"The minority is not a problem, it has problems" says minority MP to local newspaper
"Hüseyin Zeybek, although a member of parliament for the last 11 years, was the target of nationalist anger before the elections with the accusation that his candidacy in Xanthi was promoted by the Turkish consulate in Komotini.
The SYRIZA MP was finally re-elected, however, as he points out, the pre-election poison that was spilled did a lot of damage to the Thracian minority. We met him at his office in Xanthi.
We know all this pre-election noise. People came in contact with the minority but many people do not know the minority. What would you say are the dominant problems, those that most concern the Rhodope minority population in Xanthi and the Rhodope?
First of all, thank you for giving me the opportunity to answer about everything we experienced. I don't know how to capture it. In a European country in 2023 at the core of democracy these things shouldn't happen. Character assassination where every journalist came out and said his ... crazy things and people believed them. We didn't give a good picture. This saddened me especially because the minority was targeted in order for the New Democracy to take advantage of this whole situation.
But it didn't work out for. The far right benefited. I have been a politician since 2012. I have been elected 7 times. I got the lowest percentage in this election. 7,600 votes or so, I've gotten 16,500 votes. We have won 2 seats. In 2015 we got the "crazy" percentage of 50% and got three seats. It has never happened before. Then there was no problem? Now after five electoral contests, on May 21st we lost the lead in the prefecture by 10 points from New Democracy. After the attack on our face, and especially after what Mrs. Bakoyannis said, we caught up.
People showed their indignation. It saddened me and troubled me because such an important issue as the minority of Thrace was used for some pre-election goals and then forgotten again. What was the purpose of this? But to hide the weaknesses of the New Democracy, the inability to manage the problems of the last four years.
The issues of poverty, accuracy, health that in 2023 people die in the carts of farm cars because there are no ambulances. They thus found an easy target. The biggest pre-election problem was us. Nothing else. Neither the accuracy was interested, nor that the hospital of Xanthi, which was a good hospital but is now under-functioning and will become a health center.
The surgeons themselves issued a statement and warned that if this situation continues, in a month they will stop operating. They don't care about that, they care about our face. And of course I emphasize it again because for me it is very important. This was a matter of democracy and the image of our country's democracy was damaged.
Let's play devil's advocate a bit. The prevailing narrative was that you were highly promoted by the Turkish consulate...
So I'll give you some examples of whether they supported me or not. First of all, it is not correct to say that the minority takes the line. The minority has changed, it has made great strides forward. It is not the same minority of the 80s with bars, with terrorism, with totalitarianism. The world has woken up, it has invested in education, we have scientists, we have children with great potential and from important universities in Europe, not only in Greece. The minority knows what to do and how to vote.
In my village, Echinos, in the May 21 elections, out of 1,280 votes, I got 540 votes, where they got at least 800,900. In the second largest village, in Kentavros, out of 2,000 votes, I got 240. In the village of Myki, the deputy of New Democracy he passed me with 250 crosses and I was second with 245, New Democracy prevailed. And I wonder: Where is the line? When we got 50% there was no problem and now that we came second there is?
This is ridiculous stuff. And most importantly, New Democracy sees the minority as a problem. The minority is not the problem, it has problems and there should have been a consultation towards solving the problems it faces. You know we also had the infamous cross-party of which I was a member. All the issues of Thrace were raised there, but the solutions remained in the drawers as we expected anyway.
The government needs to get serious. The important problem of the country is not the minority. Is there will and political will to solve the problems of the minority? No. If there was, we'd work it out. We saw Mrs. Bakoyannis threatening our people. Another member of parliament says that the Rhodope is a speck on the map of Greece. Unfortunately we didn't manage to make the second scoop.
The biggest issue is education and minority education has serious problems. Some teachers were not supposed to teach because of their lack of language and knowledge. Not all of course. There are people who do their work seriously. But there is a degradation of the minority school. They say that if you want a good education, come to the government. I think this is wrong.
SEE THE ITINERARY OF NIKOS YIANNOPOULOUS AND DIMITRIS KOULELIS IN MINORITY THRACE
Why do you say that?
Every citizen has the right to choose any school he wants. But even the minority school must be a proper school. We have a serious issue with the building problem of the minority High School that I also attended. My son goes there too. I think it is the only school in our country that has morning and afternoon shifts. 750 children are crammed into an 18th century shop that is in danger of collapsing at any moment. In the SYRIZA government we made an improvement to the building.
In another building that was next to the school we found four rooms. The main building has a very small courtyard. Advance rooms are required. The parents' association then proceeded to a symbolic occupation which ended with the Regional Governor's commitment that classrooms would indeed be created. The mayor also committed. Three years have passed and we haven't seen the previews. And this problem continues even though it entered the inter-party system.
