Place, Country Athens, Greece
Year 2020
Affected group/minority Turkish community in Western Thrace
Perpetrator Kyriakos Velopoulos, Prime Minister of Greece
Type of case Hate speech
Type of act Written attack
Media: Online platforms/ communication channels
Reactions: Members and civil society organisations of the Turkish community
in Western Thrace strongly condemned Velopoulos' remarks on Twitter.
Brief description:
On 23 March 2020, Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis declared a nationwide curfew to prevent the coronavirus. The village of Echinos (Şahin) in Xanthi was the first quarantined village in the country after a 72-year-old man from the Turkish community in Western Thrace died.
Following the quarantine imposed on the village of Echinos, Kyriakos Velopoulos, head of the far-right Greek Solution Party, posted on Twitter, ‘Echinos is in Quarantine!!! Ankara's spies live there, coming in and out of Turkey! Think about what it is in Erdoğan’s Turkey!’. Condemning the racist rhetoric, the President of the Federation of Western Thrace Turks in Europe (ABTTF), Halit Habip Oğlu, stated: “We should avoid planting the seeds of hatred in society in the fight against this virus that threatens all of humanity regardless of geography, religion, ethnicity or social class… In Greece, whether we are Turks or Greeks, Christians or Muslims, we are all in the same boat. If we don't fight the virus together, we'll all be affected by the bad consequences.”
More information on the case can be obtained through the links:
https://www.abttf.org/arama-detail.php?id=6165
https://gundemgazetesi.com/haber/detay/6804
Photo: Shutterstock / Zorro Stock Images
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