Birgül Maksum is a young working woman from Western Thrace, which is home to a diverse muslim minority of approximately 120,000 Greek citizens of various ethnic origins (Turks, Pomaks, Roma, etc). She is also a candidate for the Regional Council of Eastern Macedonia and Thrace with the electoral list of the Communist Party of Greece (KKE).
Birgül was among the speakers during yesterday's KKE event in Komotini, which was attended by the Party's General Secretary Dimitris Koutsoumbas who is currently visiting the region.
The young woman began her greeting message with the words of the legendary Turkish communist poet Nazim Hikmet: "One religion, one law, one right: The worker's labour". With these words in our mind and hearts, she said, "we are giving the struggle so that our Party will come out powerful in the elections of May".
The young KKE candidate pointed out: "The young working women of the minority will give a powerful response to those who send our fathers, our brothers, our friends in the modern slave market of shipyards, constructions, greenhouses and in other heavy and unhealthy manual work exists in Northern Europe and in other places".
Maksum said that "we will condemn those who do not take any essential measure in order to improve education", adding: "We know who they are. They are the bourgeois classes of both sides. They are their political personnel, all the parties that have governed, SYRIZA, ND, PASOK, the ones who, through their policy, create the negative reality that we experience."
"We are concerned because our region is involved deeper and deeper in the US-NATO plans with the Alexandroupolis' base", Birgül said. "We know well that for their profits, for the redistribution of the markets, they can slaughter the people".
In her interesting intervention, the KKE regional candidate also underlined: "We isolate those who say that we must vote on the basis of religion and (ethnic) background. We are against nationalism in all its forms. We trust the KKE, the only Party that doesn't divide the worker by skin colour, language or religion. The Party that daily gives the struggle to organize the counterattack, so that we can live however we like".
She ended her speech with an optimistic tone: "Because we are young men and women and we will change their rotten world". And again with Nazim Hikmet's words: "We will sink this pirate ship! And we will create a free, spacious, hopeful world!".
