While still a high school student, Sadik Ahmet wrote an article titled The Expected Sun for a local newspaper, declaring, “The Turks of Western Thrace need a sun to lead them out of the darkness”.
Ahmet, who dedicated his life to defending the rights of the Turks of Western Thrace guaranteed under the Treaty of Lausanne, signed on July 24, 1923, died in a suspicious traffic accident on July 24, 1995 — the very anniversary of the treaty and at the height of the struggle he had devoted his life to.
With his death, he left the cause he had carried for decades in the hands of his people.
Born in 1947 in the village of Kucuk Sirkeli, near Gumulcine, one of Western Thrace’s oldest cities, Ahmet returned to his homeland as a physician after completing his medical studies in Greece’s Thessaloniki.
But what he encountered there would not allow him to remain simply a doctor.
The plight of a community whose identity was denied, whose religious institutions were taken over, and whose schools were closing one by one transformed him first into a defender of rights and then into one of the leading figures in the Western Thrace Turkish community.
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Western Thrace, which also borders Bulgaria and the Greek region of Macedonia, is home to an estimated 150,000 ethnic Turks, comprising approximately a third of the population.
In 1913, the Turks of Western Thrace established what is considered the first Turkish republic in history, long before modern Türkiye was founded.
In 1923, the Treaty of Lausanne did not merely redraw borders; it also made a mutual promise. The Turks of Western Thrace would remain under Greek sovereignty, while the Greeks of Istanbul and Gokceada (Imroz) and Bozcaada islands in the Aegean would be under Turkish sovereignty.
Ahmet grounded his struggle in international law. The 1923 treaty guaranteed the Turks of Western Thrace the right to preserve their identity, language and religious institutions.
However, members of the Western Thrace Turkish community have long argued that Greece failed to uphold those guarantees.
The restrictions that intensified under the 1967 military junta were compounded by the deterioration of Turkish-Greek relations after 1974.
During that period, thousands of Western Thrace Turks were stripped of their Greek citizenship under Article 19 of the Greek Citizenship Code.
Refusing to remain silent in the face of this reality, Ahmet launched a struggle that would prove historic and cost him his life.
‘Denial of their Turkish identity’
In 1985, he launched a petition campaign to bring the voice of the Western Thrace Turks to the international stage.
Cigdem Asafoglu, the current General Chair of the Friendship, Equality and Peace (DEB) Party, founded by Ahmet, recalls those days and his stance:
“Criminal charges were filed against Ahmet over signed papers [petition campaign papers] found in his car. But this process transformed into an existential struggle for the entire community and triggered the events of 29 January 1988,” Asafoglu tells TRT World.
“For the first time, the people of the minority mounted a mass resistance against the denial of their ‘Turkish’ identity. Ahmet was a courageous man who, at a time when even uttering the word ‘Turkish’ was forbidden, defiantly declared ‘I am a Turk, and I will remain so.’ His contribution to every gain that has been achieved is immeasurable.
Despite being sentenced to prison for his activism, Ahmet entered the Greek parliament as an independent candidate in 1989 and founded the DEB Party in 1991, the first and only political party representing the minority.
According to supporters of the minority, Athens sought to obstruct his political rise by amending the electoral law to impose a three percent national threshold, effectively preventing independent minority candidates from gaining representation.
