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Hate-motivated attacks targeting the Turkish community in Western Thrace in the OSCE 2019 Hate Crime Report

24.11.2020

The Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) published its 2019 Hate Crime Report. In the report, which includes statistical and descriptive information regarding hate crime incidents in the countries of the OSCE region, hate-motivated attacks and hate speech targeting the Turkish community in Western Thrace in Greece are also included. 

The Federation of Western Thrace Turks in Europe (ABTTF) had submitted a written contribution in preparation for the OSCE 2019 Hate Crime Report and had reported the hate-motivated attacks and hate speech targeting the Turkish community in Western Thrace in Greece. In the part dedicated to Greece in the OSCE 2019 Hate Crime Report where ABTTF is also cited as an organization having contributed to the report, the attacks reported by ABTTF are also included. 

In the report, it is being recorded that an attack was realised at Sünne Mosque in Xanthi on 18 May 2019 by unknown perpetrators who threw eggs and wrote racist slogans on the walls of the mosque, that the gravestones in the Turkish cemetery in Alexandroupoli were damaged on 28 May 2019 and that it was written that “Pork meat is tasty” on the entrance door of the Xanthi Minority Secondary and High School on 5 December 2019. 

Moreover, the report also indicates that the president of the Friendship, Equality and Peace (FEP) Party received calls to her phone from unknown callers, death threat messages and targeted with hate speech as a result of the success realised by her party in the May 2019 European Parliament (EP) elections. 

The report also refers to the attacks in March and October 2019 on the Consulate General in Thessaloniki of the Republic of Turkey which is the motherland of Western Thrace Turks, and the burning of the vehicle of a diplomat working at the Turkish Consulate in Thessaloniki on Monday night, 23 December 2019.

The 2019 Hate Crime Report, in which 39 OSCE participating States provided official data, contains information about hate incidents in 45 participating States reported by 148 non-governmental organizations. The OSCE report, the most comprehensive of its kind worldwide, recorded a total of 6,964 hate crime incidents in the OSCE region in 2019.

Please click on the follow link for the part related to Greece in the OSCE 2019 Hate Crime Report: https://hatecrime.osce.org/greece?year=2019

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