This is what we want from Mrs. Bakoyannis who loves Thrace very much. Let's see in practice her love for solving problems so that children don't suffer in an inappropriate building. Minority education is very important for our children. If given the right education, our children can become trilingual. Who doesn't want that?
The 5 percent for admission of minority children to Greek universities, proposed and implemented by George Papandreou, was a serious leap. Certainly from 1980 to 2023 the minority advanced a lot.
Hey, what's wrong?
The bars, although gone, still remain in the minds of some. We also saw it in Parliament. It's not the first time. You remember that when it was Golden Dawn in Parliament, I was attacked both inside Parliament and outside.
Here someone connected to a local channel threatened to kill me. It's not the first time. I also had one last court where I was the plaintiff. It was a case of a soldier from Glavki who drowned in Keramoti while on duty. We went to the funeral and as soon as we got back from the funeral I started looking at the phones. What did you do with the flag? I say guys what happened? And yet the media had written that Zeybek took the Greek flag and tore it up. He did not, they said, let the army perform the ceremony properly.
But I didn't even touch the flag! I have filed three lawsuits in my life and three are for newspapers from 2016 onwards. 20 days ago the court ended. Is it possible for a member of the Greek Parliament to be accused of taking the Greek flag, tearing it up, "playing" it everywhere on TVs and my press release coming out but they continue to play the same fiddle?
Besides education, we also have other problems, such as waqfs. The administrator of the waqf property is appointed. Why should he be appointed? By the time the junta came, elections had been held three times. The other very "hot" issue is the election of the mufti by a body, by the people. It is not possible to appoint the religious leader of another community. I think we are not on the right track. That is why we see that there is an appointed and an elected, the people are with the elected and there is a disturbance.
But over here things are clear and I think the minority has given the message to New Democracy. When in the Municipality of Myki in the first elections on May 21st New Democracy gets 30% and then drops to 15%, I think it is an important message that they should take into account. Don't see us as third-class citizens. The equality and equality of the late Mitsotakis remained only on paper. We are still waiting for parity.
Do families really now prefer to settle their disputes in the civil courts or do they still use the Mufti?
You know that our country was condemned by the Court of Human Rights for one case. An amendment was made to the powers of the mufti. I got married in 1992 in a religious marriage, then we could not do politics. The minorities necessarily performed a religious marriage which was also written as a political one. If I divorced, I would go to the mufti and the mufti would decide who would have custody of the children. And you know what the terrible thing is? That in Greece the laws of our country did not pass.
That is, if someone went to the notary to settle his inheritance and had two children, a boy and a girl, he would leave his property 50/50. But the boy objected and broke the will that the deceased had made. Tragic stuff. Especially with the muftis we had another problem. Whoever was powerful made the decisions he wanted. With the SYRIZA government, we made the amendment so that if one of the couple disagrees, we go to the civil courts.
The minority wants the religious leader to be somehow nominated, elected, not appointed. We had the events that took place in 1988 and 1990, the episodes. The bill brought by New Democracy was not at all towards solving the issue and set us back many years. There was no proper consultation, and there was no proposal to solve the problem.
Mr. Zeybek, why are people leaving the villages, especially the mountainous ones?
They desert our villages necessarily because there is a question of survival. We used to have the tobacco that was a trademark of our area. Xanthi experienced development through tobacco. But there was a saying that those who invested their fortune in tobacco became tobacco. And you know, after the second world war when there was a serious problem with the tobacco industry, slowly tobacco started to disappear.
Of course, we must also say that the world's best variety of tobacco thrives in our region. For my part, I made several attempts to get it into protected product status, but the tough attitude of the European Union did not allow it.
The lot is very limited in agricultural production, animal husbandry is also limited and farmers suffer with prices. The alternative for the youth is to go to the shipyards of Europe, which is where I went in 2001. I worked in the shipyards. But we want incentives so that these children at their most mature age who can offer, offer to our country. Of course, I think we are very far from that.
You know Xanthi had a tradition with the agricultural movement and cooperative factories. The late Baltatzis and my grandfather, who was an MP of the Agrarian Party in 1946, offered a lot to our country. But the continuation of the movement "managed" to close the four factories, to depopulate Xanthi and to give the last factory to a businessman. For the good of us all the Japanese bought SEKAP and the only factory that remained alive is still in production.
It wasn't just the people who were employed in the factories though, it was also the producers. The milk factory was privatized and decline came to our city. It is no coincidence that our region is the poorest in Europe. Some people should see this and make investments so that not only the young people of the minority but of our entire prefecture stay in Thrace and produce in Thrace.
