Greece should not want my kin to assimilate: Turkey's Erdogan

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region (Kurdistan 24) - Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on Friday that the Athens government should not "demand" the ethnic Turks there to assimilate.

This was the first visit in over six decades by a Turkish head of state to the neighboring Greece. Two countries maintain troubling relations deep in history. 

"We never wanted [to assimilate] a different ethnic element. This would be a great injustice," Erdogan told an audience of Greek Turks, a majority of whom are Muslim, in the city of Komotini.

The Turkish President's trip to Greece where he met with Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras began with a row over the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne when Erdogan suggested in the Thursday joint press conference that the international agreement needed an "update."

Lausanne defines the land and water borders between the two countries while at the same time ensuring the protection of minority rights of Christians in Turkey and Muslims in Greece, as the early 20th-century treaty refers to those groups by their respective religious affiliations.

It also grants rights such as education, commerce, the use of media and print and defense at courts in mother tongue to speakers of non-Turkish languages in Turkey such as the Kurds.

However, Ankara has since the foundation of the Republic enforced bans on language, the right to self-rule and assimilation on millions-strong Kurds.

In the past several years, Erdogan has repeatedly attacked Lausanne over what he called a loss of the Aegean Islands to Greece.

But in his presser with Tsipras, he criticized Athens's appointment of mufti for the Turks in Western Thrace province, which he said was in violation of the treaty, reported Turkish state media.

He said the minority, descendants of Ottomans who controlled Greece from the 15th-century until the 19th-century war of independence now numbering in tens of thousands, should be able to elect their own chief Islamic cleric.

After the Greco-Turkish war in the early 1920s, the two countries "exchanged" populations in 1923 that resulted in the deportation of over one million Greeks from Anatolia and about half a million Turkish-speaking people from Greece, all forcibly made refugees.

However, not all Muslims in Greece are Turkish. There are, though in smaller numbers, Muslims of Slavic, Pomak, Albanian, Greek, and Romani origin.

Erdogan said what united those groups was Islam and that his concerns about "assimilation" was not limited to the Turks.

Editing by Sam A.