Agents among Turkey's Christians not surprising as new informant discovered

Discovering agents among the small Christian community of Turkey is not a surprise, according to observers as there has been a report revealing yet another informant who was present within the Christian population of the southern province of Mersin.

A long-time Christian, Hakan Çevikoğlu, who died in a traffic accident in Spain last year, turned out to be a secret agent among the Christians of Mersin where they only number around 20. This revelation came out in the testimony of İ.Ç., known as Deniz Uygar who used to be a bishop and an informant. He is now a secret witness in the ongoing Malatya murder case of 2007 in which three people who sold Christian literature were brutally killed.

İ.Ç. said in his testimony in March this year that Çevikoğlu was a secret agent of the intelligence service working for noncommissioned officer Abdullah Atılgan, former chief of the unit of the extreme right actions in relation to the Mersin Gendarmerie Intelligence, according to a report in the Radikal daily on Friday. When the court asked Atılgan about this claim, he said that Çevikoğlu was introduced to him by İ.Ç. and that Atılgan used Çevikoğlu as a registered informant. But he said that he severed his relations with Çevikoğlu because he heard that Çevikoğlu was sharing some of the information that he had with others.

Soner Tufan, the press and public relations officer for the Association of Protestant Churches based in the Aegean province of İzmir, told Today's Zaman that revelations about Çevikoğlu are unexpected, but the developments are not surprising at all.

“Çevikoğlu and his family have been devout Christians for a long time. His daughter had a Christian marriage. His wife is a Christian, and the family attends church. Even Çevikoğlu's family was unaware of his activities,” Tufan said.

However, he added that the development is not surprising.

“There have been so many revelations about informants among Christians; we don't know whom to trust anymore. Our feeling is that if there are so many agents in such a small community like the one in Mersin, then how many more are there?” he asked in reference to three other agents previously discovered among Mersin's Christians.

Link

Can a new Constitution solve religious freedom problems?

Following the AKP's general election victory, political attention in Turkey has turned to the long-awaited new Constitution, Forum 18 News Service notes. It appears that a consensus may exist among Turkey's liberals, leading civil society organisations, religious minorities, legal academics, and the main opposition party, the CHP, that the new Constitution should uphold the right to freedom of religion or belief. Many would not object to this as an ideal, but attention to the detail of the proposals is essential. The AKP's past record would suggest that any predictions of its response should be cautious. Indeed, it is unclear what the AKP itself would propose. It is vital that the new Constitution enshrines full guarantees of freedom of religion or belief for all, fully in line with Turkey's international human rights obligations. But on its own - without good laws, regulations and state actions - a Constitution can only have a limited impact in generating practical change in the daily lives of people belonging to minority religious and belief communities.

Link

Answered Prayers

Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan is redrawing the Constitution. Why the devout Muslim is good for the Christians.

As a teenager growing up in a tough Istanbul neighborhood, Recep Tayyip Erdogan studied to be an Islamic cleric. His dream, though, was to become a professional player on the local Kasimpasa football team. In the end, neither ambition worked out: he became Turkey’s prime minister instead. Now, after nine years in power, Erdogan has just pulled off his third—and biggest—general-election win on an ambitious program that includes a radical redrawing of Turkey’s Constitution. The theology student from Kasimpasa now wants to remake the hard-wiring of the Turkish state by scrapping restrictions on religious freedom; creating a powerful French-style presidency (presumably with himself as the first incumbent); and by making the country’s judges, universities, and Army more accountable to Parliament: a to-do list that rings loud alarm bells for many Turks—and friends of Turkey. The country’s old secular elite fears that allowing Erdogan’s Islamist-rooted AK Party a say in the appointment of judges, school principals, and university rectors will make the country more Muslim and more conservative. Pundits and politicians in America and Israel aren’t thrilled with the idea of giving Erdogan more power—especially after he railed about a Jewish press conspiracy against him during the campaign. And Turkey’s chattering classes are increasingly concerned about Erdogan’s intolerance of criticism. One hostile newspaper magnate has been landed with crippling tax bills, while more than 60 Turkish journalists languish in jail—more than in China.
Unexpectedly, though, Turkey’s tiny but ancient Christian community has welcomed the AK Party’s most recent landslide. Erdogan may be a deeply devout Muslim, and his party dominated by nondrinking, headscarf-wearing Sunni Muslims. But despite his Islamic grassroots, Erdogan advocates a historic softening of Turkey’s 80-year-old anti-Christian rules. Most significantly, he has helped save the 1,700-year old patriarchate of Constantinople. The current Patriarch Bartholomew, as senior bishop of the Orthodox Church, is spiritual leader of 300 million Orthodox faithful around the world. But a 1923 Turkish law insists that the patriarch and all members of the Synod—the Orthodox equivalent of the Catholic College of Cardinals—be Turkish citizens drawn from Turkey’s tiny ethnic-Greek community, now just 2,500 strong. With Bartholomew already 71, and most of the Synod not much younger, it looked as though the end of the institution was nigh. But by granting Turkish citizenship to a new crop of younger Orthodox bishops from around the world, Erdogan likely saved the institution by ensuring Bartholomew’s succession.

