Some Hard-Liners in Turkey See Diversity as Divisive
By SUSAN SACHS
November 21, 2004
New York Times
ISTANBUL, Nov. 20 – In the cavernous Panayia church, one of the few
Greek Orthodox churches still active in Turkey, ceiling panels dangle
precariously over the choir loft. Flying glass has pitted the frescos
of biblical scenes. Musty carpets are rolled up and stored like logs
beside the elaborate Byzantine iconostasis.
The building, which celebrates its 200th anniversary today, has
been scarred for a year, since terrorists bombed the nearby British
Consulate and the force of the explosion shattered dozens of the
church’s stained glass windows.
Orthodox leaders, following Turkish law, asked for government
permission to make repairs but received no response. Rain seeped
in. Paint peeled. Mildew grew.
After a few months, they surreptitiously replaced the broken church
windows. But they hesitate to start renovations because the Turkish
authorities, as frequently happens in such cases, still have not
acknowledged their request.
“That’s the usual tactic,” said Andrea Rombopoulos, a parishioner
who publishes a newspaper for the small Greek Orthodox community
in Istanbul. “They don’t give a negative answer. They don’t give
any answer at all.”
Turkey has long viewed its non-Muslim minorities with a certain
ambivalence, defending individual freedom of worship while tightly
regulating the affairs of religious institutions. Christians of Greek
and Armenian descent, in particular, have said they are blocked from
using, selling and renovating properties that have been in their
churches’ hands for centuries.
Now, under pressure from the European Union and local civil rights
advocates, Turkey has started to cautiously reassess the way it has
treated religious minorities since the state was founded 81 years ago.
Prime Minister Recip Tayyip Erdogan’s government has prepared
legislation that would give Christian and Jewish foundations
more freedom to manage their own assets and elect their board
members. Parliament is expected to vote on the bill before Dec. 17,
when European Union leaders are to decide whether to open accession
talks with Turkey.
For the first time, senior Turkish officials have also broken a
long-standing taboo and broached the idea of allowing the Greek
Orthodox patriarchate to reopen a 160-year-old seminary that once
served as a leading training center for priests.
The school, perched on a hill on an island in the Sea of Marmara
off Istanbul, was closed in 1971 when the state took control of all
private universities. Mr. Erdogan’s aides have suggested that it could
be permitted to operate again, as a gesture to the European Union,
if Turkey’s membership bid advances.
Some legal constraints on religious foundations have already been
relaxed over the last three years although European and American human
rights monitors, citing cases like the Panayia church, have reported
that local officials have been reluctant to carry out the changes.
Still, Christian leaders here said they were more hopeful than ever.
“What has changed is that we don’t have that hostility anymore from the
authorities,” said Elpidoforos Lambriniadis, an aide to the Ecumenical
Patriarch Bartholomew. “As the patriarchate, we don’t doubt the good
will of the government. But we know the government is not controlling
everything in this country.”
For many Turks, even a discussion of religious or ethnic minorities
raises fears of separatism. Some have argued that lifting government
controls on religious institutions, whether Muslim or non-Muslim,
would undermine Turkey’s secular foundations. And Turkey’s president,
Ahmet Necdet Sezer, recently warned that drawing attention to Turkey’s
sectarian or cultural diversity harmed the state.
The delicacy of the issue was highlighted earlier this month when
a government-sponsored commission released a report criticizing
Turkey’s definition of itself as a “single-culture nation-state”
and urging an end to all restrictions on the expression of minority
languages and cultures.
When the report was presented at a news conference, a dissenting member
of the commission ripped a copy from the hands of the presenter and
tore it up. Later, the Erdogan government, which established the
commission, also disowned it.
Baskin Oran, the Ankara political science professor who headed the
commission, said he was undeterred by the reaction.
“They are clearly seeing that what they have been pushing under the
carpet since the 1920’s is now being questioned,” he said, “Now,
everything will be discussed. There will be no taboos in Turkey,
and they hate that.”
For some hard-line nationalists, even the term “minority” is anathema,
suggesting dual loyalties and the betrayal of the country’s cherished
ideal of an indivisible Turkish identity.
“In the end, there will be lots of small groups feeling different and
trying to identify their differences as separate identities on basis of
religion, race or language,” said Mehmet Sandir, a spokesman for the
Nationalist Movement party. “And at times of economic or political
crisis, our country will immediately turn into a ‘minority hell’
of internal strife.”
Turkey’s enemies, he added, could then exploit those differences to
split the nation, as the European allies and Russia did after World
War I when the Ottoman Empire was further divided.
“This is not paranoia,” said Mr. Sandir, whose party has organized
demonstrations against the orthodox patriarchate. “The recognition of
minorities was used as an argument in destroying empires. The Balkans
are boiling now because of this chaos of minorities.”
A distrust of minorities is drilled into Turks from childhood,
according to Hrank Dink, a magazine publisher and scholar active in
the country’s ethnic Armenian community.
“In public school, ‘minorities’ are mentioned in the textbook on
national security, under the section that talks about separatism
and about the ‘games played against Turkey’ by outside powers,”
Mr. Dink said.
That suspicion carries over to the local officials who are in charge of
regulating the non-Muslim religious foundations, including those that
administer the 17 schools and 42 churches of the Armenian community
in Turkey.
“They see the minorities in terms of national security,” Mr. Dink
said. “The fewer there are, the less they feel threatened.”
The official doctrine on minorities stems from the 1923 Lausanne
treaty in which the European powers recognized Turkey’s independence
and received guarantees concerning the status of three non-Muslim
communities – Jewish, Greek Orthodox and Armenian – in the new and
predominantly Muslim Turkish state.
The three groups mentioned in the treaty, sometimes referred to as
“indigenous foreigners” in official documents, were promised protection
but not the privileges they enjoyed under Ottoman rule.
The Greek Orthodox patriarchate, regarded with great suspicion by the
Turkish leaders because of its support for the failed Greek invasion
a few years earlier, was allowed to remain in Istanbul, where it had
been based for nearly 1,700 years.
But Turkey did not recognize its ecumenical authority, instead treating
successive Orthodox patriarchs as parish priests responsible for the
churches in their immediate neighborhood.
The treaty did not mention Turkey’s minority Alewite population,
who are Muslims but follow a different sect from Turkey’s Sunni
mainstream and now want their national identity cards to show them
as Alewite instead of Muslim.
Nor did the treaty mention ethnic minorities like Kurds. Until
recently, Turkish governments used that omission to justify their
ban on references to Kurds as a distinct subgroup in Turkey. The
government has eased its restrictions on Kurds in the past two years
but it refers to them as a group using a different language than
Turkish, not as a minority.
More changes are inevitable, said Professor Oran, who spearheaded
the government report on minorities.
“The concept of ‘minority’ has changed since the Lausanne Treaty,”
he said. “Now it’s anyone different from the majority and who wants
to maintain this difference. We have to delete the laws that prevent
them from using the same rights as the majority. If a Turk can read
and write and publish in Turkish, then any Kurd or Circassian should
have the same right.”
“The genie,” Professor Oran added, “is out of the bottle.”
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company