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  • Battle Over Orthodox Christian Monastery Tests Turkey's Tolerance

    Order of St. Andrew, Archons of the Ecumenical Patriarchate
    March 12 2009


    The Wall Street Journal highlights 'Battle Over an Orthodox Christian
    Monastery Tests Turkey's Tolerance of Minorities'

    Kartmin, Turkey
    3/11/2009

    Mor Gabriel, one of the world's oldest functioning Orthodox Christian
    monasteries in Turkey for more than 1600 years, is in jeopardy of
    losing more than half its property. Turkish surveyors and Muslim
    villagers, armed with old maps and aerial photographs, are redrawing
    property boundaries owned by the monastery and plan to designate their
    land as public forest.


    Last summer, Turkish officials informed the monastery that
    approximately 100 acres of land, currently enclosed within a high wall
    was actually state-owned forestland, resulting in a loss of about 60
    percent of its core property. Even the monastery wall was also
    declared illegal. This threat by the Turkish government is an ongoing
    signal of religious persecution and confiscation of property rights of
    non-Muslim minorities, which includes institutions owned by the
    Ecumenical Patriarchate.

    The dispute over Mor Gabriel is being closely watched in the United
    States and abroad as it is now in the hands of a Turkish court. Bishop
    Timotheus Samuel Aktas is battling to keep the monastic lands and has
    mobilized support from foreign diplomats, clergy, and politicians. The
    European Union and several embassies in Ankara sent observers to a
    court hearing in February, and a Swedish diplomat attended this week's
    session.

    The trial comes at a critical stage in Turkey's 22-year drive to join
    the EU since protection of minority rights is a condition for entry.

    The historic monastery, viewed by Syriacs as a "second Jerusalem", was
    built in 397 A.D. and has seen invasions by Romans, Byzantines,
    Crusaders, and Muslim armies. Three monks, fourteen nuns, a bishop,
    and thirty-five students reside and worship on the ancient grounds and
    preserve the Syriac liturgy in a chapel adorned with Byzantine
    mosaics.

    The originally published article, which appears in The Wall Street
    Journal and reported by Andrew Higgins, can be read in its entirety
    below.

    --------------------------------- --------------------------------

    Defending the Faith
    Battle Over a Christian Monastery Tests Turkey's Tolerance of Minorities

    By Andrew Higgins, The Wall Street Journal
    Saturday, March 7, 2009
    Read this article on the website of The Wall Street Journal


    KARTMIN, TURKEY -- Christians have lived in these parts since the dawn
    of their faith. But they have had a rough couple of millennia, preyed
    on by Persian, Arab, Mongol, Kurdish and Turkish armies. Each group
    tramped through the rocky highlands that now comprise Turkey's
    southeastern border with Iraq and Syria.

    The current menace is less bellicose but is deemed a threat
    nonetheless. A group of state land surveyors and Muslim villagers are
    intent on shrinking the boundaries of an ancient monastery by more
    than half. The monastery, called Mor Gabriel, is revered by the Syriac
    Orthodox Church.

    Battling to hang on to the monastic lands, Bishop Timotheus Samuel
    Aktas is fortifying his defenses. He's hired two Turkish lawyers --
    one Muslim, one Christian -- and mobilized support from foreign
    diplomats, clergy and politicians.

    Also giving a helping hand, says the bishop, is Saint Gabriel, a
    predecessor as abbot who died in the seventh century: "We still have
    four of his fingers." Locked away for safekeeping, the sacred digits
    are treasured as relics from the past -- and a hex on enemies in the
    present.

    The outcome of the land dispute is now in the hands of a Turkish
    court. Seated below a bust of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, modern Turkey's
    secular founding father, a robed judge on Wednesday told the feuding
    parties that he would issue a ruling after he visits the disputed
    territory himself next month.

    The trial comes at a critical stage in Turkey's 22-year drive to join
    the European Union. When it first came to power in 2002, the ruling AK
    party, led by observant Muslims, pushed to accelerate legal and other
    changes demanded by Europe for admittance into its largely Christian
    club. But much of the momentum has since slowed. France has made clear
    it doesn't want Turkey in the EU no matter what, while Turkey has
    seemed to have second thoughts.

    A big obstacle is Turkey's continuing tensions with its ethnic
    minorities, notably the Kurds, who account for more than 15% of the
    population and are battling for greater autonomy. Also fraught, but
    more under the radar, is the situation confronting members of the
    Syriac Orthodox Church, one of the world's oldest and most beleaguered
    Christian communities. The group's fate is now seen as a test of
    Turkey's ability to accommodate groups at odds with "Turkishness," a
    legal concept of national identity that has at times been used to
    suppress minority groups.

    The dispute over Mor Gabriel is being closely watched here and
    abroad. The EU and several embassies in Ankara sent observers to a
    court hearing in February, and a Swedish diplomat attended this week's
    session. Protection of minority rights is a condition for entry into
    the EU.