Link

Former general testifies at court on missionaries’ murder

Retired Gen. Hurşit Tolon was released after testifying Friday morning at Beşiktaş Courthouse in Istanbul regarding an ongoing investigation into the Zirve Publishing House massacres during which three Christians were killed.

Tolon gave his testimony to prosecutor Cihan Kansız, who is in charge of the investigation of the alleged Ergenekon coup-plot case, according to Doğan news agency, or DHA.

Tolon is one of the suspects being tried without arrest in the Ergenekon trials.

Link

Syriac Christian elected in Turkey after 50 years

A Syriac Christian has been elected to Turkey's new parliament, not seen in the overwhelmingly Muslim country for 50 years, it was reported Monday.

Erol Dora, 47, is a member of the orthodox Syriac Church and part of a small community also known as Assyrians based in Mardin in southern Turkey.

Elected as an independent, Dora was nevertheless backed by the main pro-Kurd group the Peace and Democracy Party (BDP) in Sunday's vote.

The sole Christian member of parliament, dominated once again by the Islamist-rooted Justice and Development Party (AKP), has committed himself to being a voice for the country's Christians.

Read more:

Christian woman’s burial story full of irony, questions

Zeynep Tufan was 75 years old when she died of cancer this month. Even though her identification card from the Republic of Turkey had a box which indicated that she was an adherent of the religion of Islam, she wasn’t.


Although she was born to Muslim parents, she had changed her religion later in life, but did not change her identification card because of the hurdles attached to the process of doing so.

Since officials in Turkey determine a person’s burial rituals according to the indication of religion on her or his identification card, she was buried in a Muslim cemetery. Her son Soner Tufan told Sunday’s Zaman that her burial ceremony on June 2 was full of irony. “First the Muslim prayer leader wanted to carry on a ceremony. We told him about our being Christian, but he said he has to do his job. The imam read prayers and naturally expected to be followed, but there was a patient silence. We wanted him to finish up so we could continue with our own little ceremony,” Tufan said, emphasizing that burial ceremonies are important in Christianity.

The problem he pointed out is in regards to respecting one’s beliefs and will. “My mother would have wanted to be buried in a Christian cemetery with a Christian burial ceremony, but nobody cared about her will or our declaration because of her identification card,” he said. When asked why she did not change her identification card after becoming a Christian, Tufan said she did not want to get into trouble for doing it. “The bureaucracy that you have to go through for that kind of a change is terrible,” he said. “Plus officials question why you did it.”

Tufan is referring to the questioning by public registration officials when somebody wants to change his or her religion. “They ask you why you changed your religion. They even try to convince you that Islam is the best religion. Actually, their questions and remarks reach the level of harassment,” he said. After becoming a Christian, Tufan changed his identity card in 1996. “I completed all the hard work for the necessary paper work. But the hardest part was the remarks that I had to endure at the public registration office,” he added.

Just like his mother, Tufan’s father also avoided changing his identification card and was buried in a Muslim cemetery. He is now joined by his wife in his grave in an Ankara cemetery. They were allowed to have a gravestone in accordance with their Christian traditions, but were not allowed to display a cross. “We have a verse from the Bible there,” Tufan said.

According to Tufan, the core of the matter is that a person’s declaration should be given utmost importance when it comes to the practice of freedom of religion. He says: “If a person or his or her family wants a certain type of burial ceremony, this should be respected and officials should ease the process for people, not make it harder.”

Human rights lawyer Orhan Kemal Cengiz told Sunday’s Zaman that there are other problems, too. “This practice is against freedom of conscience and religion. It is also not correct from a humanitarian perspective,” he said, indicating that a person should not be in a position to declare his or her religion every time he or she shows an identity card. In that regard, he said, the religion box on identification cards should be removed, or at least be optional.

“It’s quite possible that you can be discriminated against because of your religion,” he said.

Pointing out additional problems, he said the Turkish practice is discriminatory in itself because the state does not allow one to indicate belief systems on identification cards other than major religions, like Islam, Christianity and Buddhism, recognized by the Republic of Turkey. Therefore, for example, Alevis of Turkey do not even have the choice of indicating their belief on their identification cards.

