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  • Keeping Track Of "Other"s: Surveillance Of Religious Minorities From

    KEEPING TRACK OF "OTHER"S: SURVEILLANCE OF RELIGIOUS MINORITIES FROM TURKEY TO THE U.S.

    The Faculty Lounge
    August 4, 2013 Sunday 2:37 PM EST

    On my last day in Istanbul, I remembered that a colleague had asked
    whether I could bring him back a copy of the Turkish newspaper, Å~^alom
    (Turkish spelling for Shalom). To my knowledge, the weekly Å~^alom
    is one of two regularly published Ladino publications in the world,
    along with the monthly El Amaneser, also published in Istanbul. I was
    also looking for a copy of Agos, the Armenian-Turkish weekly. Because
    Jewish and Armenian communities are primarily centered in a few larger
    cities, I knew that my best chance of finding print copies of these
    papers would be in Istanbul. After visiting a few newsstands and
    bookstores, I learnt that it was not easy to find either paper even
    in the heart of Istanbul, and was told by a bookstore owner that both
    papers operated primarily through individual subscribership. I finally
    found the papers in a small bookstore with a newsstand, complete
    with papers in various other languages, primarily from Europe. When
    I told the shopkeeper that I had a hard time finding the newspapers,
    he told me, "You're lucky. Today is the first day they came in!"

    The previous day, the Turkish daily Radikal reported that the Turkish
    government is categorizing its non-Muslim citizens by a numbers system:
    1 for Greeks, 2 for Armenians, 3 for Jews, 4 for Assyrian Christians,
    and 5 for all other non-Muslims. It remains unclear for how long this
    system has been in effect. The categorization came to light when
    an Armenian woman who was raised as Muslim decided to reclaim her
    Armenian identity. She was baptized, converted to Christianity, and
    in an effort to assure her child would grow up aware of her Armenian
    identity, wanted to enroll her child in an Armenian pre-school. Her
    husband did not change the official records indicating his religion
    as Islam. As a result, the Armenian school asked the mother to
    obtain official records proving she is Armenian, since to enroll in
    a minority school in Turkey, the child's parent must prove that she
    is indeed of that minority. The school official's letter requesting
    proof of Armenian identity explicitly stated that Armenian citizens
    were categorized as category 2, and he needed proof that the mother's
    "family or descent code" was 2.

    The school official's letter written in the most matter-of-fact tone
    has caused much discussion in the last few days. Government officials
    have tried to downplay the significance of the categorization saying
    that it is a mere administrative tool to ensure that religious
    minorities' rights are fulfilled while others have argued that the
    practice violates the terms of the Treaty of Lausanne, which ended the
    war between the Turkish Republic and the occupying powers at the end
    of World War I. Articles 37 through 45 of Part I Section III of the
    Treaty sets out the rights of religious minorities in Turkey. When
    the first 3 categories of the ancestral coding system were revealed,
    the government's initial response was that the numbers merely helped
    fulfill the mandates of Section III, by ensuring that the students
    going to minority schools indeed belonged to the respective minority
    community. However, since the information about categories 4 for
    Assyrians and 5 for all other non-Muslims has come to light, the
    government's explanation no longer makes sense because Assyrians (or
    other non-Muslims who would fall under category 5) do not have schools
    for which such "administrative convenience" would be necessary. It
    remains unclear whether the practice has been in place since the
    founding of the Turkish Republic in 1923 (which the government claim
    of administrative efficiency might imply) or if it is a more recent
    surveillance method. It is also unclear whether it is only religious
    minorities whose ancestry is "coded" or if there are other codes for
    ethnic and linguistic minorities and perhaps even political outsiders
    such as communists.

    As I expressed in my previous post, vulnerability exists in every
    society and some communities are particularly vulnerable in the face
    of State practices, including facially neutral laws. Reading about
    Turkish government's ancestral coding system and talking to friends and
    family about it, I cannot refrain from drawing parallels between this
    appalling practice and the kind of invasive and still mostly-unknown
    surveillance of Muslim communities in the U.S.- from the placement
    of undercover agents in mosques trying to convince innocent Muslims
    to participate in violent plots to collection of private data by
    the government. (On surveillance in mosques and profiling in Muslim
    communities see here and here, and on reactions to the reported end
    to surveillance in the mosques after 2011, see here).

    Religious identity as a basis of vulnerability is nothing new. From
    Native Americans to Jews, Mormons and Quakers, many before Muslims have
    known religious persecution in the U.S. When compared to its Western
    European counterparts, the Ottoman Empire may have been a relatively
    gentler place with its millet system, but it was still not a land of
    egalitarianism for religious minorities. Thus, the current problematic
    and appalling ancestral coding system should not be a surprise to any
    of us familiar with world histories, though the attendant nausea is
    hard to hold back. From an unwitting school official in Turkey to
    courageous individuals like Bradley Manning imprisoned and Edward
    Snowden forced into self-exile, one cannot help but hope that the
    unearthing of government surveillance of private citizens will continue
    across the globe. Despite the disappointing and infuriating outcome of
    the Manning case and the forced exile of Snowden, it is important that
    we know through which means our governments continue to monitor our
    private lives, our bodies and our beliefs. With increasing intrusive
    technologies including drones over our backyards, computerized census
    records, and the monitoring of our e-mails and cellular phones,
    Turkey and the U.S. have outdone even the worst examples of Michel
    Foucault's surveillance society where the State constantly watches,
    surveys, orders and disciplines its citizens.

    http://www.thefacultylounge.org/2013/08/keeping-track-of-others-surveillance-of-religious-minorities-from-turkey-to-the-us.html

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