    Founded in 397, Mor Gabriel is one of the world's oldest functioning
    monasteries. Viewed by Syriacs as a "second Jerusalem," it sits atop a
    hill overlooking now solidly Muslim lands. It has just three monks and
    14 nuns. It also has 12,000 ancient corpses buried in a basement
    crypt.

    The bishop's local flock numbers only 3,000. Mor Gabriel's influence,
    however, reaches far beyond its fortress-like walls, inspiring and
    binding a community of Christians scattered by persecution and
    emigration. There are hundreds of thousands more Syriac Christians
    across the frontier in Iraq and Syria and in Europe. They speak
    Aramaic, the language of Jesus Christ.

    "The monastery is all we have left," says Attiya Tunc, who left for
    Holland as a child and returned this February to find her family's
    village near here reduced to ruins and overrun with sheep, since most
    of the villagers abandoned it. Ms. Tunc says she came in response to
    telephone call from Bishop Aktas appealing to former residents to come
    back and show their support in the land battle.

    Historical Claims

    Turkish officials say they have no desire to uproot Christianity. They
    point to new roads and other services provided to small settlements of
    Syriac Christians who have returned in recent years from abroad.

    Mustafa Yilmaz, the state's senior administrator in the area, says
    Turkey wants to clarify blurred property boundaries as part of a
    national land survey, something long demanded by the EU. He says the
    monastery could lose around 100 acres of land currently enclosed
    within a high wall, meaning a loss of about 60% of its core
    property. Some of that could be reclassified as a state-owned forest,
    with the rest claimed by the Treasury on the grounds that it's not
    being used as intended for farming or other purposes.

    Mr. Yilmaz says none of this would affect the monastery's operations
    as the land targeted isn't being used by monks or nuns, and he notes
    that the court could yet side in part with the monastery. He says the
    government has no desire to hurt a monastery he describes as a "very
    special place" that, among other things, helps boost the region's
    economy by bringing in throngs of pilgrims and tourists.

    Christian activists, says Mr. Yilmaz, have "blown up" a mundane muddle
    into a religious issue. "Look, everyone wants to have more land," he
    says.

    Syriac Christians see a more sinister purpose. They say the Turkish
    state and Muslim villagers want to grab Christian land and force the
    non-Muslims to leave. "There is no place for Christians here" until
    Turkey changes in fundamental ways, says Ms. Tunc.

    The dispute has spurred some Muslims in neighboring villages to launch
    complaints against the monastery. Mahmut Duz, a Muslim who lives near
    Mor Gabriel, lodged a protest last year to the state prosecutor in
    Midyat, a nearby town. Mr. Duz alleged that the bishop and his monks
    are "engaged in illegal religious and reactionary missionary
    activities."

    Mr. Duz urged Turkish authorities to remember Mehmed the Conqueror, a
    15th-century Ottoman ruler who routed Christian forces and conquered
    the city now called Istanbul for Islam. He said Turkish officials
    should recall a vow by the Conqueror to " 'cut off the head of anybody
    who cuts down even a branch from my forest.' " Bishops and priests,
    Mr. Duz told the prosecutor, can keep their heads, but "you must stop
    the occupation and plunder" of Muslim land by the monastery.

    No one at the monastery has been prosecuted for the crimes alleged by
    Mr. Duz and other villagers. The monastery says these claims are
    ludicrous. It says it tutors 35 Syriac Christian school boys in
    Aramaic and religion but conducts no missionary activities.

    Syriac Christians take an even longer view than Mr. Duz. They deride
    local Muslims as newcomers, saying Mor Gabriel was built two centuries
    before Islam was founded. "Mohammed did not exist. The Ottoman Empire
    did not exist. Turkey did not exist," says Issa Garis, the monastery's
    archdeacon.

    A Long List of Raids

    Syriac Christians have indeed been living -- and often suffering --
    here for a very long time. Mor Gabriel's history is a "long list of
    raids, wars, droughts, famines, plagues and persecutions," says
    British scholar Andrew Palmer. "Time and again, they've had to start
    again from nothing."

    In the eighth century, plague swept through the area and took the
    lives of many of Mor Gabriel's monks. Survivors dug up the body of
    Saint Gabriel, the monastery's seventh-century abbot, and propped him
    up in church to pray for help. The plague, according to tradition,
    passed.

    When disease later ravaged a Christian center to the north, Saint
    Gabriel's right hand was cut off and sent there to help. One of the
    fingers was then removed and dispatched to avert another crisis
    elsewhere. The finger is now missing.

    As Islam extended its reach, the monastery shut down repeatedly, but
    always reopened. It was attacked by Kurds, Turks and then Kurds
    again. In the 14th century, Mongol invaders seized the monastery and
    killed 40 monks and 400 other Christians hiding in a cave. Perhaps the
    biggest blow of all came in the modern era, when Turkey's slaughter of
    Christian Armenians during World War I led to massacres of Syriac
    Christians, too. The patriarch of the Syriac Orthodox Church later
    decamped to Syria.

