The European Language Equality Network, represented by President Elin Haf Gruffydd Jones and Secretary-General Davyth Hicks, held a very productive and informative set of meetings with Turkish national minority representatives and religious leaders in western Thrace organised by new ELEN members ABTTF – Avrupa Batı Trakya Türk Federasyonu (represented by President Halit Habip Oğlu and International Relations Director Melek Kırmacı). The meetings, held last week (May 2-3rd) in Komotini and Xanthi, heard numerous testimonies of the incredibly high levels of systemic, normalized discrimination against the Turkish national minority, particularly in the domain of education and culture.
The Saturday meeting focused on educational issues with Turkish NGOs detailing the various ways that bilingual Greek-Turkish education is being deliberately undermined by Greek central government. One example is the Xanthi middle and high school where the Greek government are refusing to pay for much needed repairs for the dilapidated school building as a means to get bilingual Turkish/ Greek-speaking children to be permanently moved to publicly funded Greek-medium schools, with the aim of having the bilingual school shut down.
In addition, despite efforts by the Turkish community to open privately run bilingual nursery schools, the Greek authorities compelled all Turkish-speaking children to attend Greek language only nursery schools.
ELEN-ABTTF meeting with Western Thrace Turkish Teacher’s Union.
The Turkish national minority in Greece is arguably one of the most discriminated national minorities in Europe, with NGOs detailing numerous contraventions of international human rights law that protects national minorities and children’s rights. ELEN will continue to work closely with ABTTF and local civil society organisations to ensure long-term resilience and sustainability for bilingual Turkish/Greek education.
It was proposed that one effective solution would be to have the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, a permanent international agreement, ratified by Turkey, Greece, UK, Italy, France, Romania, Japan and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, which was relatively well implemented up until the early 1980s, to again be fully implemented as this would provide adequate national minority protection.
At the meeting ELEN President Elin Jones commented that the Turkish national minority example is “one of those rare occasions where the situation for the national minority was better 100 years ago.”
ELEN Secretary-General Davyth Hicks added that, “Its clear that current Greek policies are aimed at systematically eradicating Turkish language and culture and have no place in modern 21st century Europe. Its unacceptable and clearly contravenes international standards on human rights, language rights, national minority rights, as well as children’s rights, which are enshrined in Treaties ratified by Greece.”
ELEN will be working with the international institutions and other partners to urgently bring attention to the current situation with the aim of achieving some progress, and to help initiate a constructive dialogue with the Greek Government so as to ensure substantive protection for the Turkish national minority.
ELEN wishes to thank ABTTF and Turkish national minority representatives for organising the mission and for their warm hospitality during the visit. (Eurolang 2025)
ABTTF Report, Saturday May 3rd.