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  • The New York Times: Some Hard-Liners in Turkey See Diversity asDivis

    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
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