BEING CRUCIFIED…
Yusuf Kanli
Hurriyet
Dec 22 2009
Turkey
A Turkish-Armenian citizen proudly declares, "How happy is the one
who calls himself a Turk" and makes headlines in almost every paper. A
teenage Turkish-Greek citizen comes first in a "best national anthem
reading contest" and it is reported in all papers and on all TV
stations’ primetime news programs. In a country where there has not
been one single non-Muslim in the 550-seat unicameral Parliament since
the late 1980s, is there something abnormal for a minority religious
leader with immense international standing and prestige to complain
that his community feels he is treated like a second-class citizen?
Is it only that religious community and its religious leader who
feel like they are being treated as second-class citizens? Don’t the
secular people in this country of rising religious-conservatism, who
see they are denied senior posts in bureaucracy or equal opportunities
in public tenders or even a seat on the prime minister’s official jet
just because their wives don’t cover their heads, feel as though they
are treated as second-class citizens? Or, don’t the people behind bars,
some of them without seeing a judge for the past 30 or more months,
under the Ergenekon probe and the judicial case feel as though they
are treated differently than the Lighthouse sham, where the suspects
are not only still free, but enjoying some lucrative municipal tenders,
like the recently discovered fire brigade tender?
In a country where a non-Muslim community, persistently considered
as a threat to national security, is encouraged to migrate abroad
through various and very effective methods, including the shameful
Sept. 6 and 7 incidents of 1955, and the size of which shrunk to
around 2,000 over the years from several hundred thousand, and if
a seminary, raising clergy for the church that under law must have
priests possessing the nationality of that country, has been closed
for the past 30 years, is it something odd for the religious leader
of that community to start to develop existential fears?
If in that country there is an article in the media or a statement
from some nationalist-conservative political elite accusing that
minority church of aspiring to a second Vatican in that country and
creating some sort of an autonomous, if not independent, theocratic
state more loyal to a neighbor than that country? If the patriarch
heading that church, internationally recognized as ecumenical and
as the first among equals, keeps on calling on the offices of the
political administration of that country with a demand for resolution
of the problems of his church and his community, but his calls fall
on deaf ears, is it abnormal to hear him complaining in an interview
that he sometimes feels himself crucified?
Is that religious leader the only person who sometimes feels as though
he or she is being crucified in this country? Can anyone empathize
with the widow and children of the lieutenant colonel who after being
subjected to a summary execution on the front pages of the allegiant
media, condemned and executed as member of a gang plotting to kill
some leading admirals of the country committed suicide this week?
The attacks on Greek Orthodox Patriarch Bartholomew over his remarks
during an interview with the U.S. television network CBS are indeed yet
another attempt to crucify him. One reason for the outburst might be
in the translation of the term "being crucified" in Christian culture
to the Turkish-Muslim culture. Indeed, the term means nothing more
than being compelled to live hell on Earth, or to make someone suffer
under pressure. But, in whatever context the patriarch might have
used the expression, as well as his complaint of being treated like
a second-class citizen, the fact that he used such an expression or
made such a complaint cannot and should not provide the legitimacy to
subject him to treatment as if he was crucified. He has just expressed
his opinion, yes with some strong words that we might not like so much.
People have started drawing comparisons between the treatment of the
Muslim-Turkish minority in Greece and the Greek Orthodox people in
Turkey. That’s a self-defeating approach. Greece is indeed wrong to
refuse Muslim-Turks living there to elect their own religious leaders.
But, can there be the practice of tit-for-tat, or reciprocity in
human rights?
After all, under the principle of constitutional citizenship,
all citizens of a country must have equal rights. Furthermore,
under international minority norms, rather than being considered
a "potential threat" and having their rights restricted on the
understanding obsessed by certain phobias, the minorities of this
country must be accorded with some "additional" rights to preserve
and promote their ethnic, religious, cultural or whatever differences.