A diplomatic incident between Turkey and Greece has been avoided after Athens News Agency published a corrected version of the statement by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on the “referendum in Thrace.”
According to ANA, in his speech in Rize earlier today, Erdogan did not call for a “referendum in Thrace” in north-eastern Greece with a strong presence of Muslim population.
Furthermore, Erdogan made also no reference to “Thessaloniki, the Aegean islands and Cyprus.
It was “an error” by the agency’s correspondent in Turkey who attributed to Erdogan the analysis of a Turkish journalist of daily Sabah who was referring to and interpreting the decisions of the Misaki Milli of 1920.
However, Erdogan did indeed refer to “Thessaloniki, Syria, Iraq, Gaza, North Africa,” and other countries and “sister areas” formerly under the rule of the Ottoman Empire and for which Erdogan claims Turkey has a strong interest in what is going there.
The ANA correspondent has been reportedly fired.
more sources: here (in Greek) and KTG’s earlier post
Not only that, in the past Erdogan and his side kick foreign minister said that Kosovo and Bosnia are Turkish and they will do anything to defend them. They also said that the Ottoman Empire was the best thing ever happened to the Balkans and that that situation needs to be restored. Many people on the Balkans disagree with that to put it mildly.
Ah, a “glorious past”. Nothing to go some people’s heads faster than that.