The Foreign Ministry condemned Greece’s decision to shut down four more elementary schools belonging to the Turkish Muslim minority living in Western Thrace.
"With this latest decision, more than half of the minority primary schools have been closed. Thus, Greece's policy of closing primary schools belonging to the Turkish Muslim Minority in Western Thrace through 'temporary suspension' has proven to be systematic," Tanju Bilgiç, the country's Foreign Ministry spokesperson, said in a statement.
Bilgiç reiterated the Turkish minority's right to establish, manage and inspect their own schools in accordance with the Treaty of Lausanne signed in 1923 – which eventually paved the way for an independent Turkish republic.
He said the recent moves show the "discriminatory and oppressive policies" implemented against the Turkish minority in the field of education.
"While Greece closes primary schools with the pretext of an insufficient number of students, it ignores, on the other hand, the demands for opening new minority secondary/high schools despite the obvious need, and violates the education rights of minority children," Bilgiç noted.
He urged Greece to put an end to its discriminatory policies toward Turkish minority schools year after year.
"The Republic of Turkey will continue to support the minority's struggle for its rights and justice, both in bilateral contacts and international platforms," he added.
Greece's Western Thrace region is home to some 150,000 Muslim Turks, whose rights to elect their own religious leaders, found Turkish associations, and have their own schools have been denied by Athens, in violation of numerous European court orders.
Greek authorities shut down over 126 Turkish minority schools in the Western Thrace region, in violation of international treaties in the past 10 years, as they impose restrictive measures against students attending these schools
According to a report by Parliament, the Western Thracian Turkish minority, which constituted 65% of the region's population in the 1920s, has now fallen down to 30%.
After a Greek military junta came to power in 1967, the minority community started to face persecution and rights violations by the state. Following Turkey's 1974 peace operation on the island of Cyprus to protect Turkish Cypriots, the Greek military junta eventually fell, but strict restrictions on the minority group were imposed. By the early 1990s, some rights of Western Thracian Turks were partially restored, but problems regarding collective and civil liberties continued, and new challenges have emerged.
Greece launched an education drive in 2011 to cut costs and started merging schools with a low number of students, drastically reducing the number of schools from 1,933 to 877. In 2020 alone, some 14 schools attended by Turkish minority students were shut down.
