The Challenges of Christians in Turkey

The emergence of an Islamic-oriented government was seen at the beginning as a possible threat to non-Muslim minorities. Nevertheless, the AK Parti government has worked more than others to improve the conditions of the minorities in the country, challenging the previous monist vision of the secular republic. However, the biggest obstacle for the normalization of relations with Christian minorities is represented by widespread intolerance, and the government could do more to stop suspicion of non-Muslim minorities.

The burden of this mixed historical heritage rests strongly on modern Turkey, where small Christian communities still struggle for the full recognition of their rights in a rapidly modernizing country. Today, there are no official figures on the presence of Christians in Turkey. The office of statistics does not publish figures on religious minorities (even though all Turkish citizens, when registered at the birth register office, have to identify their religious belonging). The most reliable figures are provided by the International Freedom Report of the US State Department (see table 1), which, however, also includes foreign nationals living in the country. Indeed, it estimates that 90,000 Armenian Orthodox Christians live in Turkey, of which 30,000 are immigrants (often illegal) from Armenia.

 

Table 1: Christian population in Turkey. Source: International Freedom Report[1]

 

Before addressing the contemporary and future challenges of Christians in Turkey, it will be useful to briefly present the Christian presence in the Ottoman Empire and in early Republican history, with a special focus on the Treaty of Lausanne (1923), which at the same time fixed and cut relations between the emerging Turkish Republic and some religious and/or linguistic minorities. This paper will also spend a few words on the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AK Parti) era, where the entire concept of citizenship has been reshaped with important consequences for Christians.

Christian Minorities in the Ottoman Empire

In the Ottoman Empire, all Christians, since they belonged to the ‘People of the Book’ (Ehl-i Kitâp), were accorded protection and organized into two millets, headed by two patriarchs located in Istanbul: the Orthodox millet was established in 1454 by Mehmet the Conqueror and the Armenian millet was established in 1461. The Armenian millet was dominated by ethnically and linguistically homogeneous followers of the Armenian Apostolic Church. However, until its reform in the nineteenth-century, it also included the much smaller Catholic and Protestant communities. The Orthodox millet included followers of the Orthodox Church of different ethnic and linguistic groups: the Greeks and the Bulgarians, but also members of the Maronite Church. 

The millet system was a social and administrative unit that organized the life of communities inside the empire and ensured representation to the Ottoman authorities. It was also a socio-cultural and communal framework based firstly, on religion and secondly, on ethnicity. Religion supplied each millet with a universal belief system, while ethnic and linguistic differences provided for divisions and subdivisions within each one of the two Christian millets. The clergy had control over church organization, the minority’s schools, and the legal and court systems. Consequently, the clergy administered the extensive church properties, which had the same status as the Muslim vakıf (waqf) properties.

As Karpat has observed: ‘the millet system emphasized the universality of the faith and superseded ethnic and linguistic differences without destroying them.’[2] However, in the seventeenth-century, the emergence of rural notables and of a secular intelligentsia had already begun. This, combined with the administrative reforms and the subsequent new responsibilities given to communal leaders and the birth of non-Muslim entrepreneurial-commercial elites in towns, worked to undermine the authority of the clergy. Consequently, by the end of nineteenth-century, secular ethnic and linguistic identities superseded the ‘universal and a-national’[3] millet identities and delegitimized the Ottoman administration of minorities.

After the Serbian and the Greek uprisings in 1804 and 1821, the Ottoman government responded to the challenge to the millet system by initiating a series of reforms intended to strengthen the authority of the central government and to develop a new common secular sense of political belonging. As a matter of fact, parallel to the millet, the Tanzimat reforms (1839-1876) created a representative system for the minorities in local (later also national) administrations and introduced the concept of ‘Ottomanism’, which is the idea of regarding as Ottoman all individuals living in the Empire, regardless of their faith and language. A reform to the millet’s internal organization was also promoted and the number of millets increased to five, adding autonomous millets for Catholics and Protestants.

The decline of the millet system was dramatically accelerated by foreign intervention that exploited the minority issue to increase outside influence and, eventually, as a tool of penetration into the Empire. An earlier example is the Treaty of Karlowitz (1699), which in article 13 forced the Ottoman Empire to respect the freedom of the Roman Catholic Church inside its borders and allowed the ambassadors of Venice and the Holy Roman Empire to intercede at the Porte on matters concerning the holy sites of Jerusalem and issues concerning the Catholic community. Other treaties followed. For instance, the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca (1774) granted substantial rights to Orthodox subjects and the right of the Tsar to intercede on their behalf. Foreign powers’ intervention and support for nationalist movements in the Balkans as well as missionary activities in the Empire increased Muslim suspicion toward non-Muslim minorities and alimented the political elites’ notorious siege mentality—or the so called ‘Sèvres Syndrome’—which identified minorities as the fifth column of Imperialism. [4]

At the end of the Great War, Greece-led Allied invasion of Turkey, Armenian incursions in eastern Anatolia, and France-coordinated Armenian foray into Cilicia fostered this syndrome. These actions were all designed to split up what remained of the Ottoman Empire but faced local resistance and resulted in the intensification of Turkish nationalism, based on Turkish-Muslim ethnicity.[5] Even when the plans to divide the country failed, Stalin’s threats, the events of the Second World War, the Cold War, and conflicts in the Middle East as well as the more recent EU intervention on issues regarding religion and minorities in Turkey boosted the siege mentality. The Treaty of Lausanne and the subsequent state policies reflected this syndrome.

