ABTTF President: “Stathis does not say that in the past, the state itself used the definition of ‘Turkish Minority’ for us, that it had written ‘Turkish primary schools’ in Turkish and Greek on our schools. Stathis does not say that the number of our primary schools has dropped from 231 to 99 in the last 25 years.”
In an article on Larissa.net titled ‘‘The time of crisis is approaching for Erdoğan’’, Former Deputy Minister of National Defense and former Larissa Deputy for PASOK and President of the Mediterranean Studies Foundation Dr. Theodoros Stathis referred to the statements of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan regarding the Turkish community in Western Thrace, and he claimed that contrary to Erdoğan’s statements, the Turkish community in Western Thrace has a prosperous life in Greece.
In his article, Theodoros Stathis indicated that while Erdoğan claimed that the "Western Thrace Turkish minority, which is not recognised in Greece", is being persecuted because of their religious beliefs, he alleged that the ‘‘Muslim minority’’ with a population of 120,000 in Thrace lives prosperously with hundreds of mosques. Stathis, on the other hand, said that the population of the Greek minority in Turkey, which had a population of 120,000 in the past, has decreased to less than 4,000 today.
Halit Habip Oğlu, President of the Federation of Western Thrace Turks in Europe (ABTTF) made the following statement: “All politicians in our country say the same thing with one voice: According to Lausanne, there is a Muslim minority in Greece and a Greek-Orthodox minority in Turkey! However, all politicians and Stathis know very well that, according to Lausanne, if the Minority in our country is Muslim, the minority in Turkey is also a non-Muslim minority! Stathis says that the minority in Western Thrace with a population of 120,000 and mosques leads a prosperous life, whereas the population of Greeks in Istanbul has fallen below 4,000. However, Stathis does not say that in the past the state itself used the definition of ‘Turkish Minority’ for us, that it wrote ‘Turkish primary schools’ in Turkish and Greek on our schools. Stathis does not write that the number of our primary schools has dropped from 231 to 99 in the last 25 years. Again, Stathis does not mention that 60 thousand Western Thrace Turks were stripped of their citizenship due to Article 19, and does not say that our associations bearing the word ‘‘Turkish’’ in their names were dissolved. In Rhodes and Kos, when the Dodecanese Islands were handed over to Greece in 1947, he does not say that while the Turkish community on the islands had bilingual schools, they were closed, that the Office of Mufti was abolished when there was a Mufti, and that while the mosques on the islands were open to worship, today only one mosque in Rhodes is open for worship. If the politicians in our country are going to talk about the issues of the Greek-Orthodox community in Istanbul, they should talk about the issues of our society in all their bare reality!”.
