The Turkish-Muslim minority of Greece : confidential discourses, reciprocity and minority subjectivity during the emergence of the policies of discrimination (1945-1966)

This thesis examines through confidential discourses and political logics the emergence of the regime of administrative harassment that was established in Greek Thrace in regard to its Muslim-Turkish minority population in the middle of 1960s. Deploying a Discursive Analytical approach, the thesis seeks to do this by means of examination of the most extensive collection of previously confidential official documents regarding Thrace in a period extending from the end of the Second World War until the application of the first administrative measures with repressive character. The basic argument is that the conditions of possibility for the emergence of the organized policies of discrimination against the minority population of Western Thrace can be traced in the various ways the transformation of minority's identification from a religious (Islamic) to an ethno-national (Turkish) one was 'problematized' by formal agents and institutions. The interpretation of minority's identification with Turkish nationalism as a 'threat', interacting with the intervention of the Turkish state (as a 'kin-state') in Thrace, and contingent historical events like the repressive policies against the Greek-Orthodox minorities of Turkey and the dispute over Cyprus, transformed these negative interpretations and logics into political projects. As a result, the focus of the Greek administration became the construction of a secret political project that tried unsuccessfully to block the growing identification of the local Muslims with the Turkish-Kemalist discourse, while at the same time promoting alternative groups such as the traditional Islamists and ethnic Pomaks. That project included the selective application of the 'principle of reciprocity' with regard to various minority groups, while the program of "land purchasing" manifested the first efforts to Hellenize Thrace by forcing its minority population to emigrate.