La Croix International staff
Armenian Christians have written to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to say they are dissatisfied with his Islamo-nationalist government not making good its promise to non-Muslims by giving them freedom to establish and run their religious and social institutions.
Armenian Patriarch of Constantinople Sahak II Masalyan in a letter to Erdogan, expressed discomfort and growing dissatisfaction among Armenians in Turkey following a new regulation on the administrative management of foundations linked to non-Muslim faith communities.
Patriarch Sahak's letter was published by the local media, the bilingual Turkish-Armenian newspaper Agos .
In that letter Patriarch Sahak proposes to provide all foundations with clear guidelines setting out the criteria for submitting electoral lists on a regional basis in accordance with the approved regulations.
The text of the new regulation for the election of the governing bodies of the foundations have already been published in Turkey's Official Gazette.
The publication of the new rule was intended to end a long period of deadlock and legislative uncertainty that in recent years hampered and partially prevented the normal functioning of these bodies for the benefit of non-Muslim communities in Turkey.
This regulation is an issue of vital importance for local Christian communities such as Armenians and Assyrians, whose places of worship — many of them historic –, other real estate and public institutions are entrusted to and managed by foundations.
This new initiative aims to alert Turkey's highest civil authority to the possibility that the growing unease among Turkey's Armenian communities could lead to an outright boycott of the electoral procedures used to allocate managerial and administrative posts within each individual foundation.
Representatives of the local religious communities of religious minorities, had since the first draft, criticized the new provisions.
They had objected to the new territorial subdivision of the constituencies for the elections for the renewal of the boards of each foundation and for the requirement that foundations that manage hospitals and other health facilities are subject to the control of the Ministry of Health.
The previous electoral regulation for the top management of foundations had been suspended in 2013, after the government chose to establish new procedures to make the management of real estate more functional and transparent.
The system of foundations is the legal instrument through which Turkish institutions regulate their relations with non-Muslim religious communities.
It is still based on the Peace Treaty of Lausanne, signed in 1923 by Turkey and the Entente powers (British Empire, France and Russian Empire) victorious from the First World War.