|
|
|
Published by The
New York Times, November 21, 2004
Some Hard-Liners in
Turkey See Diversity as Divisive
By SUSAN SACHS |
 |
 |
ISTANBUL,
Nov. 20 - In the cavernous Panayia church, one of
the few Greek Orthodox churches still active in
Turkey, ceiling panels dangle precariously over
the choir loft. Flying glass has pitted the frescos of biblical
scenes. Musty carpets are rolled up and stored
like logs beside the elaborate Byzantine
iconostasis.
The building, which celebrates its 200th
anniversary on Sunday, has been scarred for a
year, since terrorists bombed the nearby British
Consulate and the force of the explosion shattered
dozens of the church's stained glass windows.
Orthodox leaders, following Turkish law, asked for
government permission to make repairs but received
no response. Rain seeped in. Paint peeled. Mildew
grew.
After a few months, they surreptitiously replaced
the broken church windows. But they hesitate to
start renovations because the Turkish authorities,
as frequently happens in such cases, still have
not acknowledged their request.
"That's the usual tactic," said Andrea Rombopoulos,
a parishioner who publishes a newspaper for the
small Greek Orthodox community in Istanbul. "They
don't give a negative answer. They don't give any
answer at all."
Turkey has long viewed its non-Muslim minorities
with a certain ambivalence, defending individual
freedom of worship while tightly regulating the
affairs of religious institutions. Christians of
Greek and Armenian descent, in particular, have
said they are blocked from using, selling and
renovating properties that have been in their
churches' hands for centuries.
Now, under pressure from the European Union and
local civil rights advocates, Turkey has started
to cautiously reassess the way it has treated
religious minorities since the state
was founded 81 years ago.
Prime Minister Recip Tayyip Erdogan's government
has prepared legislation that would give Christian
and Jewish foundations more freedom to manage
their own assets and
elect their board members. Parliament is expected
to vote on the bill before Dec. 17, when European
Union leaders are to decide whether to open
accession talks with Turkey.
For the first time, senior Turkish officials have
also broken a long-standing taboo and broached the
idea of allowing the Greek Orthodox patriarchate
to reopen a 160-year-old seminary that once served
as a leading training center for priests.
The school, perched on a hill on an island in the
Sea of Marmara off Istanbul, was closed in 1971
when the state took control of all private
universities. Mr. Erdogan's aides have suggested
that it could be permitted to operate again, as a
gesture to the European Union, if Turkey's
membership bid advances.
Some legal constraints on religious foundations
have already been relaxed over the past three
years, although European and American human rights
monitors, citing cases like the Panayia church,
have reported that local officials have been
reluctant to carry out the changes.
Still, Christian leaders here said they were more
hopeful than ever.
"What has changed is that we don't have that
hostility anymore from the authorities," said
Elpidoforos Lambriniadis, an aide to the
Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew. "As the
patriarchate, we don't doubt the good will of the
government. But we know the government is not
controlling everything in this country."
For many Turks, even a discussion of religious or
ethnic minorities raises fears of separatism. Some
have argued that lifting government controls on
religious institutions,
whether Muslim or non-Muslim, would undermine
Turkey's secular foundations. And Turkey's
president, Ahmet Necdet Sezer, recently warned
that drawing attention to Turkey's sectarian or
cultural diversity harmed the state.
The delicacy of the issue was highlighted earlier
this month when a government-sponsored commission
released a report criticizing Turkey's definition
of itself as a
"single-culture nation-state" and urging an end to
all restrictions on the expression of minority
languages and cultures.
When the report was presented at a news
conference, a dissenting member of the commission
ripped a copy from the hands of the presenter and
tore it up. Later, the Erdogan government, which
established the commission, also disowned it.
Baskin Oran, the Ankara political science
professor who headed the commission, said he was
undeterred by the reaction.
"They are clearly seeing that what they have been
pushing under the carpet since the 1920's is now
being questioned," he said, "Now, everything will
be discussed. There will be no taboos in Turkey,
and they hate that."
For some hard-line nationalists, even the term
"minority" is anathema, suggesting dual loyalties
and the betrayal of the country's cherished ideal
of an indivisible Turkish
identity.
"In the end, there will be lots of small groups
feeling different and trying to identify their
differences as separate identities on basis of
religion, race or language," said Mehmet Sandir, a
spokesman for the Nationalist Movement party. "And
at times of economic or
political crisis, our country will immediately
turn into a 'minority hell' of internal strife."
Turkey's enemies, he added, could then exploit
those differences to split the nation, as the
European allies and Russia did after World War I
when the Ottoman Empire was further divided.
"This is not paranoia," said Mr. Sandir, whose
party has organized demonstrations against the
orthodox patriarchate. "The recognition of
minorities was used as an argument in destroying
empires. The Balkans are boiling now because of
this chaos of minorities."
A distrust of minorities is drilled into Turks
from childhood, according to Hrank Dink, a
magazine publisher and scholar active in the
country's ethnic Armenian community.
"In public school, 'minorities' are mentioned in
the textbook on national security, under the
section that talks about separatism and about the
'games played against Turkey' by outside powers,"
Mr. Dink said.
That suspicion carries over to the local officials
who are in charge of regulating the non-Muslim
religious foundations, including those that
administer the 17 schools and 42 churches of the
Armenian community in Turkey.
"They see the minorities in terms of national
security," Mr. Dink said. "The fewer there are,
the less they feel threatened."
The official doctrine on minorities stems from the
1923 Lausanne treaty in which the European powers
recognized Turkey's independence and received
guarantees concerning
the status of three non-Muslim communities -
Jewish, Greek Orthodox and Armenian - in the new
and predominantly Muslim Turkish state.
The three groups mentioned in the treaty,
sometimes referred to as "indigenous foreigners"
in official documents, were promised protection
but not the privileges
they enjoyed under Ottoman rule.
The Greek Orthodox patriarchate, regarded with
great suspicion by the Turkish leaders because of
its support for the failed Greek invasion a few
years earlier, was allowed
to remain in Istanbul, where it had been based for
nearly 1,700 years.
But Turkey did not recognize its ecumenical
authority, instead treating successive Orthodox
patriarchs as parish priests responsible for the
churches in their immediate
neighborhood.
The treaty did not mention Turkey's minority
Alewite population, who are Muslims but follow a
different sect from Turkey's Sunni mainstream and
now want their national
identity cards to show them as Alewite instead of
Muslim.
Nor did the treaty mention ethnic minorities like
Kurds. Until recently, Turkish governments used
that omission to justify their ban on references
to Kurds as a distinct
subgroup in Turkey. The government has eased its
restrictions on Kurds in the past two years but it
refers to them as a group using a different
language than Turkish, not as a minority.
More changes are inevitable, said Professor Oran,
who spearheaded the government report on
minorities.
"The concept of 'minority' has changed since the
Lausanne Treaty," he said. "Now it's anyone
different from the majority and who wants to
maintain this difference. We have
to delete the laws that prevent them from using
the same rights as the majority. If a Turk can
read and write and publish in Turkish, then any
Kurd or Circassian should have the same right."
"The genie," Professor Oran added, "is out of the
bottle."
|
