ABTTF President: “Our country, which usurped our educational and religious autonomy guaranteed by the treaties with various laws and practices, is closing our autonomous primary schools in Western Thrace and ignoring our demand for bilingual Turkish kindergartens. We request our country to immediately abandon the perception discourse that is incompatible with the facts about our community and aims to mislead the European and international public opinion, and to establish a direct and good faith-based dialogue with us to solve our overarching issues’’.
Our country, Greece’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Giorgos Gerapetritis made special reference to the Turkish community in Western Thrace in his speech at the 55th Ordinary Session of the United Nations (UN) Human Rights Council held in Geneva, Switzerland.
In his speech, Gerapetritis indicated that they have always paid special attention to the Muslim minority in the (Western) Thrace region in north-eastern Greece and claimed that its members enjoy both special protection as a Minority and all rights as citizens of Greece and the European Union (EU) and added that the development of the Minority on a population basis over the past 100 years is the greatest proof of this.
“The words of our country’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Gerapetritis, who claims that we enjoy all rights in our country while ignoring the discrimination and rights violations that the Turkish community in Western Thrace has faced for years, are in no way compatible with the facts. I ask our Minister, who misled the international public with the following: Why has our country not yet ratified the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities and the European Charter on Regional or Minority Languages of the Council of Europe, of which it is a member? Our country, which denies our Turkish identity, has been systematically violating the principle of the rule of law by persistently not executing the three judgments of the European Court of Human Rights with respect to our associations for the past 16 years. This situation, which is in no way incompatible with democracy and EU values, was confirmed once again by a resolution adopted by the European Parliament recently. Our country, which usurped our educational and religious autonomy guaranteed by the treaties with various laws and practices, is closing our autonomous primary schools in Western Thrace and ignoring our demand for bilingual Turkish kindergartens. While we had 226 primary schools in 2003, this number has decreased to 90 in the 2023-2024 school year. There are at present 25 public secondary schools and high schools in the prefecture of Rodopi, where we constitute the majority of the population, and 32 public secondary schools and high schools in the prefecture of Xanthi, whereas there is only one Turkish minority secondary school and high school each. Again, there is not a single Turkish kindergarten compared to 141 kindergartens each in the prefectures of Rodopi and Xanthi. We request our country to immediately abandon the perception discourse that is incompatible with the facts about our community and aims to mislead the European and international public opinion, and to establish a direct and good faith-based dialogue with us to solve our overarching issues’’, said Halit Habip Oğlu, President of the Federation of Western Thrace Turks in Europe (ABTTF).
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