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

A political social gathering based by Greece‘s 150,000-strong Turkish minority, concentrated largely within the Western Thrace area, introduced they’re competing within the present elections to hunt options to the minority’s issues within the European Parliament.

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

Speaking to Anadolu, Çiğdem Asafoğlu, the social gathering’s chair, stated their resolution to compete within the European elections has to do with the perspective of most Greek political events in the direction of the minority, which is usually 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 stated.

Saying that the DEB was the strongest social gathering within the provinces of Rodop (Rodophe) and Xhanti (Iskece) in Western Thrace within the 2014 and 2019 European elections, Asafoğlu stated: “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 close to Greece’s northeastern border with Türkiye-is residence to a considerable, long-established Muslim Turkish minority numbering round 150,000.

For a long time, Athens has carried out discriminatory practices in opposition to the native Turkish neighborhood, together with stopping them from utilizing the phrases “Turk” or “Turkish” within the names of their foundations, barring them from electing their very own spiritual representatives, and shutting down their colleges.

The rights of the Turks of Western Thrace have been assured below the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne. But since then, the state of affairs has significantly deteriorated, with Greece refusing to hold out rulings by the European Court of Human Rights.

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