Following December’s EU Summit, Turkey Forced to Reassess Issue of “Minorities”
By Jon Gorvett

Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, Middle East
pages 48-49
March 2005 Issue

Talking Turkey

TURKISH PRIME MINISTER Recip Tayyip Erdogan certainly was not
exaggerating when he told the nation after December’s historic
European Union summit that “We have a difficult journey ahead of us,
littered with obstacles.” While Turkey now has a date to start EU
membership talks later this year, a whole string of tough issues
still waits to be resolved-and with nothing guaranteed on any side.

Yet while the difficulty of Turkey’s relationship with Cyprus grabbed
most of the worry-along with a skillfully obscured question mark over
the status of any “permanent” conditions on Turkey’s membership, such
as freedom of movement-one of the thorniest issues in the year ahead
is likely to be that of “minorities.”

This touches on a real raw nerve in Ankara and elsewhere in the
country, and already is causing a degree of outraged debate.

The issue concerns EU views of Turkey’s patchwork of religious,
linguistic and ethnic groups. While the nation’s Kurds are probably
the most well known of these, there are literally dozens of others
that are less high profile. These range from the Laz-the Black Sea
people who have their own language and culture-to the Yoruks,
originally nomadic people of the Anatolian steppes. There also are
many ethnic groups that arrived in Turkey during the rollback of the
Ottoman Empire, with Caucasians and Circassians, Slavs and Albanians
forming considerable groups, almost all of whom have also become
integrated with other Anatolian-based ethnicities. Ironically enough,
many of these groups were ethnically cleansed in the 18th, 19th and
20th centuries-from the Balkans in particular-because they had become
identified via their Muslim religion with “the Turks.”

Crosscutting through these ethnic identities, moreover, are religious
ones. There are a multiplicity of groups within Islam itself, in
addition to the major fault line of Shi’i and Sunni, with the
largest-and most problematic-of these others in Turkey being the
Alevis.

Indeed, some would argue that the division between the Alevis and
Sunnis is sufficiently wide for the Alevis not to be considered
Muslim at all. It is in this controversial area, too, that the EU has
recently jumped feet first.

In the lead up to the EU summit last December which fixed a date for
Turkey to start membership talks, the suggestion came from Brussels
that the Alevis should be considered a “minority.” In mathematical
terms, with anywhere between 5 million and 12 million Alevis in
Turkey, a country of around 60 million, a minority they clearly are.
But in Turkey, as elsewhere, the definition of “minority” has far
more political and social baggage attached to it than simple
statistics.

At the end of the conflict that led to the founding of modern Turkey,
back in the 1920s, the peace treaty that established the state’s
frontiers contained provision for the security of three officially
recognized “minorities”-the Armenians, Greeks and Jews. These were,
of course, religious groups as well as ethnic, representing the old
Ottoman Empire’s three largest non-Muslim communities. This
dovetailed with Ottoman administrative practice, which had always
used religion to define the status of its citizens.

Since then, all three official minorities have declined in numbers to
the point where the Greek community numbers no more than a couple of
thousand, the Armenians perhaps five times that and the Jews ten
times. The Greek community, in particular, became the whipping boy
for decades of antagonism between Greece and Turkey, with major
anti-Greek riots in the 1950s and 1960s causing much of the community
to emigrate. Given the widespread view that to be a Turk is also to
be a Muslim, most Muslim Turks view all three minorities with some
degree of suspicion. As a result of this-along with the tendency of
states such as Greece, Armenia and Israel to see these people as
overseas communities that should have some allegiance to them-they
often are seen as basically foreigners. Discrimination against them
has been commonplace over the years.

To be identified as a “minority,” therefore, is seen by many in
Turkey as highly negative. Rather than as a way of guaranteeing
cultural and educational rights and combating discrimination, it
often is seen as a form of alienation, division and a kind of
singling out. And Turkey’s history is replete with examples of why
being “singled out” is not a good thing. Likewise, the Turkish
Republic’s stated principle of unity has sometimes been a defense for
different religious groupings, who are able to point to shared
citizenship as a testament to their loyalty. As a result, some of the
loudest voices against the idea of the Alevis being a minority have
been Alevis themselves.

The Ambiguity of Alevism
Too, because of religion’s key role in the definition of minority,
this dispute also has focused on the argument over what Alevism
actually is. Here, the community has become divided, with some
arguing that it is quite a distinct religious position from Islam,
while others argue that it is a subset-either of Shi’i Islam, or a
combination of Shi’i and Anatolian animist beliefs that predate the
arrival of Islam.

The former idea is clearly the more risky, as it plays along with the
beliefs of many Sunnis that there was always something a bit dodgy
about the Alevis. They do not pray five times a day, do not go to
mosque, but instead to their own temple, known as a cemevi. They also
do not observe Ramadan and other mainstream Muslim festivals, while
they do celebrate days that look suspiciously like Christmas, Easter
and Epiphany, leading some to conclude that old Christian festivals
from pre-Islamic Anatolia have lived on with them. At the same time,
their women and men pray together and have no prohibition on alcohol.
They see Ali, rather than Mohammed, as the key figure in Islam,
linking them to Shi’ism, yet from this, too, they greatly differ.
They traditionally have voted for the left, and have provided the
country with some of its best-known and most radical secularists-both
bad marks for the traditionally right-wing Islamists, whose party now
runs the country.

Yet at the same time, it is also the idea that most strongly lays the
basis for defining the Alevis as a minority. Advocates argue that
this is the best way to counter discrimination, which for many Alevis
is very real. Even those who are opposed to the idea of minority
status concede that Alevism is marginalized and officially excluded.
While the country allows Jewish, Greek and Armenian schools, Alevis
go to state schools, where Sunni ideas are taught and their existence
denied. The community overall has a generally lower standard of
living, while the religion enjoys no official financial support,
unlike Sunni Islam, which is administered in Turkey via an official
government body.

The EU’s intervention in the issue may have mixed results, then.
Anything that appears to attack social unity-perceived as a denial of
difference-is widely frowned on. This is particularly true when it
comes from the Europeans, who, Turks are still taught, have long
sought to divide Turkey as a way of dominating it. Before the 1923
Treaty of Lausanne, which established the minorities, was the
never-implemented 1920 Treaty of Sèvres, which saw the Ottoman Empire
carved up like a Thanksgiving Turkey by World War One’s victorious
Allied powers. The Europeans, many Turks still believe, have a
“Sèvres mentality.”

The road to EU membership, therefore, is sure to be a bumpy one.

Jon Gorvett is a free-lance journalist based in Istanbul.

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