SHAKEN AND ASHAMED AGAIN
By DoÐu ErgÝl

Today’s Zaman, Turkey
April 20 2007

Turkey has once again been shaken and ashamed after three people were
found dead with their throats slit in a publishing house in Malatya,
eastern Turkey, known to be printing and distributing Bibles and
other Christian literature.

Assailants killed three people Wednesday at a publishing house that
distributed Bibles, in the latest attack apparently targeting Turkey’s
tiny Christian minority.

One of the victims was a German citizen. According to Reuters, Carlos
Madrigal, an evangelical pastor in Istanbul, has identified the victims
as evangelical Protestants. Five men arrested on suspicion of having
committed the crime were young people aged 19 and 20, just like the
assassin who shot Hrant Dink, the Armenian-Turkish journalist murdered
in Istanbul, and the young killer of the Roman Catholic priest Andrea
Santoro in Trabzon. All of these crimes attest to two things: that
hate and intolerance has been steeped against Christian minorities
and that fanatical youth have been reared with extreme nationalist
bigotry and twisted religious sentiments. Both are dangerous and
constitute obstacles to Turkey’s bid to be a global country.

There is no doubt that there is a significant nationalist fringe
that has admixed religion to their fabricated group/national identity
through a secondary socialization process in extremist organizations.

They are xenophobes and their nationalism is more an ethnic construct
than political. This racial twist inevitably leads them to seek the
ethnic and religious purity of the Turkish nation, as they understand
it. What distinguishes this fanatical nationalist-religious youth group
is the secondary socialization they receive in extremist organizations
that exalt violence as a purifying force. This purification has two
ends: to purify the nation and to purify themselves as the savior of
the nation from internal and external enemies.

Although this criminal trend is relatively new and rare, it certainly
does not help Turkey’s bid for membership to the European Union. Nor
does it support its diplomatic struggle to abort parliamentary
resolutions adopted one after another in diverse countries concerning
the acknowledgement of tragic events that ended in the elimination of
vast numbers of Armenians during World War I in Ottoman Turkey. What
is happening today recalls the images of old tragedies that took
place four generations ago and supplies convincing argument to those
who claim that such crimes are still a part of life in contemporary
Turkey. But just as no one can claim that Americans in general shoot
each other en masse due to the recent school shootout in the US, the
tragic event that took place in Malatya this week cannot be attributed
to the whole Turkish nation. However, the event begs serious questions
as to why a mixture of fanatical nationalism supported by militant
religiosity wedded with a political agenda yield inhuman behavior.

There are several plausible answers:

1) In the 1970s and 1980s there was a strong leftist current in
Turkey. This current was most apparent in the labor movement and
the universities. The rulers of Turkey have exaggerated this leftist
trend that was more vocal than effective. Their fear of the left was
further exacerbated with the Soviet Union looming in the country’s
eastern border. Communism became a bogey to limit basic freedoms and
modernizing structural change. Instead it put the Turkish political
system under military tutelage. In addition, civilian forces were
groomed to fight against communism on the home front. It is during
this time that many youth of lower social standing were recruited into
paramilitary nationalist organizations and were trained as militia
to deliver the country from the "encroachment" of communism.

Their excesses were officially tolerated, and crimes against liberal
and democratic intellectuals and academics were covered up. This
impunity has lingered on to some degree until this day. The culture
of intolerance to diversity was cemented during this period.

2) It has been an official policy to deny that there are minorities
in this country other than several hundred thousand (now hardly
100,000) acknowledged Christians and Jews by the Lausanne Treaty
(1922). Although this treaty protects the legal, linguistic,
educational and economic (e.g., property) rights of the acknowledged
non-Muslim minorities, official practice most often times have violated
some of these rights. However, more than legal issues, non-Muslim and
non-Turkish (ethnically) minorities have been discriminated against in
clandestine ways. Apart from being denied bureaucratic and official
(army, police) service, most serious of this has been derogatory and
incriminating rhetoric that has affected the public opinion negatively
against such citizens. Indeed Christian citizens have been presented
as alien elements of this country and oftentimes as a fifth column of
foreign powers that want to dismantle Turkey. The outcome has been
a growing emotional rift between Muslim ethnic Turks and non-Muslim
non-ethnic Turkish citizens. Needless to say, the rift has been
more than emotional, non-Muslim citizens have felt insecure and they
have left the country in droves throughout the republican decades,
especially when open examples of physical threats have surfaced.

So it is easy to accuse individuals and groups with a fanatical
orientation. But behind their orientation is a socialization process
fueled by intolerance and discrimination at the official and unofficial
but social levels. Recently xenophobia and discriminatory rhetoric is
heard in abundance from the secularist sections of the society that
claim to be more modern. The reason is quite problematic: secularism
has been mainly upheld by the state (bureaucracy) in Turkey due to
the traditionalism of the insufficiently developed and modernized
society. Those "secular" groups who drew their power, privilege and
mission of upholding secularism from the state are losing their grip
on the state apparatus. The state is progressively being subjugated to
the control of society. The last blow to the nationalist-secularist
camp will be the loss of the presidency to the incumbent AK Party,
whose most likely candidate is Prime Minister Erdoðan, who has been
vilified by this camp as an agent of the West and the man who has
sold out Cyprus to the Greeks, and is now getting ready to give away
eastern Turkey to the Kurds. The surge of these sentiments may, as it
has already, take the form of the violent reactions of the so-called
nationalists who really represent a past that Turkey is struggling
to shrug off.

Bloody political crimes seem like birth pangs of future to come.

–Boundary_(ID_wQzOpaoiEupn6xRfryZP9A)–

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress