GREEK MUSLIMS - FINALLY CITIZENS

Ghosts finally come alive!

AIM Athens, 19 December, 1997

New Year's eve is a traditional day for jubilation for almost everyone. This year, millions of Muslims around the world anticipate it in a different manner, as it sets off their Ramadan. For some 1,000 Muslims of Greece, this Ramadan will be one they will never forget. Just ten days before its beginning, they will be able to start coming out of the closet to get official documents that will turn them from ghosts into normal human beings with a claim to human dignity if not full civil rights. Who are these odd individuals? Greece's stateless. They are probably unique in the democratic world, as they have been turned stateless inside their very own homeland: another accomplishment from this country's exuberant record of human rights violations.

Aysel Zeybek was seven when, one day in 1984, as she remembers now, her mother came home crying and inconsolable. After some insistent probing, she explained to her four young daughters that she had turned in to the police all their documents as the whole family was being stripped of their citizenship. The crime, as Aysel then understood, was that, a few weeks before, they had all visited her grandparents in Istanbul. There, the father lost his passport. Like any citizen, he turned to his country's consulate to ask for a replacement. The Zeybek family ordeal was only beginning.

For other Greek citizens, the Greek Consulate in Istanbul, on the basis of the identity card, would immediately replace the passport. But the Zeybeks were already not any Greek citizens; they did not have normal blue plastic identity cards like their fellow citizens but special white cardboard booklets which specified that they could not move more than 30 km away from their residence without the prior approval by police authorities. Showing that document to the consulate meant that the replacement passport had to wait for a similar prior approval. After having been sent off a few times, by consuls who had no answer yet, Huseyin Zeybek was finally told that no passport will be issued as a procedure to strip him of his citizenship was engaged.

"Why? What have I done" he was insistently asking unable to hide his tears. "Don't know" was the answer of the as usual arrogant Greek consular officer, "Go away and don t come back again!" the diplomat commanded. Huseyin had no choice. He left the consulate and made sure that his wife and four daughters, still in possession of valid passports, return home at once. Then, a few weeks later, he paid quite a sum to one of those professional smugglers of usually destitute Turks or other Middle East fugitives looking for political asylum or a mere semi-decent job in what they think is the heaven of Greece. They help them cross the Greek - Turkish border, as they did for Huseyin, who thus joined his family into the open prison of the Rhodopes that was to become, for the following fourteen years, a living hell.

The family was at a loss. Soon they were asked to turn in also the license for the small family grocery store in the home town of Ehinos. "What if a policeman or some other inspector comes and asks for my license" asked the father. "Tell them it is in the police station and they will not bother you" answered the police station chief. Well, this worked for a while; once the license expired, and for a dozen years, police or other inspectors had been taking sadistic pleasure in torturing this quiet family man suing him for operation of an unlicensed store. Millions of drachmas ($1=270drs.) have being paid as fines following multiple court-delivered sentences.

Aysel, like her sisters, started having problems at school. To register, you need an identity document. But, as the whole family was stripped of their citizenship she had no documents. Only thanks to the help of her uncle, a former deputy, did the school register her; the uncle died in 1991, and so did Aysel s hopes to go beyond eighth grade. Numerous other similar forms of harassment were to be endured, as the Greek state s purpose was clear: they wanted to force the Zeybeks to leave Greece for good.

Refusing to be uprooted, Huseyin started becoming acquainted with Greek law. First, he heard of Article 19 of the Citizenship Code which empowers the state to strip non-ethnic Greeks (only -an obvious racist discrimination) of their citizenship if they had permanently settled abroad with no intent to return to Greece. "But I have never left except for short trips" he screamed at his lawyer. "Well, arkadash, the law does not say that you have to prove that. The state security police decides who lives here and who does not. Do you know how many people like you have left for short trips or sometimes for short stays, even as students, and found themselves heimatless [German but also Turkish for stateless]?" said the lawyer. "Not to mention those who have been stripped of their citizenship while still living and serving in the army or even voting here. In fact the first time they heard about it was when they actually applied for a passport!" He was also told that collective guilt was applied in this case: the whole family can lose the citizenship if the father s is revoked.

"So what can we do?" asked the desperate father. "Let us appeal to the Supreme State Administrative Court and then, if necessary, apply for citizenship anew" suggested the lawyer. "If you are a good boy, they may give it back to you, as they did for Kurt." Kurt Yakup was stripped of the citizenship in the 1980s when he was as a student in Turkey because he is smart and we tried to win him over but we failed as was said in the top secret note of the Foreign Ministry to the Citizenship Board: win him over meant becoming an informer which Kurt had refused. Maybe because Kurt, a leftist, ended up being beaten up by police in Turkey, the Greek state allowed him back. In the Zeybek case, the Citizenship Board had been postponing the examination of his dossier, despite the positive recommendation of the Ministry of Public Order, after the State Court had rejected his appeal as overdue.

Since Zeybek was a good boy many tried to help. Huseyin or his daughter Aysel had the chance to plead their case in front of a former prime minister, an acting foreign minister, and a governing party s leader. They all heard with sympathy the case and promised to help, in vain of course. In the meantime, though, the father continued having his professional problems while her sister was barely managing to go to school, unregistered of course, and could not -as neither could Aysel- get any transcript.

Because no one had ever informed the Zeybek family that even stateless people have rights, at least in countries desiring to be civilized and thus having signed inter alia the 1954 UN Convention Relating to the Status of Stateless Persons. These stateless belong to the officially called Muslim minority (they themselves prefer to be called Turks ) and they had been stripped of their citizenship in an obviously irregular application of the anyway inhumane and contrary to all European human rights documents Article 19. They can have special identity papers and even travel documents. Moreover, they must enjoy the rights of legal aliens in the country except on matters of health where they are equated with full citizens. Greece ratified the Convention with Law 139 of 25/25 - 8-1975 but had almost never applied it.

Worse, not just stateless people but even all lawyers and all politicians were conveniently unaware of the law s existence. In fact, most, including the UNHCR which has a mandate also to look after stateless people, were unaware of the very existence within the borders of Greece of an estimated 1,200 stateless. "I had been teaching for ten years in Thrace [where these people live] but have never heard of them" said the Secretary General of the Greek Foreign Ministry (and a Professor of International Law!). "It s only since you alerted the Ministry of Public Order a few days ago that we became aware of the problem" of both their existence and their deprivation of all UN mandated rights, added the Deputy Foreign Minister, promising in the process a swift solution to the problem.

Both high officials made these statements to a joint delegation of Human Rights Watch/Helsinki and Greek Helsinki Monitor which had indeed come across this blatant violation of fundamental human rights while running into Aysel and Huseyin Zeybek, in their lawyer s office, during their fact-finding mission in Thrace, in early September 1997. Then, they escorted the two to the Xanthi police headquarters to ask for the identity documents called for by the law. When the local police chief stated his, apparently sincere, ignorance of the matter, the human rights activists called the Minister of Public Order s advisor in Athens: he was also astounded but went on promising that the problem will be solved within two weeks.

Three months later the stateless were still in the limbo, as the Foreign Ministry bureaucracy was stubbornly refusing to give the go ahead. So, on International Human Rights Day (10 December), eleven Greek NGOs (with the noteworthy absence of the Greek sections of the Helsinki Citizens Assembly - HCA and the International Federation of Human Rights - FIDH, that have still to discover Greece s ethnic minorities), all three Turkish minority deputies and three smaller political parties made public a joint appeal. In it they were asking the government to grant all rights to the stateless, and to abolish Article 19, as well as the notorious security zone, this open prison in the Rhodopes mountain where ethnic Turks had been living restricted with the aforementioned internal passports until a couple of years ago and in which, even today, no foreigner may enter without a -rarely granted- police authorization.

Aysel was on 10 December in the Athens Bar Association where the appeal was made public and the first ever debate on the minority with the participation of almost all minority leaders took place. Hardly any Greek media were present though and only two papers wrote about the event and the tragic destiny of the stateless (they were Avghi and Eleftherotypia, in front page stories). Most important, the five ministries concerned which were invited to present their position snubbed the meeting (but some were abundantly represented that day in other anodyne celebrations where the focus was on human rights problems in Africa or elsewhere in Europe). So, those appealing announced they will go the following day to the Minister of Public Order to demand the granting of the papers.

In the event, only the deputy from Xanthi, Birol Akifoglu, and only two NGOs, Greek Helsinki Monitor and Minority Rights Group - Greece, showed up, but determined not to leave the Ministry until the problem was solved. Unfortunately, the Minister was tied up with the sequels of a terrorist attack, but promised to have the solution a week later. Indeed, on 18 December 1997, Aysel could smile again. The Greek government had decided to finally honor its obligation under that UN treaty: the leadership of the Ministry of Public Order had imposed its will on the other reluctant Ministries to have identity and travel documents issues to all stateless within Greece. The ghosts could finally come alive! Hopefully, from now on all stateless of Greece will be able to breathe, live, study and work fearlessly; now they will have to give the next fight, for the restoration of their citizenship that was stolen away in an equally brutal way. First though, Aysel, her family and the other stateless will calmly honor Ramadan and from the bottom of their heart shout "Allah akber" [God is One and Only].

Panayote Dimitris