Turkish Daily News
Feb 12 2005

A Briton who regrets ever coming to Turkey

Mehmet Ali Birand
Saturday, February 12, 2005

The Parish family, after retiring in 1997, sold everything they owned
in Britain and moved to Milas. They bought 800 square meters of land
and built a house there. Five years later, the Turkish state knocked
on their door. Since then, their life has been a living hell.

Turkish society has a strange fear.

Foreigners coming and purchasing land are seen as a “violation of the
motherland” or even as “selling out our heavenly country.” Some go
even further and claim Arabs are buying land in the Southeast and
Hatay, while others say the Greeks are trying to establish a new
Pontic Empire by purchasing large tracts of the Black Sea region.
While the Greeks are busy to the west, some say, Armenians are close
to achieving their “Greater Armenia” dream by acquiring homes in
Kars-Ardahan. The strangest thing of all is officials taking these
claims seriously and investigating the hearsay. A few people stir up
trouble, and the rest are all affected by it.

This was considered such a potential problem that until very recently
no foreigner was allowed to purchase land anywhere in the country. Such
bans still exist in certain regions. Military permission must be
granted for such sales to take place.

While the rest of the world does its best to attract foreign investment
and invite foreigners to buy property, we do our outmost to keep them
at bay.

Actually, we need not do anything special to keep them away.

Our bureaucracy itself and the inherently unjust system that
currently exists are enough to protect (!) our country from any
foreign encroachment.

The Parish family is just a simple example.

How we crushed the Parish family

Nigel Parish and his wife are in their 60s and live in Milas. After
retiring from their positions as top executives at a British bank,
they decided to move to the Turkey they loved so much. They sold
everything they owned and bought three parcels of land from three
different owners in the town of Ören.

Their first shock came soon after they begin building their home.
They were told that there was a ban on building homes in the region
imposed by the military. Turks ruin the beautiful Aegean coastline
by building illegal shanty homes and no one says a word, but when a
foreigner comes along, we suddenly hammer down the letter of the law.

The Parish family didn’t understand their friend’s suggestions:
“Don’t worry. Just register your house in the name of a Turk you
know well and everything will turn out just fine.” They failed to
make sense of our habit of deceiving ourselves.

But, by then, the bureaucratic wheels had already been set in motion.

They received a document from the Land Registry stating there was
no reason why they couldn’t build a house on the land they owned.
They finally completed the house in 1998.

They thought their dreams had come true. So much so that when a young
English teacher came to them to ask for their assistance, they agreed
to help him paint the soulless local school classrooms. The headmaster
of the school was a very modern, open-minded person, and not before
long they had developed a warm relationship.

However, everything changed in 2002.

The Finance Ministry then told the Parishes that one of the pieces
of land they had bought was actually owned by the ministry. A year
later it was the Forestry Department’s turn; they staked a claim on
another piece of their land, filing charges against them.

The Parish family failed to understand what was happening. They
presented the land deeds they had, and brought forward witnesses.
After expert testimony, useless lawyers, investigations and tons of
money spent, the court decided in favor of the state, effectively
ignoring the Land Registry. On top of that, the court also found it
appropriate to fine the Parish’s TL 675 billion.

You can imagine how shocked the Parishes were. Whatever you might say,
it just doesn’t make sense. It’s bureaucratic chaos that even we,
who are used to such trouble, might find hard to understand.

The Parish’s have no idea what to do and are very distressed. I guess
they regret ever deciding to sell everything they owned in England and
make Turkey their second home. I am sure when their British friends
hear the story, they’ll never consider buying anything in Turkey.

As I said, there’s no reason to impose military bans or pass
restrictive laws in order to keep foreigners out of our country. Our
bureaucracy, sales procedures and the condition the Land Registry and
justice system find themselves in are all we need ensure no foreigners
will want to buy land here.

The Parish family can take meager consolation from one sad fact.
They were not a special exception. They did not face this kind of
treatment simply because they were foreigners; this is just everyday
Turkish bureaucracy. If they only saw what some Turks had to face,
they might forget their woes and try to console us instead.

–Boundary_(ID_am2/EdaGRyP08ISXfNGcfQ)–