BTTDD President Küçük: "out of spite red"
Hasan Küçük, President of the Western Thrace Turks Solidarity Association (BTTDD), which has its headquarters in Istanbul, published an article on the issue of the minority and the elections that occupied the agenda of Greece in recent days.
The article written by BTTDD President Hasan Küçük was published on the website of the headquarters.
The article on the latest developments in Western Thrace and the 25th of June elections is as follows
"When will the oppression, in short, the persecution of the Turkish Minority of Western Thrace, who have been living in Greece as subjects and loyalists for a century, come to an end? As a minority, we reject the policies of marginalisation and distrust, which we have always known during the election process but which we are now sure of with the confessional statements made from the upper curtain of politics, and we strongly condemn this political understanding that is dealt to us. We have never witnessed such a trampling of human rights and freedoms in a democratic EU country. We hope that this situation will come to an end. Until it is, we will raise awareness by painting the provinces where the minority lives in a colour other than the one generally accepted in Greece.
See why we are out of spite RED:
First of all, because you put the 3% national threshold barricade in front of our representation in the parliament, which is a requirement of democracy, and you do not give us the opportunity to shout freely in the parliament about the usurpation of our rights,
Because the minority candidates to be recruited to political parties are determined according to intelligence reports and with the joint decision of all political parties,
For constantly placing party statutes in front of minority deputies elected as MPs from political parties and taking group decisions and taking away their right to object to laws or decisions to be taken against the minority, let alone to express their opinions,
Because you regard a minority of Greek citizens who fulfil their civic duties to the letter as a matter of national security, and because you give the minority the right to vote and be elected in theory but silence them in practice,
Even for using your political influence to go to their villages and scold them for not voting for you, for trying to mortgage their preferences by disrespecting their free will,
For making a recruitment parliamentary candidate who looks like us but is not one of us, who licks what he said yesterday for political rent today, to defend the plans you have built on the minority, and for making him blaspheme the identity, values, privacy and history of the minority,
Again, because you had this recruitment deputy approve and defend a strange law such as the "240 Imam Law", regardless of our religious autonomy and freedom,
For constantly tapping the phones of the presidents and directors of minority organisations and constantly trying to intimidate and frighten them with the triangle of police, judiciary and tax office,
For reading the messages of the Consultative Committee of the Turkish Minority of Western Thrace in advance and deploying intelligence to the meeting areas, and for treating these people, who have nothing else to worry about except the struggle for their rights, as anarchists,
For bullying and trying to erase the TURKISH identity, which you recognised until 1983 when there was no problem, immediately after the declaration of the TRNC, by putting forward absurd excuses,
For continuing the nonsense and ridiculousness of defining one minority as religious and the other as ethnic without being ashamed or bored,
For closing down our historical institutions with junta methods in order to erase our ethnic identity from all sides and for not restoring the rights of our historical associations despite being found guilty by the European Court of Human Rights,
For not allowing our newly established non-governmental organisations to be established due to names that evoke the existence of a minority, even though "Turkish" is not mentioned in their names, and for constantly filing closure lawsuits against those that have been established,
For not recognising the Mufti elected by the Muslim Turkish Minority of Western Thrace and for insulting him in order to humiliate and target him in the eyes of the society and for constantly judging him in order to intimidate him,
For forcibly choosing the mufti of another religion and religious officials under the name of 240 imams and imposing your choices on minority people, even though you are a member of another religion,
For not putting an end to the countless difficulties and obstacles you have created in our places of worship, from the size of minarets to the renovation of our mosques,
For occupying our foundations, which our ancestors accumulated and left to us with thousands of difficulties, preventing the minority from benefiting from them, even hiding their inventory from us, selling some of our immovable properties at auction and expropriating some of them,
For knowingly and willingly making the region where the Turkish Minority of Western Thrace lives the poorest region of both Greece and the EU, for forcing our young people to migrate and changing the demographic structure,
With plans such as establishing a university and an industrial zone, you have expropriated the lands of our people, most of whom are engaged in agriculture, leaving them landless, and then using a small part of these lands for their intended purpose and leaving the rest idle,
For years you have denied our people even a tractor licence, for not allowing them to renovate their houses,
Again, because for years you have separated our people with borders as mountainous and lowland, built police barricades on fabricated borders and prevented people from connecting with each other,
For closing minority schools one by one under the pretext of the economic crisis, regardless of our educational autonomy,
For preventing our Turkish graduated teachers from working in minority schools with the sole purpose of reducing the quality of education in minority schools,
For deliberately appointing incompetent Greek language teachers to minority schools and spreading the black propaganda that education in minority schools is inadequate,
For inviting the parents of our children graduating from kindergarten to the school separately and telling them that your child is very clever, don't waste it in minority schools, for insidiously encouraging our people to public schools and for cunningly reducing the number of children in minority schools,
For constantly and persistently portraying these docile minority people, who have never once picked up a stone and rebelled, as an element of danger in your public opinion,
In short, since you do not respect the minority people at all, marginalise them and prevent them from feeling a sense of belonging to this country they live in, and target their leaders by portraying them as terrorists or Ankara's pawns through fascist journalists, we say RED for neither GREEN nor BLUE. Who knows what colour the next one will be. But it is definitely a colour that is not generally accepted. The aim is to raise awareness and draw attention to our problems. Don't look for the culprit elsewhere. Just look in the mirror. The profile of the minority people has already changed, only you are not aware of it. There are thousands of educated people and intellectuals. As long as these problems continue, we will continue to raise awareness.
Let it be known like this!"