Minority party leader claims Turkish identity

Turkish media are prominently covering the Party of Friendship, Equality and Peace, representing mostly the Muslim minority in Greece’s northeast.

KIEF, as the party is known by its Greek acronym, prevailed in the regional units of Xanthi and Rodopi in the previous European Parliament elections of May 2019. In Xanthi, it got 25.24% compared to New Democracy’s 24.44%, while it almost doubled New Democracy’s core in Rodopi (38.00% to 19.69%). In an interview on Turkish TV station TRT Haber, Cigdem Asafoglou, the party’s 36-year-old leader, said the Greek state denies the minority’s “Turkish identity.”

“They deny our identity. They do not take us into account. They behave as if we do not exist,” Asafoglou said. “It is, indeed, very difficult to be a minority in Greece. And, being a Turkish minority is even more difficult.”

Asafoglou said that instead of referring to them as Turks, the Greek state uses the term “Muslim minority,” based on the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne.

Asafoglou misleadingly claimed that the whole Muslim minority is Turkish, whereas it is, in fact, multiethnic, also containing Pomaks (Bulgarian-speaking Muslims) and Roma.

It is true that, in discriminating against the Muslim minority in various ways in the past, while letting them get their religious education from teachers sent from Turkey, the Greek state inadvertently helped forge a distinct identity. While lifting the discriminatory, and humiliating, measures against the minority in the 1980s and 1990s, Greece belatedly realized the benefits of recognizing the multiethnic identity of the Muslim minority and tried to promote it, with varying degrees of success.

Asafoglou pointed out that her party’s slate contains a representative from the “Macedonian” minority, another sore point for Greece, which never officially recognized an ethnic Macedonian minority, but, rather, a Slavic one.