Gümülcine/Komotini. “In the 2024/25 school year, the authorities of our country, Greece, will close 4 more elementary school catering to the Turkish ethnic group in Western Thrace under the pretext of a lack of students,” writes Halit Habip Oglu, President of the Federation of Western Thrace Turks in Europe (ABTTF), in a press release. The aim is obvious: Greece is trying to eliminate the educational autonomy of Western Thrace Turks guaranteed by international treaties in a long-term plan. Since 2011, the number of Turkish elementary school in Western Thrace has fallen from 188 to 86. The minority does not even have its own kindergartens. The association is calling for an end to this policy and the abolition of the measures.

The Western Thrace Turks point out that there is another way. For example, Turkey made it possible for a private Greek elementary school to be opened on the Turkish island of Imbros/Gökçeada in 2013, initially with only three pupils, and for a private Greek middle and high school to be opened in 2015, with the result that the number of members of the Greek minority returning to their home island has risen from 200 in 2000 to 700 today thanks to the good educational opportunities.

The Turkish minority in Greece and the Greek minority in Turkey are linked by a common bond: the Lausanne Treaty of 1923. After the end of the First World War, the Ottoman Empire had to accept drastic territorial losses as the loser of the war. The later founder of modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal (“Atatürk”, father of the Turks), fought back against the dismantling of the empire. In the Greco-Turkish War from 1919 to 1922, Greece attempted to gain further territories for itself, particularly in Asia Minor. However, this attempt to implement the “Great Idea” (Megali Idea) failed, which was perceived in Greece as the “Asia Minor Catastrophe”, but in the Ottoman Empire as a victory in the Turkish War of Liberation. Greece lost its Asia Minor territories (Smyrna/Izmir) for good.

The outcome of the war rendered the Treaty of Sèvres concluded in 1920 between the Ottoman Empire and the victorious powers irrelevant; it had been one of the Paris suburb treaties that formally ended the First World War, just as the Treaties of St. Germain and Trianon did for other states. In 1923, a new treaty was concluded between Greece and Turkey in Lausanne. The content was an extensive exchange of the population, most of which had already been carried out at great sacrifice. The criterion for the expulsion of people from their homeland was their religious affiliation, which did not always correspond to their ethnicity. Only the Turks in Western Thrace and the Greek Orthodox minority in Istanbul and on the two islands of Imbros/Gökçeada and Tenedos/Bozcaada, which lie at the entrance to the Dardanelles, were spared from this exchange - which involved around two million people.

Incidentally, the Treaty of Lausanne later served as a model for the agreements between Hitler and Stalin (resettlement of Germans from Bessarabia, Bukovina and Dobruja) and between Hitler and Mussolini (the South Tyrolean “option”).

The treaty contained provisions for the protection of minorities. However, these were far too non-binding, so that only a few of them were implemented. To this day, the approximately 120,000 members of the Muslim minority in Greece (consisting of Turks, Pomaks and Roma) and the 2,000 to 3,000 Greeks in Turkey are discriminated against in every respect by their respective countries of residence. Every measure that generally has a negative impact on one minority is met with an equally negative response from the other side.

The Turkish minority in Western Thrace, for example, is denied the use of the term “Turkish” in association names, although this has been repeatedly criticized as unlawful by the European Court of Human Rights. The Turkish minority also complains about interference by the Greek state in the appointment of Muslim dignitaries and numerous other forms of discrimination.

Note: This article gives the views of the author and does not represent the position of the European Association of Daily Newspapers in Minority and Regional Languages (MIDAS) or Eurac Research.