Under Fire

The Turks are at it again. There aren’t that many Armenians left, so the Turks have to hate the Kurds. They especially hate that the Kurds want to be united and independent. The Kurds would undoubtedly want the bit of southeastern Turkey where 55% of their number live.

But just as most of what the Turks occupy is historically Greek, likewise the Kurdish parts of Turkey were Kurdish for hundreds or even thousands of years before the Turks ever showed up.

The Turks have been building up their forces on the border with Iraq since before the Coalition invasion. The building has been increasing in recent months.  Because of the relative freedom of Kurds in northern Iraq, Turkish ruled Kurds frequently cross the border and set up strikes against Turkish force. Now Turkish troops are crossing into Iraq to pursue them. They are also shelling Kurdish positions in Iraq.

But violating Iraqi borders, the Turks can claim no moral high ground. They cannot complain about the Kurds crossing the border if they are doing the same thing. Why do the Turks have a greater claim to the Kurdish parts of Anatolia than the Kurds of Iraq have over their territory?

Avoiding a Coup

Turkey is headed for early parliamentary elections after a second massive protest against the AK Party candidate for president. As I mentioned last month after the first protest, the AK Party hold a substantial majority in the Grand National Assembly and thus can elected whoever they want as president. Prime Minister Erdogan has stepped out of the race in favour of his Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul. As a result the size of the protest march went up from 300,000 to about a million.

The only tool the Opposition had to stop the election of an AK president was to boycott the parliamentary vote. The country’s highest court ruled that a quorum was not present, so the first round of voting was invalid. This was a step short of what normally happens when the ruling party falls afoul of the secular military and judiciary. The army has ousted four governments in the last 47 years. The most recent occurance was in 1997.

But just how secular are the military and the judiciary. Turkey is an Islamic state, even if it is not an Islamist state? They may not want headscarves, but they also don’t want Christians. Turkey’s secularism is entirely about its relationship to the rest of the Islamic world. It is also a key factor in its bid for membership in the European Union.

If you consider the size of the Greek and Armenian communities, Imperial Ottoman Turkey was a lot more favourable to Christians than secular republican Turkey.

1.5 Million Memories Eternal

Thanks to the young fogey for reminding me that yesterday marked the 92nd anniversary of the Armenian Genocide.

I have written a number of times about this, including one of my Meanderings.

In an era when it had become a crime in some places to deny the historicity of certain genocides (a policy with which I disagree), in Turkey is it a crime to acknowledge this one.

Even though I’m a day late, may the memory be eternal of those who died by the hands of the Turks.

Remembering the Truth About Turkey

The Damien McElroy of the Daily Telegraph has exposed the idea that the Christians martyred in Malatya, Turkey were killed by Islamic radicals like we see elsewhere in the Muslim world. If Malatya were in a area control by fundamentalists, he wouldn’t have been interviewing a woman in a bar drinking a beer.

Referring to the murders, she said, “I don’t think this has a religious root, it’s about nationality. To be Turkish is to be Muslim and so Christians are here working against Turkey.”

This is why I think that Turkey needs to be as secularist as possible, but it will never get away from Islam being the de facto state religion. Further, I don’t think it will ever get beyond Christians being persecuted.

As McElroy notes in his article,

In fact, Christians are a fraction of one per cent of Turkey’s 71 million people but it is common for Turks to complain that evangelical churches are proliferating at an alarming rate. Courts continue to prosecute converts for insulting “Turkishness”. Three members of the Turkish Protestant Church are currently standing trial.

Missionary activity, while not an offence, has been placed on the list of threats to the nation by the National Security Council.

Turkey has no room for religious freedom. On it’s official tourism site, it may try to woo dollars and pounds with statements like, “Turkey is a secular state that assures complete freedom of worship to non-Muslims.”

Why not just say, “Turkey is quasi-secular state that only protects the worship by Muslims, but we’ll leave a few ancient thing laying around for your amusement.” Or how about a slogan like, “Turkey – where Christianity is a thing of the past!” Another that comes to mind: “Turkey – keeping the tradition of Christian martyrdom alive.”

But then the Turkey has always had a thriving economy in truth.

Martyrdom in Turkey

It is dangerous to be a Christian in Turkey. Three evangelical protestants, two Turks and a German, had their throats slit yesterday in Malatya, a town in the eastern part of the country. They were on the staff of a Bible publishing company.

This is another example of how Turkish nationalists want to purify the country from anything un-Islamic. The violence against Christians has been on the increase. In January, Armenians newspaper edior Hrant Dink was shot and killed by a nationalist in Istanbul. Incidentally, Dink was born in Malatya. In February, Fr Andrea Santoro was shot at point blank range in Trabzon by a gunman shouting, “Allah is great!” as he ran out of the church.