Last year in February, the European Court of Human Rights issued a landmark ruling which said whether obligatory or optional, displaying one’s religion on identity cards is a violation of human rights. The ruling was in response to a case filed by a Turkish citizen who is a member of the Alevi community. A complaint filed with the court in June 2005 by Sinan Işık, who in 2004 applied to a Turkish court requesting that his identity card feature the word “Alevi” rather than the word “Islam.”

Until 2006 it was obligatory in Turkey for the card holder’s religion to be indicated on an identity card, yet since 2006 he or she has been entitled to request that the entry be left blank. But both Cengiz and Tufan said it is a widespread practice that public registration officials automatically write Islam on a person’s identity card.

Link

Charter Schools Tied to Turkey Grow in Texas

TDM Contracting was only a month old when it won its first job, an $8.2 million contract to build the Harmony School of Innovation, a publicly financed charter school that opened last fall in San Antonio.

It was one of six big charter school contracts TDM and another upstart company have shared since January 2009, a total of $50 million in construction business. Other companies scrambling for work in a poor economy wondered: How had they qualified for such big jobs so fast?

The secret lay in the meteoric rise and financial clout of the Cosmos Foundation, a charter school operator founded a decade ago by a group of professors and businessmen from Turkey. Operating under the name Harmony Schools, Cosmos has moved quickly to become the largest charter school operator in Texas, with 33 schools receiving more than $100 million a year in taxpayer funds.

Some of the schools’ operators and founders, and many of their suppliers, are followers of Fethullah Gulen, a charismatic Turkish preacher of a moderate brand of Islam whose devotees have built a worldwide religious, social and nationalistic movement in his name. Gulen followers have been involved in starting similar schools around the country — there are about 120 in all, mostly in urban centers in 25 states, one of the largest collections of charter schools in America.

The growth of these “Turkish schools,” as they are often called, has come with a measure of backlash, not all of it untainted by xenophobia. Nationwide, the primary focus of complaints has been on hundreds of teachers and administrators imported from Turkey: in Ohio and Illinois, the federal Department of Labor is investigating union accusations that the schools have abused a special visa program in bringing in their expatriate employees.

But an examination by The New York Times of the Harmony Schools in Texas casts light on a different area: the way they spend public money. And it raises questions about whether, ultimately, the schools are using taxpayer dollars to benefit the Gulen movement — by giving business to Gulen followers, or through financial arrangements with local foundations that promote Gulen teachings and Turkish culture.

“It’s basically a mission of our organization,” said Soner Tarim, the superintendent of the 33 Texas schools.

Link

Selective religious freedom is not freedom: The Turkish Case

What some observers see as “Turkey’s bloodless civil war” was perhaps best captured in the words of Bülent Arınç, then parliamentary speaker and today deputy prime minister, in the run-up to the presidential election in 2007, “They [secular Turks] don’t want a Muslim president!” Yet Turkey’s former presidents or potential rivals to Mr. Arınç’s favorite candidate were neither Christians nor Jews, or anything but adherents to Islam. For Mr. Arınç, “Muslim” meant a “Muslim like me.”

Turkey’s bloodless civil war is between pious Muslims who want the public space to be dominated by their interpretation of religion and less dogmatic and secular Muslims who believe in strict separation of state and mosque. Mr. Arınç’s Justice and Development Party, or AKP, has advocated greater religious freedoms since it came to power in 2002, but its favoritism toward a chosen practice of piety has deeply polarized Turkey. Turkey's “war of religion” is not between two religions, nor is it between the faithful and atheists; it is a contest between believers of the same faith with divergent interpretations of its strictures and/or different levels of observance.

Link

The Diyanet – the elephant in Turkey's religious freedom room?

The Diyanet, or Presidency of Religious Affairs, is a state institution reporting to the Prime Minster's Office and exerts a very large influence on the extent to which freedom of religion or belief can be enjoyed in Turkey, Forum 18 News Service notes. Massive state financial and institutional support of the Diyanet along with its activities - including its biases against Muslim and non-Muslim beliefs it dislikes - make it difficult for people inside and outside the Diyanet's structures to exercise freedom of religion or belief. This has been reinforced by the latest law governing the Diyanet, which increases its influence without addressing its current incompatibility with Turkey's human rights obligations. For a political party to propose removing the Diyanet from the state's structures would render that party liable to be closed down under Turkish law. Despite the need for change in the Diyanet-state relationship, civil society proposals for change have been described by the government as "unjust" and "too assertive for such a sensitive issue".

Link

Turkey on religious freedom watch list for 3rd year in a row

Turkey remains on a US panel’s watch list of 11 countries for the third year in a row for its violations of religious freedom, according to the annual country report released by the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF).

