President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who is in New York for the 78th session of the United Nations General Assembly, met with Meskhetian Turks at the Turkish House.
Speaking at the meeting, President Erdoğan noted that the Meskhetian Turks, who had been forced to migrate to nine different countries with the exile, lived for years under severe conditions, but that despite all the difficulties, they managed to defend their identity and leave their cultural heritage to their children.
President Erdoğan said: “Wherever they live, Meskhetian Turks’ hearts always beat with Türkiye. We as Türkiye are proud of the success stories that you write by resisting all kinds of setbacks. We are determined to do what falls to us to add new and greater ones to these stories. With this understanding, we closely follow the situation of Meskhetian Turks. Right after the incidents had started to take place in Ukraine, we contacted Ukrainian officials and brought our Meskhetian Turk brothers and sisters, who had been affected by the conflicts, to our country. We enabled a total of 1,000 families of different groups to settle in Erzincan and Ahlat. The number of Meskhetian Turks, thus, who have come to our country, has reached 4 thousand.”
Underscoring that he sees necessary to strengthen Meskhetian Turks’ cooperation with other Turkish and Muslim nongovernmental organizations in the U.S., President Erdoğan went on to say: “You should act together against racism and Islamophobia that are on the rise recently, and stand up together against those tendencies. It is important that you, too, show sensitivity in the face of this unjust, unlawful and discriminative mentality targeting Muslims. I attach importance to your integration with the society you live in and to your effective representation within it while defending your culture. In this sense, your active participation in the American civil society will be the strongest legacy that you will leave your children.”
https://tccb.gov.tr/en/news/542/149469/president-erdogan-meets-with-meskhetian-turks-in-new-york
