Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has claimed that the “problems of Western Thrace” was the “main issue” he raised with Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis at their meeting on the sidelines of the NATO summit in Vilnius on Monday.
“We want to overcome these [problems]to overcome the issue with the muftis,” the Turkish president said, referring to the procedures used to appoint clerics for the Muslim minority in Thrace, northeastern Greece.
Under Greek law, muftis are appointed by the state, as they are in Turkey, but Turkey has called for the Thrace muftis to be elected by the minority community.
“And our ambassadors will hold meetings, they will make the preparations, as will our foreign ministers, and later the two leaders will meet and take the necessary steps,” Erdogan said.
“From the perspective of history, our experiences are a given and we do not wish to continue in this way. Mr Mitsotakis went through new elections, just like we did. As two leaders who won the elections, we want to take steps in the positive direction,” Erdogan said.
A day after his meeting with Erdogan at the NATO summit in Lithuania, Mitsotakis announced the promotion of a “bold agenda” in Greek-Turkish relations with the ultimate aim of bringing the basic bilateral dispute, namely the delimitation of the continental shelf and the exclusive economic zone (EEZ), to the International Court of Justice in The Hague.