    Ms. Tunc, the woman now living in Holland, grew up with stories of
    massacred relatives. Her father "told us never to trust Turks or
    Kurds," and ordered her to master Dutch ways "because we could never
    go back."

    Her family and many others left Turkey in the 1980s during a brutal
    conflict between Turkish soldiers and Kurdish guerrillas. Syriac
    Christians, viewed with suspicion by both sides, frequently got caught
    in the crossfire.

    The exodus drained towns and villages of Christians, including Midyat,
    the town where the court is reviewing the land dispute. Midyat used to
    be almost entirely Christian but now has just 120 non-Muslim families
    out of a population of 60,000. The town has seven churches, but just
    one preacher.

    Running a Tight Ship

    As Christians fled, Bishop Aktas took charge of Mor Gabriel. He'd
    earlier studied in New York but found the U.S. too permissive. "I
    didn't like America. It is not for monks like me," he says.

    By some accounts, he ran a very tight ship. Aydin Aslan, a student
    there from 1978 until 1983, says discipline was extremely strict, each
    day devoted to study and prayer. "It was like a prison," recalls
    Mr. Aslan, who emigrated to Belgium.

    Alarmed by a spate of thefts and determined to keep Muslim neighbors
    from encroaching, Bishop Aktas started building a high wall around his
    land. When Muslims from the village of Kartmin planted crops and
    grazed livestock near a well on monastic property, monks and school
    boys filled the well with stones to keep them away.

    Muslim resentment grew against the monastery, which was being
    bolstered thanks to funds from abroad. Following a drop-off in
    fighting between the Turkish military and Kurdish guerrillas after
    2000, Syriac Christian emigres seized on the relative calm. They
    poured money in to rebuild old churches, expand the monastery compound
    and build summer homes.

    A few decided to move back for good. Jacob Demir returned from
    Switzerland with his family to a new villa on the outskirts of
    Midyat. "They thought we would go to Europe and melt away," says
    Mr. Demir. Instead, he says, exile only made him more aware and
    assertive of his Syriac identity. (His older children are less
    enthusiastic: A daughter stayed behind in Europe and a son who came
    back to Turkey left when he discovered how low local salaries are.)

    The return to Turkey of relatively prosperous Christians helped the
    economy and provided jobs in construction. But it also needled some
    Muslims, especially when returnees began to claim abandoned property
    occupied by Muslims.

    Turmoil in neighboring Iraq added to the unease. After the 2003
    U.S. invasion, hundreds of thousands of Syriac Christians in Iraq fled
    mainly to Syria and Jordan as security collapsed and Muslims turned on
    their neighbors. Iraq's most prominent Syriac Christian, Saddam
    Hussein's foreign minister Tariq Aziz, was arrested by the
    U.S. Acquitted this week in the first of three cases against him, he
    remains in jail on other charges relating to the massacre of Iraqi
    Kurds in the 1980s.

    As uncertainty mounted about the future of the Syriac church,
    officials in Midyat were ordered to survey all land in their area not
    yet officially registered. Surveyors, armed with old maps and aerial
    photographs, began fanning out through villages trying to work out who
    owned what.

    Last summer, officials informed the monastery that big chunks of
    territory it considered its own were actually state-owned forest
    land. The monastery wall was declared illegal. Surveyors also redrew
    village borders, expanding the territory of three Muslim villages with
    which the monastery had long feuded.

    The monastery went to court to challenge the decisions. Three village
    chiefs filed a complaint against the monastery with the Midyat
    prosecutor. Bishop Aktas, they complained, had destroyed "an
    atmosphere of peace and tolerance" and should be investigated.

    The monastery's emigre lobby swung into action. Late last year and
    again in January, Syriac activists organized street demonstrations in
    Sweden and Germany. Yilmaz Kerimo, a Syriac Christian member of the
    Swedish parliament, protested to Turkey's Ministry of Interior,
    demanding an end to "unlawful acts and brutalities" at odds with
    Turkey's desire to join the EU.

    Ismail Erkal, the village head here in Kartmin, one of the three
    settlements involved in the dispute, blames Bishop Aktas for stirring
    tempers. "This bishop is a difficult person," says Mr. Erkal. Standing
    on the roof of his mud-and-brick house. Looking out towards the
    monastery, he points to swathes of monastic land which he says should
    belong to Kartmin. His village used to have a church but, with no
    Christians left, it is now a stable. Next door is a new mosque.

    Mr. Erkel says Islam "does not allow oppression," and denies any plan
    to get the last Christians in the area to leave.

    Bishop Aktas says the message is clear: "They want to make us all go
    away."

    http://www.archons.org/news/detail .asp?id=295
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