Suspicion of non-Muslim minorities was behind the most disgraceful episodes of recent Turkish history: the Armenian massacres. For many centuries, the Armenian community was considered ‘the loyal community’ and mainly concentrated in the eastern provinces of the Ottoman Empire, close to the border with Russia. With the weakening of the centralized Empire, relations with the Kurds deteriorated and the government was unable to avoid violence and abuses. Moreover, Armenians also felt the growing influence of the nationalist literary renaissance, the influx of French political ideas, and Protestant missionary activities. When, in 1877, Russia started to invade northeaster Anatolia, Armenian nationalists supported the advancing troops, but when they were forced to withdraw, Kurds and Circassians (Muslims escaping from the Russian Caucasus) pillaged Armenian villages in the border region, and thousands of Armenians took refuge in the Russian Caucasus.

The Russian retreat and the European powers’ disinterest over the Armenian issue radicalized the movements in the Eastern provinces of the Empire even further and Armenian émigrés initiated intense propaganda activities in Europe in the 1890s. After the Treaty of Berlin (1878) and the consequent loss of territory in the Balkans, Ottoman authorities feared for their eastern provinces and empowered Kurdish militias to monitor minorities, even though Armenian authorities had many times complained of the marauding habits of armed Kurdish bands and then, more than ever, the central authorities were unable to exert any control. Small-scale clashes became a constant feature that culminated in widespread violence between 1894 and 1896, often intentionally provoked by Armenian militants that hoped to incite European intervention.

In April 1915, there was another wave of violence following the successful uprising of Armenian nationalists in the city of Van, which ended with Russian occupation of the city in May. In the same period, the Ottoman army was in a very difficult phase of the Great War; Russia was advancing in Anatolia and the long Gallipoli campaign started in the Straits’ region. The central Ottoman authorities ordered, then, the deportation and resettlement of the Armenian population during the summer and winter of 1915. However, the authorities were unable to protect them from local Kurdish and Circassian bands, the harshness of the journey, and poor health conditions. Thousands of Armenians died. Others were forced to convert or were adopted by Muslim families. Even if we do not know exactly how many people died in the violence since the 1890s, how many were deported or coercively converted, or how many Armenians were resettled in today’s Syria, we do know, though, that the Armenian population in the Eastern provinces decreased by at least 1.5 million.[6]

The Lausanne Treaty and Christian Minorities

On 29 October 1923, after a decade of continuous war, the Republic of Turkey was established on the ashes of the Ottoman Empire. The Republic would soon become the first secular political system in the Muslim world, yet Islam had been a constitutive element of the Turkish identity and nation. Moreover, the emigration of non-Muslims facilitated the homogenization of the Muslim-Turkish population (see table 2). As a result, the inclusion of non-Muslim minorities became increasingly problematic in the normative definition of the ‘Turkish citizen.’

Table 2: Muslim and non-Muslim population in Turkey, 1914-2005 (in thousands)[7]

As a matter of fact, for many years Turkey had no special provision for the protection of its minorities. On the contrary, the legal system intentionally prevented the recognition of the existence of any minority, which was perceived by the ruling elites as a potential threat to its unity. Until the 2000s, the only legal recognition of basic minority rights was constituted by the Treaty of Lausanne, signed on 20 July 1923.[8]

Turkish bureaucrats and academicians always understood the Treaty was as applying only to the three oldest millets: the Orthodox, the Armenian and the Jewish. The reason for this restrictive interpretation is not clear; the reform of the millet system in the late nineteenth-century included a higher number of groups and the Treaty of Lausanne did not explicitly specify minorities. Moreover, according to the Treaty, the Turkish Republic appears to be the continuation of the Ottoman Empire and its social order, in which Muslim minorities (like the Alevi or the Kurds) were not mentioned and the only recognized non-Muslim minorities where the religious and not the ethnic and linguistic ones.[9]

Many denominations were ignored by the Treaty, and consequently ignored by Turkish authorities until recently. Muslim minorities continued to be ignored, but important Christian confessions were also excluded. The best example is the Syriac Church, which is deeply rooted in Anatolia and constituted of 20,000 followers, yet it was not officially recognized until 2003, when the EU integration reforms imposed a revision of Turkish law on minority rights.[10]

