Izmir 2000

Many international organizations specialized on the problem of human rights have allocated huge spaces in their annual reports to the Greek state’s intolerant approach to the Turkish minority here. Obviously, under the current conditions it is very difficult to wait a fundamental development on the treatment of the Greek authorities to the Turkish minority living in the Western Thrace. The first thing is that the Greek authorities and the members of the minority do not share the same opinion about the demographic composition of the region. Though the Turks’ complaints are on the grounds that Greek governments’ policies are designed to change the composition of the population to the favor of the ethnic Greeks through either assimilationist or exclusivist policies, and for this reason Turkish population gradually declines in the region, the Greek foreign ministry documents claim its reverse. The reports of international organizations also assert that the discriminatory policies of the Greek state is the very reason of the diminution of the Turkish population here. Independent resources reported that the number of the Turks in Western Thrace was about 120.000 (about 53.5 % of the total population of the region) on the eve of the Balkan Wars. After these wars and the general war in 1914, the number declined by 87.000. According to the reports of the Commission that was formed under the Convention Concerning the Exchange of Greek and Turkish Populations due to finding out the numbers of the Greeks in Istanbul and the Turks in the western Thrace, the number for the Turks was 106.000. The result of the 1940 census in Greece indicated that the number had mounted to 140.000 and after the war according the results of the 1951 census, it was about 120.000. It is estimated that with current 2-2.5 percent growth rate the population must be around 450.000 today. Hence, it is very easy to see how many Turks did immigrate particularly to Turkey in a period spanning from 1950s to 1990s. The Greek Foreign Ministry announces that all the population living in the region was about 86.000 on the eve of the exchange, and of this population only 50 percent was Turks and the remaining 35 percent was Pomaks and the rest was Roma. Yet ignoring the high rate of growth of population the Ministry claims that the number of this minority “climbed to” approximately 120.000 today. The Greeks also claim that the linguistic and cultural differences among the mentioned ethnic groups within the Muslim minority was the very reason for the Lausanne Treaty to talk only about the “religious minority.” What is intended with this argument is to question the accuracy of the figures for the Turkish population. For example, recently the Greek administration disclosed that the Turkish population even declined to 98.000 in 1999.

Despite all the suspicions, Greece, as a member in United Nations, the Council of Europe, OSCE and European Union, is one of the countries that had put their signatures on many important international conventions for human rights. For that reason the Greek state had to frequently confronted with the members of her minorities sued in international courts by invoking the involved provisions of these conventions and treaties.

Greek state is one of the signatories of the several international documents that grant minorities their rights recognized and protected by international law. The most outstanding international document is the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR). The Article 27 of the covenant stipulates that the members of the minority groups can not be denied the right, in community with the other members of their own group, to enjoy their own culture, to profess and practice their own religion, or to use their own language. Another important international document that Greece should be respectful in that it is one of the members of the family of nations that composes United Nations. Greece acceded to the ICCPR on May 5, 1997. UN Declaration of Human Rights of Persons Belonging to National, Religious and Linguistic Minorities is the most significant authoritative source for the international documents to be articulated on the protection of the minority rights. The declaration envisages that the states have responsibility in the protection of existence and national or ethnic, cultural, religious and linguistic identity of minorities within their territories and in the promotion of their identity (Article 1). This document’s Article 2 also covers several items involving the right of the Turks living in the Western Thrace. These are expressed as such; “the members of the minority groups have the right to enjoy their own culture, to profess and practice their own religion, and to use their own language, in private and in public, freely and without interference or any form of discrimination; the right to establish and maintain their own associations; the right to establish and maintain, without any discrimination, free and peaceful contacts across frontiers with citizen of other States to whom they are related by national or ethnic, religious or linguistic ties.” The Council of Europe’s 1995 Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities includes the same items; Greece signed the convention in 1997 but its parliament has not ratified it so far. However Greece preferred to sign the European convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (European Convention). The convention does not make any specific emphasis on the minority rights but stipulates that the member of the minority groups can also enjoy the same rights. (Convention Article 14). Greece ratified the convention in 1974.

Another important international document is 1923 Treaty of Lausanne which makes the signatories responsible in the granting some specific rights to the ethnic minorities living within their respective boundaries. Articles 37 through 45 of the treaty involve with the fundamental rights of the Greek and Turkish minority that Greek and Turkish states should respect and promote. These are; protection of life and liberty without regard to birth, nationality, language, race or religion; free exercise of religion; freedom of movement and of emigration; equality before the law; the same civil and political rights enjoyed by the majority; free use of any language in private, in commerce, in religion, in the press and publications, at public meetings and in the courts; the right to establish and control charitable, religious and social institutions and schools; primary schools in which instruction is given in both languages; full protection for religious establishment and pious foundations. Besides the treaty, the Turkish and Greek governments signed some additional protocols in 1951 and 1968 on mutual respect to the ethnic, national and religious consciousness of the Greek and Turkish minority and exchange of teacher and textbooks.

