Dangerous alliance between state Islam and chauvinistic Kemalism threatens the Christians in Turkey!

After the cold-blooded murder of three Christians in south-eastern Turkey the Society for Threatened Peoples (GfbV) appealed on Thursday to the German government and the parties represented in Parliament no longer to white-wash the increasing anti-Christian development in Turkey. "The ruling state ideology of Kemalism has for decades used the muzzled Sunni Islam to prevent the democratisation of the country”, said the GfbV General Secretary, Tilman Zülch. "This is an elemental part of Turkish national identity, so that Christians are not counted as belonging to the "people of Turkey”. In Germany too the German-Turkish Association with about 600 communities and 870 societies and its more than 500 mosques lies under the jurisdiction of the state "’Committee for Religious Affairs” in Ankara. This itself gives the Turkish imams week by week the general line for the Friday sermon. We call on German politicians and bishops to make a clear statement as to whether this way of presenting religion is in keeping with the basic principles of religious freedom in our country.”

The Society for Threatened Peoples draws attention to the fact that the percentage of Christians in the population in the boundary of present-day Turkey has dropped from 25% to 0.1%: 1913 – 1922 through genocide and from 1923 onwards through the ensuing ethnic cleansing (today white-washed as "population exchange”) of Armenian, Aramaic-Assyrian and Greek-Orthodox Christians, through pogroms and expulsions during the pogrom of 1955 (which arouses memories of the Reichskristallnacht, during which synagogues in Nazi Germany were burned down) and during the Cyprus crisis of 1974 and through the discrimination and persecution of Christians since then.

- The Catholic and Protestant churches in Turkey have up to the present day no legal status, so they are not corporations in their own right and do not have any juristic personality. Their services must usually be held in private dwellings. Outside the tourist areas the building of new churches is as a rule not allowed.

- The Orthodox Patriarch residing in Istanbul/Constantinople, who is recognized by more than 250 million Orthodox Christians throughout the world is seen in Turkey as merely the head of the Greek Orthodox community of some 3,000 persons remaining.

- Work and residence permits are as a rule refused to ministers of religion who are not Turkish citizens.

- Although in accordance with Art. 40 of the Lausanne Treaty non-Muslims had the right to own property, until 2002 religious minorities were not allowed to acquire property. In countless cases the matter ended with confiscation.

- The Society for Threatened Peoples estimates that there are today living in Turkey about 60,000 Apostolic, United or Protestant Christians with Armenian nationality, about 3,000 Greek Orthodox in Istanbul, 2,000 Syrian Orthodox in Tur Abdin in the south-east of the country and about 3,000 in Greater Istanbul, 3,000 Syrian United and some 10,000 Catholic or Protestant Christians, who are in the main not Turkish citizens.

Christians and Kurds and Kurd Christians

"It is not a matter of chance that the most recent murder took place in the Kurdish-speaking region in and about Malatya”, said the Near-east expert of the Society for Threatened Peoples, Dr. Kamal Sido. "In the past 20 years the number of Kurds converting to Christianity has increased steadily. In Turkey one is talking about approximately 1000 converted Kurds. The publishing house which was attacked had translated the Bible into Kurdish and published it. The combination of "Christian mission” and Kurds means for Turks a double dangerous complex: religious infiltration and a threat to the unity of the Turkish state. Seen in this light it is hardly surprising that after the persecution and constant discrimination of Armenian, Assyro-Aramaic and Greek Orthodox Christians it is now the Kurds who convert to Christianity who find themselves in an invidious position. They are in the eyes of the state extremely suspicious and dangerous.”