For all of the hullabaloo about theonomic Christians in the American political process or even the goals of establishing (or re-establishing) a Christian nation, no one is going around slitting the throats of the Muslims publishing companies.

May the memories of the martyrs Tilman Ekkehart Geske, Necati Aydin, and Ugur Yuksel be eternal.

Turkish Delight

Other than expressing my love of kebabs, it is not often I have favourable things to say about Turkey. As it is, I don’t have anything favourable to say about the goverment of Turkey, but rather about the opposition to it.

On Saturday, 300,000 protesters (and that’s the conservative estimate) converged on Ankara. They were trying to persuade Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan to not run for President. They were also hoping to convince the Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi (AKP) to avoid nominating him.

The Turkish president is elected to a seven-year term by the Grand National Assembly. The AKP hold the majority in the Assembly with 354 of the 550 seats, so it is very likely that, protest or not, the AKP will choose someone form their party to be president.

The AKP consider themselves to be a moderate Islamist party. Erdogan claims that he has no religious agenda, though recent efforts have been made to introduce pro-Islamic reforms. This has upset those who value the secular roots of the republic founded by Ataturk.

I don’t normally support secularism. However in this case, secularism can serve as a counterbalance against militant Islam. Turkey will always have a Muslim majority and favour Islam over Christianity. As it is, it is very difficult for the Church to survive in Asia Minor and the Phanar is under constant pressure and surveillance. If Turkey is going to be admitted to the EU it needs to have as secularist a government as possible.

It’s Just a Building

The Turkish government has renovated an Armenian church building. This is not any church building. It is the Palatine Cathedral of the Holy Cross on Akdamar Island in Lake Van. For a country that denies the genocide of 1.5 million Armenians and has systematically eradicated all evidence of Armenian culture from eastern Turkey, this may seem like a surprise. But the Turks still manage to be two-faced.

The restored 1,100-year-old building is simply a building. It is not opened for worship. Patriarch Mesrob II has asked that worship be allowed there just once a year. The culture minister said the government would consider the request, but since they have refused requests to even put a cross on the roof, I would not anticipate a response from Ankara for a long time. It will take them a long time to come up with a refusal that they imagine will be palatable to the European Union they so desperately want to join.

You would think that if the Turks were going to spend $1.5 million and 18 months to restore the building, they would want it to be used. But this is the Turks we are talking about.

In 1915, the monks of Akdamar Island were slaughtered. The cathedral was looted. By Turks. Now they have restored it as a museum with no mention whatsoever of what happened there. The Turks never mention the genocide. For anyone in Turkey to even suggest there was a genocide is a crime. In other words, it is a crime to not be a holocaust denier. So as far as the Turks are concerned there were no monks. There was nothing in the building to loot. It’s all in the Armenian imagination.

To suggest otherwise is insulting Turkishness. How do the Turks not understand that they make Turkishness look so bad. When they prosecute someone or ignore Armenian history, they are ones who look like fools.

Until they restore Armenian worship and restore the rightful place of Armenian culture, they have done nothing. All this talk in Britain of apologising for the slave trade looks like foolishness compared to the real, continuing, unapologetic, agressive mistreatment of Armenian culture in the aftermath of the genocide.

Better to Give Than to Receive

The low level of Turkish national self-esteem has been made evident once again. The country that can bear no criticism has banned YouTube.

Some Greek YouTubers have been insulting Turkey. That was enough for a Turkish judge to order Turk Telecom to block access to the site. Try to log on from Istanabul, Ankara, or Izmir and you will receive a message that says (translated from Turkish) “Access to this site has been denied by court order ! …” (I’m not sure what point is of the elipsis after the exclamation mark. Maybe it’s a Turkish thing.)

It’s not just that Greeks have been insulting Turkey. It has been a trading of insults, with Turks insulting Greece as well. But then Greece doesn’t have laws for imprisoning anyone who insults Greece or Greek culture.

What made the situation intolerable for the Turks was criticism of Ataturk. Even though he’s been dead for 72 years (though I wouldn’t mention that if you are in Turkey), insulting the former president is very serious business. A prosecutor asked the Istanbul police for evidence of the criticisms of Ataturk on YouTube. She asked a magistrate to review the case, a court order was issued by an Istanbul criminal court yesterday.

This is the same Turkey that wants to join the European Union. The only problem is that freedom of expression is important on this side of Bosphorus. It’s just not something the Turks can handle.