“Turkey was first placed on the USCIRF watch list in 2009, and the commission notes with concern that conditions have deteriorated further since then, underscoring the need for continued vigilance in monitoring,” the report states. According to the report, the Turkish government continues to impose serious limitations on freedom of religion or belief, thereby threatening the continued vitality and survival of minority religious communities in Turkey. The USCIRF report recognizes that Turkey has a democratic government and an energetic civil society and media, and that the country’s Constitution protects the freedom of belief and worship as well as the private dissemination of religious ideas, but it also criticizes the Turkish government’s formal and longstanding efforts to control religion by imposing suffocating regulations by denying full legal status to religious institutions, resulting in serious violations of religious freedom.

Moreover, according to the said report, the government in Turkey has failed to take decisive action to correct the climate of impunity against religious minorities and to make the necessary institutional reforms to reverse these conditions.

“Instead, Turkey continues to intervene in the internal governance and education of religious communities and to confiscate places of worship,” the commission states. The alleged involvement of state and military officials in the Ergenekon conspiracy, which includes alleged plans to assassinate minority religious leaders and to bomb mosques, is also of serious concern, according to the USCIRF report. It also criticizes the ruling Justice and Development Party (AK Party) for the alleged use of preventive arrests to repress critics.

The report says it is concerning that there is a rise in anti-Semitism in Turkish society and media. “Due to these concerns, and others set forth in the related chapter, USCIRF continues to place Turkey on its watch list in 2011,” the report notes.

Link

Another obstacle to justice in the Malatya deaths

As it relates to the Malatya murder case in Turkey, the refrain "Justice moves very slowly" is becoming all too common.

April 18 marked four years since the brutal murders of three Christian missionaries in the bookstore they ran.

Delay after delay slowed the process until the case appeared to have stalled out. Then, on March 23, police arrested 27 people in six days for their connections to Ergenekon and the Malatya slayings. Rody Rodeheaver with IN Network says, "I think there was a lot of hope on the part of the plaintiff's attorneys that with the recent movement against Ergenekon and the arrest of 20 people, they were hoping that would really lead to a possible merger of the case in Malatya and the case against Ergenekon."

Subsequent investigation linked the Ergenekon (Deep State) to the slayings in such a way that they began to look like an ordered "hit" from the highest levels of government.

Now, word is that the prosecutor who has overseen the investigation into Ergenekon from the beginning is no longer on the case. Zekeriya Oz has apparently been promoted to deputy chief prosecutor of Istanbul. He joins three other prosecutors digging for the truth who were removed from the investigation. Rodeheaver says, "Since there've been all of these changes in the makeup of the people who are taking the lead in some of these investigations, it's unfortunate and will probably lead to more delays."

These events are disappointing to the Christians in Turkey. The seeming lack of energy with which this case has been pursued also sends a message to believers that not only are they second-class citizens, but that the government may not protect them from the nationalists. "All of these things tend to create emotional insecurity. When you see these things happen over and over again, it's just human to be concerned."

However, says Rodeheaver, from what he's seen of the national Church, "If you're a Christian, you really need to trust in the sovereignty of God and know that your days really need to be ordered by your Savior."

Link

‘Monstrosity’ in Kars is striking back

We can see from the cables disclosed by WikiLeaks that the prime minister and some ministers were present at the National Security Council (MGK) in 2002 when missionary work was being defined as an internal threat and that they took part in this decision.

In light of the information we have today we understand that having the MGK define missionary activities as a “threat” was part of a big plot against the government. I have tried to explain this in my earlier articles. After the classification of missionary activities as a threat in 2002, a campaign was launched against missionaries that resulted in attacks against them. The great plan was this: The deep state would create a connection between the presence of an “Islamic party” in power and attacks against Christians. In this way, the world would see the intolerant nature of “Islamists” and Europe would cut off its support for the government. The attacks on Christians were being used to lay the groundwork for a coup against the government.

In Turkey, all political parties have been influenced by nationalism to varying degrees. Even though the Justice and Development Party (AK Party) is a political party that consists mainly of religious Muslims, it also has a nationalist component. Those who planned coups aimed to use missionary work as a scapegoat to seize religious people and push them towards a nationalist course, which they managed to do to a certain degree.

Nationalism in Turkey is a dominant idea in the mentality of Turkish society, which several surprised foreign observers have come to realize. Even though the intensity of nationalism rises and falls from time to time, it remains an unchangeable, main current in the background of the political scene.

