Greek should abandon his policy towards our Turkish Minority

In the northern district of Western Thrace, Mustafçova, that is densely populated by Turkish minority members, a Greek origin teacher wanted to deliver books written in Pomak language to the children. This caused serious protest among Turkish minority members and Halit Habipo-ğlu, Chairman of Federation of Western Thrace Turks in Europe, criticized this act since it is evaluated as an effort of Greece to split the minority into different ethnic groups.

Western Thrace Turkish Minority protest against the effort of a Greek origin teacher to deliver fable books to children at the beginning of April, in the northern part of the region. The leaders of the Turkish minority express their complaints about this act since they comment it as an effort of Greece to split the minority into different ethnic groups and by this method Greece hopes to passivize the minority mem-bers. Minority Consultancy Board, which is composed of all the elected MPs, all elected Müftis, the chairmen of all associations, declared a statement condemning the act and decided to collect the deliv-ered books. The protest and condemn of the Turkish minority is going to be conveyed to the Greek authorities.

Halit Habipoğlu does not evaluate this act as a personal attempt but a tool of the ethnic segration policy of Greece and continues as “…Greece, with her policy implemented for the last 40 years, aims to de-stroy the identity of our Turkish minority. After they destroyed the signboards of our school in 1967 since “Turkish School” was written on them, they continued this policy in 1980 as they destroyed the signboards of our associations again due to their “Turkish names” and these associations still do not have legality.”

In addition to this destruction policy, Habipoğlu points out that declaration the northern part of the country as the forbidden area aimed to insulate the people living in this region and also to force them forget their identity till 90’s. “For the last 10 – 15 years, we observe a policy tool chance. Great amounts of funds are poured into the region to split the minority into different ethnic groups. It is aimed to cre-ate new ethnical identities. Till, these efforts do not work out and our minority should be very careful about these efforts also in the future .” says Habipoğlu.

The main target of this ethnic segration policy is the education of the Turkish minority as emphasized by Halit Habipoğlu. “They produced various dictionaries of various languages as well as newspapers and alphabets. Our minority did not show any interest for these efforts. Our power comes from our educa-tion, every member of our minority has the responsibility to understand this reality and act accordingly.” says Habipoğlu.

Habipoğlu declares that Greece has malicious intent within this “different identity creation policy”. “Im-posing a different identity to a person other than his own identity is explicitly racism” says Habipoğlu.

Greece supports this “different identity creation policy” in the so-called framework of “human rights and respect for dissimilarity” and if Greece had such a respect for dissimilarity and human rights then the first action to be taken were to support the identities of Macedonian, Albanian and Wallachian mi-nority members, who are not recognized as minority. Greece should abandon such policies and give back the usurped rights of the minorities and open the way for integration.