As we will touch on at the later pages, the most important violation of the involved rights in the hands of the Greek governments has been the arbitrary deprivation of right of citizenship from the members of the Turkish minority. International documents also covers articles that ban the states to adopt such policies. These documents and their involved articles are Article 15 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; The European Convention on Nationality which is signed by Greece on November 11, 1997 though it has not entered into force yet; the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination and its Article 5 which Greece ratified in 1970; and Article 9 of the Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness. Although the last document was not signed by Greece, the principles embodied in it are authoritative and constitute judicial source for the documents that may be formed on the matter in future because the principles involved are recognized as minimum legal standards on the question of nationality.

The most outstanding problem which the Turkish minority is faced with is the constant denial of the Greek governments to recognize the existence of a Turkish minority though the member of the this minority which is recognized by the Greek administration as only “Muslim minority”, because the Lausanne Treaty mentioned only this phrase, identify themselves as Turkish without respecting how they acquired this identity, be it by birth or by acculturation. It is because the involved minority covers Pomaks, Muslim Slavs who speak a different dialect of Bulgarian and Roma along with the ethnic Turks. All of these groups identify themselves as Turks and consider the official classification as Pomaks or Roma as a Greek design that aims at creating division in order to suppress them more easily. The estimated figures for these groups display that of those who define themselves as Turkish, about 65-75 percent is ethnic Turks whereas about 15-25 percent is Pomak and 5-10 percent is Roma.

Greek politicians underline that “Turkish refers to state identification rather than to an ethnicity” and add if we give them an ethnic character we will be downgrading other elements that are not Turkish like Pomaks and Roma. The term Turkish refers to the Turkish state but not a specific minority. According to state-appointed secretary general for Thrace, Stavros Kambellis all the international documents, primarily the Treaty of Lausanne, mention only on the Muslim minority. The denial of recognition of a Turkish minority led the Greek government to take some measures aiming at avoiding the usage of the term of Turkish publicly. These measures are ranging from banning civil organizations to bear the adjective of Turkish in their titles to prosecuting the persons who identify the minority as Turkish. For example in November 1987, the Greek High Court affirmed a decision by the Court of Appeals of Thrace involving closure of the Union of Turkish Teachers of Western Thrace and the Union of Turkish Youth of Komotini on the grounds that the adjective of Turkish could not be used to describe the citizens of Greece and that definition of the Greek Muslims by this adjective could endanger the public order. Some Turkish teachers were also indicted upon the same pretext and according to the Articles of 188 and 192 of the Greek Penal Code -these articles invoke participating in an association the aims of which are contrary to criminal provisions and inciting citizens to commit acts of violence upon each other- and punished. Up today their attempt to be acquitted in the higher court has been ephemeral.

The most distinguishing case involves the leaflets that were distributed during the election campaign in 1989 elections by Doctor Sadık Ahmet. These leaflets included some phrases like “Turk, Turkish Muslims and Turkish Muslim minority of Western Thrace”. Ahmet was found guilty according to the Article 192 of the Penal Code and imprisoned from January to March 1990 until its service in prison was converted into fine. Upon the rejection of his appeal to the Court of Cassation in February 1995, Ahmet applied to the European Court of Human Rights. In April 1995, the commission’s report in its Article 31 declared that Greece had violated Ahmet’s right of free expression under the Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights and forwarded the case to the European Court of Human Rights. The Turks assume the case of the recognition of the existence of a Turkish minority as a test for the involved minority to trust the Greek administration’s sincerity to admit them to the Greek political life and point out that the Greek administration confounds Turanism or Pan-Turkism with innocent demands of the Greek citizens who have a Turkish identity. One of the most disturbing argument in the mouths of the Greek officials or statesmen is of that speaks of Turkish individual identity but not a Turkish collective identity. In the same vein, the thesis recommending ‘the homogenization of the population in the Western Thrace’ that some hawkish Greek deputies brought to the agenda of the assembly in August 1998 disturbed seriously the Turkish minority.

