Greece struggles to end far-right attacks Greece's top security official said he was determined to crack down on an alarming rise in rightwing violence but acknowledged that his police force was struggling against an unfamiliar foe. We are looking at uncharted grounds. We are not familiar with it. The police are not familiar with it. But they are making huge efforts to contain it," Nikos Dendias, Greece's minister of public order and civil protection, told the Financial Times. Mr Dendias admitted that some individual officers may be sympathetic to the neo-fascist Golden Dawn party, which has been blamed for much of the violence and won a surprising 7 per cent of the vote in June elections. But he insisted the force was broadly opposed, and that its official policy was to treat violence - regardless of its political origin - as criminal. "The fact is, the main opponent of the Golden Dawn phenomenon is the rule of law," he said. If the police are effective, then the Golden Dawn has no reason to exist. Mr Dendias's comments came amid concern about a string of assaults by rightwing thugs on immigrants and leftwing opponents, and accusations that Greek police were either sympathetic or acting in collusion. Last week dozens of members of Golden Dawn - among them two MPs - and religious groups tried to storm a theatre and stop the Athens premiere of Terrence McNally's play Corpus Christi, in which Jesus and the Apostles are depicted as gay men living in Texas. Police used teargas to disperse the demonstrators, but made no objection when Christos Pappas, a Golden Dawn lawmaker, removed a detainee from a police bus. In another case, a group of leftists have accused Greek police of torture, claiming that they were burnt with lighters and subjected to Taser guns after a confrontation with Golden Dawn. Mr Dendias admitted that officers used violence to apprehend the leftists, but stood by their denial that torture had taken place. A lawyer from Corfu, with close-cropped hair and an imposing build, Mr Dendias may have taken on one of the most demanding jobs in Greece when he accepted his post in late June at the urging of Antonis Samaras, the new prime minister. "Let's be honest," Mr Dendias said. In order to do the job, you have to accept by definition that you may not have any political future left. The economic crisis has spawned a rise in crime in Athens, where residents say they once left their doors unlocked. It has encouraged the rise of the Golden Dawn, and energised violent elements of the far left and anarchist groups, who set buildings ablaze in Athens earlier this year. "It's not the case that the riots and the Molotovs are because some young guys suddenly explode and want to express themselves," Mr Dendias said. This is a very well-orchestrated phenomenon by people who act in a very professional way. They are using young people and their understandable rage against what they consider as the establishment. Mr Dendias confided his anxiety about the controversial visit of Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, to Athens last week: "We were getting signs from the extreme left that the bells of hell were going to ring, and that sort of stuff. And we were able to avoid all that sort of violence. Not even one Molotov appeared. He argued that the police had become proficient at dealing with leftist street violence through decades of - often painful - experience. By contrast, they were confronting neo-Nazis for the first time in Greece's modern history. Other Greek law enforcement officials have also indicated that they were struggling to develop sources within and intelligence on Golden Dawn. As in the rest of the Greek public sector, police numbers are being reduced. Fewer than half of country's 52,000 officers earn more than €1,000 per month and they are facing further pay cuts. Mr Dendias is also dealing with the EU's biggest problem of illegal migration, thanks to Greece's porous border with Turkey. Days after taking office in August, he ordered a sweep that has netted more than 16,000 immigrants and resulted in more than 1,000 deportations. "If the irregular migrants issue is being dealt with, I think there would not be much breathing space for the neo-Nazi phenomenon in this country," Mr Dendias said. He added that his approach of sending 2,000 additional officers to the border was beginning to bear fruit on the streets in central Athens, where police checking migrants" papers are now a common sight. But he acknowledged the discontent over a string of "removal camps" in which immigrants have been detained. Human rights groups have complained about the camps" squalid conditions, while Mr Dendias said that long-time political allies and friends had also bristled at his decision to locate them in their backyards. Opening those pre-removal centres was something that brought me into immediate confrontation with parts of Greek society ... and with members of parliament who used to be my friends for years. And then I have to go to their electoral bases and do something that I know is so unpopular," he said. But it cannot be done otherwise.