Of course there are many reasons for why nationalism is as strong as it is. Turkey’s “founding myth” is based on the struggle for the independence of a state that is encircled by enemies and under the occupation of foreign forces. Turkish nationalism emerged quite late, which is why it is very reactive. Since Turkey became a racially diverse country, the concept of “being a Turk” was defined through religion rather than race. A Turk was a Muslim, or more precisely, a Turk was not a non-Muslim. This is a key part of the issue; modern Turkey was constructed on the expulsion and exclusion of non-Muslims from these territories. The modernizing force that excluded non-Muslims also kept Islam and Muslims under its control. I have tried to explain how all these things happened in the past many times.

Link

Christian missionaries in Turkey become targets for militant nationalist

When a Protestant minister in the city of Izmir left his church one day this month, he saw a man pointing a weapon at him and shouting: "Stop proselytizing! You will pay!"

The attacker in front of the Dirilis Kilisesi, or Church of the Resurrection, was quickly overwhelmed, but the incident on the evening of April 1 was a reminder of the hatred that some radical Turkish nationalists feel for Christian missionaries. Radical nationalists in Turkey are not opposed to Christian missionaries for religious reasons, Ferhat Kentel, a sociologist at Istanbul's Bilgi University, said about the hatred against missionaries.

"It is an effort by nationalists to create enemies, a perception of threat," Dr Kentel said. "It has nothing to do with Islam. It is an ideological phenomenon." He said the fear of missionaries was "a symbol for dangers coming from outside". Turkish nationalists see Islam as a unifying force of the country that will be undermined if Christians are allowed to proselytize.

Link

Big Changes Open Politics to Turkish Minorities

Markus Urek was 15 when his Syriac Christian family grew so fearful for the lives of their children in Turkey that they sent them abroad.

Syriac Christians have lived in southeastern Anatolia for almost two millennia, but over the past decades they have dwindled to a tiny minority in the Turkish republic, their numbers reduced by poverty, persecution and the war fought between Kurdish rebels and the Turkish Army on their ancestral homeland.

Mr. Urek spent years shuttling between Germany, Turkey and the United States to complete his education before returning to settle in Ankara last year.

Now he is running for Parliament. “If I am elected, I will be the first Syriac deputy in the history of this country — not only in the Turkish Republic, but the Ottoman Empire as well,” Mr. Urek, 33, said in an interview. “Turkish democracy has improved. That’s why I have the courage to try.”

Just eight years ago, such a run for office would have been unthinkable, Mr. Urek said. “Every Syriac knew it was impossible to be in Parliament, that’s why no one tried.” Now, he said, “I think I have a chance.”

Mr. Urek, a devout Christian, is hoping for a place on the ticket of the Islam-rooted Justice and Development Party, or AKP, Turkey’s governing party, which he credits for much of the country’s political progress.

Turkey is preparing for a general election on June 12, and though little suspense surrounds the outcome, the campaign reflects just how radically this society has transformed itself in the past decade by widening individual, religious and ethnic rights under Turkey’s bid to join the European Union.

Link

Zirve as litmus test for Ergenekon

Last week, it published correspondence displaying how paranoia about missionaries and Christians in Turkey was manipulated by Ergenekon, and with the publication of this correspondence, the big picture of the murder of Christian missionaries in Malatya was completed. And prosecutor Zekeriya Öz was “promoted” away from the Ergenekon investigation the day he touched on the “theologians” factor that provided the link between the missionary issue and the Zirve massacre. The timing of his removal was really meaningful.

We have been informed that the US Embassy in Ankara sent a letter to Turkish officials, expressing their concerns about the emerging harsh discourse targeting minorities and Christian missionaries, particularly in 2005, and warning that it may lead to violence. In his letter to then-State Minister Mehmet Aydın, then-US Ambassador to Turkey Eric Edelman said: “As you will recall, during our meeting I had said that I was concerned that Turkish officials’ anti-Christian discourse, coupled with a general rise in nationalist sentiments, may pave the way for violence against Christians. Shortly after our meeting, I learned that two assailants threw incendiary bombs at the International Protestant Church in Ankara early in the morning on April 21.”

On April 1, 2005, political counselor in Ankara John Kunstadter sent a cable to Washington, reporting two years before the Zirve Massacre that the situation in Malatya was very serious. He wrote that he went to Malatya on March 22, 2005, and met the members of the Protestant community there. A Christian British national told him that the Protestant community in Malatya consisted of 20 people from four families and they were concerned about the recent increase in publications against Protestants in local papers during the past 18 months.

By looking at future developments in the Zirve case, we will understand whether the Ergenekon investigation is going to continue at full speed, as officials promised, after the removal of prosecutor Öz.

So I call on everyone to watch this historic case attentively.

Link