On the other hand some Greek politicians and academicians also accept that despite the overt definition of the Turkish minority as Muslim minority within the framework of the Treaty of Lausanne, the intransigence of the Greek governments not to recognize the Turkish minority phrase is parallel with the ebb and flow of the relations between Greece and Turkey. Accordingly the Greek policies of denial aims at limiting the nature of minority only to its religious constitutive aspect during the crisis time with Turkey. Its reverse can be run into as being parallel to the time of rapprochement between the two states, if one takes into account the evidences that are mostly used by the ethnic Turks in Greece to prove that the phrase of Turkish used to be permitted by the Greek governments despite the Treaty of Lausanne in 1930-1950s, the honeymoon period between the two nations thanks to the sensible policies of Venizelos and Atatürk- Inönü and Menderes. Venizelos had accepted that national minority was a secular term in that Kemalist rule in Turkey erased the most important foundation of the Ottoman Empire by secularizing the state and it is completely parallel with the interests of Greek state which inherited a bulk of people who identify themselves mostly Muslims rather than Turks. Until 1955 Greek governments used “Turkish” to describe the minority. For example Law No. 3065 of 1954, (so-called Marshall Papagos Law) ordered the use of the term Turkish in naming the primary schools. The Turkish minority has also collected some evidences showing the applications thereof.

It is a clear fact that the Turkish minority is the one which is most damaged from the bad relations between the two countries. The Turkish minority is always regarded as the fifth column serving the grandiose project of Turkey to revive the old Ottoman Empire. On the eve of the 1998 municipal and prefectural elections, the statement of the Turkish minority’s Consultative Committee, asking the members of the Turkish minority to vote for the minority candidates was seen as a Turkish provocation in comply with the Turkish state’s aspirations that aims at Turkification of the region. The Greek government spokesman Reppas stated that “there are no candidates who are Turks.” According to Elefteros Typos, anyway Ankara has practically formed a kind of shadow government in Western Thrace -probably implies the community-elected religious leaders of Komotini and Xanthi- dictating not only developments but also election results. Athens also adopted some undemocratic legislative to turn the situation in he favor, like the acceptance of a national threshold ( 3%) in the general elections for the representation in the national legislative. This legislature overtly aimed at preventing the entrance of the ethnic Turks into the parliament as the deputies of an exclusively Turkish-ethnic party relied on crowded population of this minority in Western Thrace. Thus, the Turkish deputies could have the visa for the entrance to the parliament only as the deputies of the parties that were capable to overcome the mentioned. national threshold. Under this conditions, the fair democratic demands of the minority seems to have planned to be silenced through party discipline. Though the Turkish deputies are from the two grand parties of Greece where the subsequent exchange of power between the two parties characterized the political party system, they are assumed almost always to be Turkish spies, traitors or provocateurs.

Furthermore, recently, the Greek authorities kicked off a new campaign that allegedly aims at preventing the subjugation of the different identities of the distinct Muslim groups into the identity of the Turkish minority. In this context, the Greek authorities hand in hand with the Greek press began to propagate on the authenticity of Pomak as well as Muslim Roma identity and promote them in every possible platform. Particularly the articles and news praying the publication of the first Pomak dictionary, the first Pomak-language newspaper as well as recording of Pomak traditional songs and stories have multiplied recently. On the other hand the Greeks see the reactions of the minority to these efforts as a plot of Ankara. For instance, Greek press assigned great space to the statements of the New Democracy Party deputy Haiditis accusing Ankara to run some secret plans to cement the assimilation of the Muslim Slavs-Pomaks and Roma into the Turkish community; according to the deputy “Ankara tried to cancel the traditional festival of the Pomaks in Alan Tepe.” It is declared in a two-day meeting in Termi participated by those who are engaged in minority matters in Greece that “Pomaks and Gypsies, face many difficulties in Thrace, when they try to save their language and cultural traditions from the organized efforts towards the linguistic and cultural homogeneity of the Muslims of Thrace in the direction of Turkisization.” However, the Turkish minority sees the efforts of the Greek authorities and press as a barrier before the full and equal participation of all the minorities living in Thrace in the Greek politics in the future. According to Birol Akifoglu, a Turkish minority deputy from the New Democracy Party;

“We are first Greek citizens. Our religion and ethnic identity should not be the reason that they see us second class citizens. All of the minority is Turkish and divisions that are being made (Roma, Muslims and Pomaks) do not derive from the minority itself and consequently are not recognized by it.”

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Yararlanılan Gazeteler ve Haber Ajansları

Adesmeftos Typos

Apogevmatini

Boto

Bulgarian Telegraph Agency (BTA)

Eleftheros Typos

Eleftherotypia

Ethnos

Kathimerini

Macedonian Information Center (MIC)

Macedonian Information Liasion Service (MILS)

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL)

Reuters

Stohos

Ta Nea

Tanjug