(Anadolu) Turkey slammed Greece on Wednesday over systematically closing down Turkish minority schools in the country’s Western Thrace region, depriving the minority of the education of their choosing.
Athens’ practice of “temporary suspension” of minority schools in Western Thrace — a region boasting a Muslim Turkish minority numbering around 150,000 — for the past 25 years is a part of Greece’s “assimilation and oppression” policy, said Foreign Ministry spokesman Hami Aksoy.
Such oppressive policies “have been carried out for decades against the Turkish minority in Western Thrace,” read the statement.
For 25 years, Greece has been systematically shutting down schools belonging to the Turkish minority on the pretext of austerity measures and insufficient enrollment, said the ministry.
