Turkey

A very timely story yesterday in the Wall Street Journal by Andrew Higgins about a land dispute between Syriac Orthodox monastery Mor Gabriel and Turkish authorities. Also yesterday, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, during a stop in Ankara, announced that President Obama will be visiting Turkey “in a month or so.” She said this toward the end of her public remarks:

I reiterate the Obama Administration’s support for Turkey’s membership in the European Union. The United States believes it will strengthen Turkey, Europe, and our transatlantic partnership. The United States continues to support the UN-sponsored talks now taking place to achieve a settlement of the Cyprus conflict based on reunification of the island as a bi-zonal, bi-communal federation. We talked about Turkey’s democracy, its multiethnic heritage, and in that context, I raised the importance that we place on reopening the Halki Seminary and efforts to reach out to all of Turkey’s communities.

For the Journal story about Mor Gabriel, Higgins interviewed Bishop Timotheus Samuel Aktas, abbot of the ancient monstery, who claims that the surrounding villagers and local government officials simply want the Christian community to “go away.”

Here’s a snippet from “Defending the Faith — Battle Over a Christian Monastery Tests Turkey’s Tolerance of Minorities” [registration required]:

A big obstacle is Turkey’s continuing tensions with its ethnic minorities, notably the Kurds, who account for more than 15% of the population and are battling for greater autonomy. Also fraught, but more under the radar, is the situation confronting members of the Syriac Orthodox Church, one of the world’s oldest and most beleaguered Christian communities. The group’s fate is now seen as a test of Turkey’s ability to accommodate groups at odds with “Turkishness,” a legal concept of national identity that has at times been used to suppress minority groups. Continue reading →

Asia News reports that the Turkish Foreign Ministry has issued a new report “which denigrates the ‘minority’ presence of the Greek Orthodox community in Turkey, and refuses to recognize the ‘ecumenical’ character of the ancient patriarchate.”

It seems that the Turkish foreign ministry is trying to make the patriarchate “disappear,” continuing to call Bartholomew I “the patriarch of Fanar [editor’s note: the neighborhood where the patriarch resides],” refusing to use the title “ecumenical” and acknowledging only that he has spiritual responsibility for the domestic Greek minority, and not for the Orthodox communities connected to Constantinople. It also seems almost a concession from above to accept that Bartholomew I uses the title “ecumenical” abroad.

Said the Patriarch: “We are not finished, or hopeless.”

The news service also cited a source who said that Turkey “was highly disturbed by the emphasis that the Russian media gave to the presence of ecumenical patriarch Bartholomew at the funeral for Alexy II.” Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has expressed an interest in visiting the Ecumenical Patriarchate, the news service said.

Read more on Asia News.

My interview with Turkish journalist Mustafa Akyol was published today in The Acton Institute’s Religion & Liberty quarterly. Our talk focused on the prospects for greater economic and religious liberty in Turkey. Mustafa blogs at The White Path.

Excerpt:

Let’s talk about religious freedom. There’s a great tension between the modern secularist path of Turkey, going back to Ataturk, and the revival of Islam and its influence on politics. Will this be a winner take all battle, or is Turkey working out something a little more complex in the future?

I say there will be room for all of these views, and Turkey will be more pluralistic than it used to be. Actually, right now, the battle is between the people who want to create room for pluralism and those who want to keep it homogeneously secular. Keep in mind that the founding idea of the Turkish Republic was very monolithic. It picked up the narrative of the French Enlightenment in that secularism would make the country safe from religious obscurantism and the forces of darkness. Hence came the closure of old traditional religious institutions while the state took control of religion by establishing the Directorate of Religious Affairs. That way, religion came under the control of the state and it would be permissible only in private sphere or, of course, in the mosques.

Continue reading →

In “Turkey Shocked by Chain Smoking, Raki-Swilling Atatürk,” Spiegel Online reporter Daniel Steinvorth reports on the controversy over a new film released to mark the 70th anniversary of the death of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.

… Turkish Defense Minister Vecdi Gönül showed that the seven-decade anniversary can also be celebrated in another way — one perhaps more to the liking of the Kemalist Thought Association. At a ceremony at the Turkish embassy in Brussels, he gave a lecture on the difficult formation of the Turkish State and the expulsion of Greeks and Armenians, a fact which Gönül described as a “very important step.” At the end of the day, he said, modern Turkey would not be as we know it, “if Greeks still lived on the Aegean and Armenians still lived in different parts of Turkey today.”

In other words: the historical expulsion, deportation and extermination of the two population groups, as the thinking goes, are to be welcomed.

Between 1.5 and 2 million Anatolian Greeks were forced to leave their home in the process of the population changes. In return, half a million Greek Muslims came to Turkey. In 1955 another 100,000 Greeks left their home city of Istanbul following anti-Greek pogroms in a chapter of Turkish history which the once multicultural metropolis prefers to keep quiet about.

Later in the week, Gönül would correct himself, saying that Turkish minority groups, like the Armenians and the Greeks, enrich the country.

Still, Turkey’s official writing of history reveals a deep reluctance to tackle the “disappearance” of the Armenians. While Armenian sources say 1.5 million Armenians died in massacres and death marches during World War I, Turkey speaks of deaths on both sides, claiming there were 300,000 Armenian victims at the very most.

Turkish politics professor Baskin Oran was well aware how strong Gönül’s words sound beyond Turkish borders. “Because the Armenians and Greeks from Anatolia were sent away, industrialization was been delayed by at least 50 years,” he said.