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Turkey FM's tweets anger Greece after Muslim minority visit
[AlAhram] The Sick Man of Europe Turkey
...the only place on the face of the earth that misses the Ottoman Empire...
's foreign minister began a trip to Greece on Sunday, quickly angering his hosts with tweets about his meeting with members of the Moslem minority.

"In Greece to meet members of Ottoman Turkish Minority in Western Thrace and discuss our bilateral relations," Mevlut Cavusoglu tweeted as soon as he touched down at the airport in Alexandroupolis, in the northeastern region close to the Ottoman Turkish border.

Cavusoglu visited a school as well as a village and the Ottoman Turkish consulate, where he met with representatives of the Moslem minority.

"I emphasized that we will always stand resolutely with the Ottoman Turkish Minority in their struggle for their rights and underlined once again our strong support," he tweeted afterwards.

Athens describes the minority as multi-ethnic Moslems, and Cavusoglu's description of them as "Ottoman Turkish" prompted an angry response from the Greek foreign ministry.

"The Moslem minority in Thrace has about 120,000 Greek inhabitants," the ministry said in a statement.

"Turkey's constant attempts to distort this reality, as well as the allegations of non-protection of the rights of these citizens, or of discrimination, are unfounded and are rejected in their entirety," it added.

"Greece would like to improve relations with Turkey, but with the respect for international law as a prerequisite."

Moslems in the Thrace region were given minority status in Greece after the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, which ended a war between Greece and Turkey.

Turkey has often claimed that Greece fails to properly protect the rights of the minority, many of whom are of Ottoman Turkish descent and Ottoman Turkish-speaking.

During a heated presser in Ankara in mid-April, Cavusoglu raised the issue with his Greek counterpart Nikos Dendias.

"You don't allow the Ottoman Turkish minority (in Greece) to call themselves Ottoman Turkish. You call them Moslems," he said.

"If they call themselves Ottoman Turkish, they are Ottoman Turkish -- you have to recognise this."

Cavusoglu is due to meet Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis as well as Dendias in Athens on Monday.

Cavusoglu had previously said the aim of his visit was to prepare for a bilateral meeting between Mitsotakis and Ottoman Turkish President His Enormity, Sultan Recep Tayyip Erdogan the First
...Turkey's version of Mohammed Morsi but they voted him back in so they deserve him. It's a sin, a shame, and a felony to insult the president of Turkey. In Anatolia did Recep Bey a stately Presidential Palace decree, that has 1100 rooms. That's 968 more than there are in the White House, 400 more than in Versailles, and 325 more than Buckingham Palace, so you know who's really most important...
during a NATO
...the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. A collection of multinational and multilingual and multicultural armed forces, all of differing capabilities, working toward a common goal by pulling in different directions...
summit in Brussels on June 14.

While the Greek media said Cavusoglu's visit was a "test" of how his meetings would go in Athens, the Greek government had tried to downplay any significance of the Thrace trip ahead of his arrival.

"The visit in Thrace is a private visit. Greece is an open, democratic country that does not forbid private visits. As far as the (Thrace) minority is concerned, it is enjoying a status of equality," Greek government spokeswoman Aristotelia Peloni said on Thursday.

The status of Greece's Moslem minority is one of several points of contention between the two NATO allies.

Byzantine heritage inside Turkey, after Ankara's move last year to convert the revered Hagia Sophia cathedral from a museum into a mosque sparked fury from Athens, is another.

Relations also plunged last year during a face-off over a wealth of energy deposits in the eastern Mediterranean Sea.
Posted by: trailing wife 2021-05-31
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=603299