Ecumenical News International
Daily News Service / 08 December 2004

Muslim majority no obstacle to Turkey’s EU bid: Dutch churches

By Andreas Havinga

Amsterdam, 8 December (ENI)–Turkey’s Muslim majority population
should not be a reason for denying the country membership in the
European Union, the Council of Churches in the Netherlands has
said in an open letter to Dutch prime minister Jan Peter
Balkenende.

The EU should, however, insist that Turkey recognise the
Orthodox and other religious minorities within its borders and
this should be a “hard condition” for membership, said the
council, which groups the Protestant, Roman Catholic and
Orthodox churches. It stressed “the importance of respect for
freedom of religion, and for religious and ethnic minorities”.

The Netherlands holds the presidency of the 25 member European
Union. Member states will decide on 17 December about whether to
open talks with Turkey on EU membership.

Turkey’s population of 69 million is second only to that of
Germany’s 82 million people. Demographers estimate that by the
middle of the century, Turkey’s population will exceed that of
any of the EU’s current members.

“The fact that Turkey is a secular state with a Muslim-majority
population certainly poses no obstacle for possible admission of
the country [into the EU],” said the 29 November letter signed by
Ineke Bakker, the Dutch church council’s general secretary.

The church council also pointed out that Turkey still does not
formally recognise the Syrian Orthodox minority living within
its borders.

Turkey does not publish official statistics on religious
affiliation, but estimates say there are between 15,000 and
50,000 Syrian Orthodox Christians in Turkey, while some 12,000
Syrian Orthodox live in the Netherlands. Totalling more than one
million worldwide, Syrian Orthodox read and write Aramaic, the
language that Jesus spoke. Fewer than 0.2 per cent of Turkey’s
population are Christians.

“It would be a special confidence-building sign if the Turkish
authorities were to publicly admit the genocide of 1915,” the
council added, referring to massacre of Armenians by Turkey’s
predecessor, the Ottoman empire, in which also Syrians were
annihilated. Books about the genocide are banned in Turkey.

Istanbul in Turkey is also home to the Ecumenical Patriarch of
Constantinople, who is seen as the senior Eastern Orthodox leader
in the world. Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomeos I complained this
month about Turkey backtracking on a promise to reopen the Halki
Orthodox seminary, closed by the government in 1971.

“It is important that all religious minorities gain the right to
build and maintain buildings such as churches and monasteries,
to set up theological training, to speak and teach in their own
language, and to be free in carrying out diaconal and other
church-related activities,” the Dutch church council said in its
letter.

In the Netherlands rapid secularisation has occurred in recent
decades while the country has received large numbers of Muslim
immigrants, mainly from Turkey and Morocco. Christians are still
the largest religious grouping in the country, but about 40 per
cent of the Dutch population profess no religious faith and more
than five per cent are Muslim.

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