Western Thrace Turkish Minority demands 38 year lasting injustice to end

Witten-21.09.2005

<>Western Thrace Turkish Minority demands 38 year lasting injustice to end

Western Thrace Turkish Minority want the foundation elections that have not been made since 1967 to be held.

Western Thrace Turkish Minority, that have minority statute with the regulations of Louzanne and following treaties, complain about not being able to elect the managing board of their foundations since military cunta came into power in 1967. As military cunta came into power, first action to be taken was to dissolve the elected managing boards and made new appointments in all over the coun-try and this application of the military cunta affected the minority foundations as the other organizations.

After the military cunta was over in 1974, the democratic election rights were restored to all the or-ganizations but minority foundations were exempted from this democratic improvement. Neither the minority foundations nor the religious communities that are affiliated to these foundations have been able to hold an election during 38 years time. This situation causes the minorities to lose the control of the foundations and also the risk of plundering the minority possession increases. “We can not elect the management board for our foundations who belong to Western Thrace Turkish Minority. This situtation is completely aganist to the democratic rights which were granted to Western Thrace Turkish Minority by international treaties and it not only causes us to lose our control on the founda-tions but also the foundations officers that want to keep their power, accept the control of the Greek government. This injustice must be given an end as soon as possible” says Mustafa Kasap, the Gen-eral Secretary of Federation of Western Thrace Turks in Europe (ABTTF).

Minority foundations play very important roles like paying the salaries of teachers and ecclesiastics, building new schools and temples, financing the events of minority. Foundations law, which was made in 1980 but was suspended until 1991 due to international responses, is the “Sword of Damok-les” for the foundations, which are the spines of the minority. As the law came into force, various articles threaten the democratic process while the new law brings a lot of undemocratic conditions. Some of them can be summarized as; the possibility of demanding the list of the possessions of the foundations, the possessions that do not have any voucher or whose voucher have been lost because of wars and immigrations have the risk of being taken charge by the government. The Greek policy that causes the minority foundations to dissolve day by day was criticized by Halit Habipoğlu, the chairman of ABTTF „The implementations that are not observed for the other minority foundations, are valid for our minority foundations and they call this application as the “Reciprocity Principle”. Our foundation which are also donation institutions are obligated to pay tax which is an incompre-hensible implementation.

The long lasting “no-election” period has caused lack of confidence among the members of the Turkish minority towards the foundations and also lack of communications. These two formations cause the members of the foundations not to donate any new property to the foundations. The old possessions begin to dissolve and Turkish minority foundations are not able to refresh themselves. If no action is taken immediately, it is so possible to lose our foundations that are century long ac-cumulated national treasury. I invite my country, Greece, to change this wrong policy that is in power since 38 years and to restore our democratic rights, to join the action that are led by interna-tional human rights organizations to seek remedy”.