Lütfü Karakaş – GJC General Secretary
It is known as the region between the Meriç River and the Karasu River near Iskece.
But in reality Western Thrace,
It is the region between the Meric River and the Struma river, which passes between Thessaloniki and Kavala and which originates from Bulgaria and flows into the sea through Greece.
Western Thrace, where our heart is half,
It is where migrations take place.
And those who can’t emigrate!
Turkish Foreign Policy envisions minorities staying in the regions where they live.
They are asked to have a say in the land in which they live, in trade, in politics, in the bureaucracy, and to take effective positions.
It is seen as a bridge between Turkey and the country in which they are citizens.
Is it easy to be a minority?
Away from the motherland, there is a name for education in the mother tongue, there is no itself.
They need to keep their tongues alive. Turkish is spoken in houses.
In Western Thrace, the elderly do not speak Greek.
Minorities must announce their problems to the outside world.
For this reason, in Western Thrace, the written press has been important since 1923.
Zaman, the first soydaş newspaper, started publishing in 1923.
The new Zia newspaper in 1924.
Mehmet Hilmi, a teacher who was a fan of Atatürk, the founder and savior of our country, reached the descendants in 1927 with the new step newspaper.
Greeks were annoyed by the publication of the new step.
Atatürk’s beloved teacher Mehmet Hilmi died at the age of 27 in a simple appendicitis operation.
A so-called health operation that leaves questions behind…
Ülkü’s publishing life, which met its readers in 1930, was short-lived.
Osman Nuri Fettahoglu, who was a member of Parliament, published the Thracian newspaper in 1932.
Asim Haliloğlu’s Akın in 1957, Gümülcine ’s meeting point of the descendants began to be read at Çukur coffee.
Serhat Galip’s father, who grew up in Turkey’s Balkans, held critical security positions and recently retired from his position as ambassador to Montenegro, became the voice of the minority Mail, which Selahattin Galip, one of the symbols of the struggle in Western Thrace, started publishing in 1967.
Khalil Khaki was interested in the problems and problems of his kindred with forward in 1975 and the late Ismail Rodoplu real newspaper, a former deputy in 1977.
When the dates indicated the year 1981, on January 26, 1988, Abdulhalim Dede, a journalist who announced the Resistance of Western Thracians to Turkishness to the world, began publishing the newspaper Voice of Thrace.
He then reached out to Western Thracians in 1996 with the newspaper Hülya Emin Gündem.
After that, Ilhan Tahsin’s unity newspaper came into play.
So how are things today?
In Western Thrace there remained two newspapers published regularly.
Genghis Omar and Bilal Budur of Iskeçeli started publishing Millet newspaper in 2005;
Gümülcineli Sezer Reza’s Cumhuriyet newspaper, which has been published since 1995.
Let’s not forget Ibrahim Baltalı’s Rhodope wind and Ilknur Khalil’s teacher’s voice magazines, which are published monthly.
It’s hard to be a minority, especially being a minority journalist, it’s much harder.
No one holds his hand.
All kinds of intrigues are translated to disrupt the unity and unity of the minority.
Standing upright, shouting at minority issues, is not easy.
The light of our eyes in Western Thrace is the voice of the descendant, the written press is disappearing.
But, continue the struggle over the internet…
For the protection of the rights of the descendants living in Western Thrace granted by the Treaty of Lausanne, the continuation of Lausanne to choose its religious leaders themselves, which is necessary…
The more press organizations that will talk about them, the more their voices will be loud.
Western Thrace does not have radios that play Turkish music, I say whether they have televisions.
The number of people who work in our country of Western Thrace origin is not small. I’m just saying, isn’t it time to keep it off the hook?
It’s time to pay off the debt of loyalty to the ancestral land, and it’s already over.