Hülya Emin, born in Komotini, smiles from behind her desk. She is the editor in chief of Gündem newspaper, a local newspaper written in Turkish, with a column in Greek. ‘Yes, there are Turkish-Greek friendships, they do exist. But in everyday life we do not live together. It is like parallel realities’, she says.

The newspaper has been published for the last 23 years, and Hülya knows a good deal about the struggles minority media outlets are facing. The authorities have put a lot of pressure in recent years on the newspaper: Hülya had to fight for permission to remain in print and in 2014 was forced to pay 50,000 Euros in fines. ‘It is my role to put people together,’ she says, ‘and I would love to report about good examples of cooperation, but it is just not happening.’

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Ibrahim Şerif, the elected mufti of Komotini, stirs a small silver spoon in his teacup and explains, at least in theory, the parallel system between the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate in Istanbul and the Mufti Office in Western Thrace.

‘Every religious minority group in Türkiye, for example Orthodox and Armenians, can elect their religious leader,’ he says. ‘The elections of muftis were and should belong to the community.’

This was implemented until 1991, but then Greece withdrew the right to choose their own religious leaders from the community and transferred control to the state, with the appointment of muftis now undertaken by the Ministry of Education and Religious Affairs.

Since the second half of the 1990s, the Greek authorities have opened cases against the elected muftis on charges of usurping responsibilities. Some of these cases ended with convictions and were subsequently appealed to the European Court of Human Rights, after all domestic avenues were closed. The Court ruled in the case of Serif v. Greece had violated Article 9 of the European Convention on Human Rights, namely concerning freedom f thought, conscience and religion.

In reaction to this, the Turkish community has elected its own muftis. Mufti Ibrahim, who has been serving as an elected religious leader since 1990, runs the ceremonies in the region and his mosque is always full of worshippers. In 2017 alone, he was investigated on seven separate occasions by the police.

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The whole of Western Thrace has just three Turkish mayors. Ismet Kadi, former mayor of Iasmos in Rodopi province, held this position from 2010 to May 2019. He describes his own experiences and the challenges of minority representation at a local level.

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‘Maybe 15 times a year I have to give testimonies at the police station,’ he says. ‘Between September and November, I had to go to the court every single day. How to work in this kind of circumstances? How to be a good mayor?’

For Cemil Kabza, the former mayor of Myki, a town close to the Bulgarian border, the situation is somewhat different since almost the entire population of his district is Turkish. ‘I have been the mayor since September 2014. And it is very difficult not to give away your beliefs. When, for example, the state is forcing you to invite a Santa Claus to a kindergarten full of Muslim children.’

Friendship Equality and Peace (FEP) party is a Greek party, founded in 1991 to represent the interest of the Turkish community in Western Thrace. They are constantly facing problems with political representation. – Even if the whole Western Thrace would vote for us, we are not enough to get to the Parliament, due to the 3 per cent electoral threshold – they say.

The party won most of the votes in the recent European Parliament Elections in the provinces of Rodopi and Xanthi.

In the area of education, the problems faced by children and young people in accessing education in Turkish are in place at every stage from primary and secondary schools to university and beyond. In the last 12 years, more than 60 minority primary schools have been closed, and there are no bilingual kindergartens. Islam is taught in public schools in Greek by religious instructors working for the government-appointed muftis, but students do not learn anything about the history of the Turkish community.

In the district of Komotini, where more than half of the population is Turkish, there is only one minority secondary school out of many public schools. Similarly, in the district of Xanthi, where just under half of the residents are Turkish, there is just one minority secondary school out of dozens of public schools. That means that each year only around 1,000 students graduate from the two available minority secondary schools.

‘They want to lower the level of education of minority schools to force students to choose the public schools,’ says Aydin Ahmet, the chairman of the Western Thrace Turkish Teachers’ Union. ‘The future of the Turkish language here is under threat.’ Indeed, the concern is wider: while the level of Turkish among students at the minority schools is low, so too is the level of Greek. Because of the poor quality of instruction and as a result the graduates’ weak performance in public examinations, there are very few officials in Western Thrace with a minority background.

Minority associations and organizations form the backbone of the Turkish community and play an important role in supporting schools, teachers, leaders and other activities. This has been central to ensuring the survival of Turkish language education in the region. The Western Thrace Turkish Teachers’ Union, which was founded in 1936, has experienced a long history of repression, including constant threats of closure during the military junta (1967-74), the removal of its signboards in 1985 and its official suspension by the courts. But they have managed to continue their activities despite these obstacles.

The Komotini Turkish Youth Union, founded in 1928, has faced similar issues.

The Xanthi Turkish Union, the first civil society organization registered in Western Thrace in 1927, is now run by Ozan Ahmetoğlu. It has taken the remarkable step of challenging its suppression by the Greek authorities in the European Court of Human Rights.

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