheduled Nov. 13-15 trip, U.S. officials got Simitis to agree to postpone it by nearly a week, shorten it from 2 1/2 days to 22 hours and restore a promised security cordon aimed at keeping protesters out of Clinton’s sight and earshot.

Communists have vowed to try to break through police lines this evening and reach the fortress-like U.S. Embassy, even though Clinton will be elsewhere--at a state dinner in the presidential palace and a hotel on the opposite side of the capital.

The leftist parties’ pressure and the government’s waffling brought a torrent of criticism from moderate Greeks. Some commentators recalled the ancient code that a Greek must welcome an enemy into his village and refrain from killing him until after he leaves.

“The debacle of Clinton’s visit has already tarnished the country’s image,” said Gregory A. Maniatis, the publisher of Odyssey magazine, which covers Greece and the Greek diaspora. “Can we do nothing right? . . . Clinton was willing to lend us his ear--something for which lobbyists pay millions--and we, doing our best Mike Tyson imitation, bit it.”