Greek political party pledges to seek solutions to problems of Turkish minority

By Ayhan Mehmet

KOMOTINI, Greece (AA) – A political party founded by Greece's 150,000-strong Turkish minority, concentrated mostly in the Western Thrace region, announced they are competing in the current elections to seek solutions to the minority's problems in the European Parliament.

Officials of the Friendship, Equality and Peace Party (DEB), who visited even remote Turkish villages in Western Thrace to campaign, underlined the importance of the elections.

Speaking to Anadolu, Cigdem Asafoglu, the party's chair, said their decision to compete in the European elections has to do with the attitude of most Greek political parties towards the minority, which is generally ignorant or discriminatory.

"They even don't accept our identity as a Turkish-Muslim minority, so they can’t develop solutions to the problems of the minority," she said.

Saying that the DEB was the strongest party in the provinces of Rodop (Rodophe) and Xhanti (Iskece) in Western Thrace in the 2014 and 2019 European elections, Asafoglu said: "In the current elections, we will emphasize that the minority in the Western Thrace is Turkish."

"Our party is working to draw attention and develop solutions for the minority's pressing problems, including education and the denial of their ethnic identity by Greek authorities,” she added.

The Western Thrace region – located near Greece's northeastern border with Türkiye – is home to a substantial, long-established Muslim Turkish minority numbering around 150,000.

For decades, Athens has carried out discriminatory practices against the local Turkish community, including preventing them from using the words "Turk" or "Turkish" in the names of their foundations, barring them from electing their own religious representatives, and shutting down their schools.

The rights of the Turks of Western Thrace were guaranteed under the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne. But since then, the situation has seriously deteriorated, with Greece refusing to carry out rulings by the European Court of Human Rights.

Türkiye has long criticized Greece for depriving the Muslim Turkish minority of their basic rights and freedoms.