A protocol of the Treaty, discussed even before reaching the final deal, concerned the infamous exchange of populations between Turkey and Greece (Mübadele). The entire Muslim population of Greece (with the exception of those living in Greek Thrace) and all Orthodox Greeks living in Turkey (with the exception of those living in Istanbul) were forced to leave their homes and resettle. 1.16 million Orthodox Greeks were forced to leave Anatolia and 463,534 Muslims had to leave Greece. [11]

The Republican Time until 2002

After the Treaty, Turkey went through a process of rebuilding of national identity, where minorities’ identities were ignored or openly discriminated against. The Varlık Vergisi (Wealth Tax), collected from November 1942 to March 1944, is a dramatic example. Because there was no fixed rate, and because the tax assessment was conducted by local committees, the tax was almost wholly paid by traders in big cities—Istanbul first of all—and 55 percent of the total tax revenue was paid by the non-Muslim communities, who were subject to rates ten times higher than those of Muslims. The result was that members of the non-Muslim communities often had to sell their businesses or properties. Those unable to pay were deported or sentenced to forced labour, with the consequence of further impoverishment and alienation of Christians.[12]

Another discriminative law was the 1935 Foundations Law (Vakıflar Kanunu), which compromised the capacity of religious groups in financing themselves. The new law had the aim of reducing the influence of non-state actors in the Republic and the properties of the religious pious foundations (including the Muslim ones) were nationalized and administered by the Directorate of the Pious Foundations to avoid expropriation. The law imposed on non-Muslim foundations the burden of proving their ownership with deeds registered to legal persons. However, many Christian vakıfs were established by Imperial decree or registered with names of convenience, like the ones registered to Meryem bint-i Hovagim (Mary daughter of Joachim, i.e. Virgin Mary).[13] Moreover, article 101 of the Civil Code prohibited the establishment of new foundations based on religious identity and, consequently, new foundations could not been established to protect their properties. The new Civil Code itself was modelled on the Swiss code, which did not recognize the vakıf as a legal person.

With the introduction of democracy in the 1950s, not Turkish nationalist aspirations, but mainly international crises (most importantly tensions with Greece) shaped policies toward non-Muslim minorities.[14] Particularly with the worsening of the Cyprus issue, the state started to confiscate the estates of religious communities, even if openly against the Treaty of Lausanne. Moreover, the Directorate of the Pious Foundations hindered the possibility for religious foundations to buy new properties after 1936. Numerous legal actions were not able to resolve the issue. On the contrary, in 1971, the Supreme Court defined Orthodox foundations as ‘foreign foundations’ attempting to acquire properties in the country regardless the fact that this foundations were enlivened by Turkish citizens.[15]

On 6 September 1955, when a conference in London was debating the future of Cyprus, it was rumoured that the house where Atatürk was born in Thessaloniki had been bombed. Immediately, violent demonstrations were organized against, first, the Greek and, then, the Armenian and Jewish communities of Istanbul and Izmir. Inaccurate investigations were unable to identify the perpetrators, but it seems evident that the ‘6-7 September events’ (6-7 Eylül Olayları) had evolved with the connivance of the security forces. An important consequence was that, in the new climate, thousands of non-Muslims again chose to sell their properties and emigrate. Once more in 1964, with the emergence of new disagreements on Cyprus, thousands of Greeks were deported (see the sharp decrease shown in Table 2).

After the military coup of 1980, the legal framework deteriorated even further. Indeed, Article 3 of the 1982 Constitution states: ‘The Turkish state, with its territory and nation, is an indivisible entity [bölünmez bir bütünlüğü].’ Territorial integrity is a principle universally recognized, but the article also stresses the indivisibility of the Turkish nation and implicitly negates the existence of any minority. Thus the constitution crystallized the 1930s monist understanding of the nation-state, which ignores any ethnic or religious diversity but the ones accepted by the Treaty of Lausanne.

A turning point for Christian communities in Turkey was the beginning of the accession process to the EU. Indeed, when Turkey was recognized as a candidate member to the EU in the 1999 Helsinki European Council, a process of reform was initiated and, among other things, in August 2002, for the first time a law guarantied the right of non-Muslim foundations to own real estate.

AK Parti Government and the Christian Minority

After 1999, the Ecevit government, with a commitment to integrate the Turkish legal system to the EU, started a process to widen religious minority rights. After 2002, this effort was continued by the AK Parti. All reforms undertaken within Turkey’s EU accession process reveal an unprecedented move of the country toward a fundamental transformation of the state system. However, while improvement in the rights and liberties of non-Muslim minorities has been made at the legislative level, implementation has come slowly,[16] and few moves have been taken to change the widespread negative attitudes among the society and the bureaucracy in particular.

For instance, the 1935 Foundations Law was changed only in 2008. Actually, the law was redacted in 2004, but stiff opposition in Parliament and the Presidential veto in 2006 slowed the law. The new law strengthens property rights and envisaged the return of nationalized properties, or at least forms of compensation. The Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Istanbul, along with the Armenian Patriarchate and the Bulgarian Orthodox Exarchate, cannot register and obtain legal identity as such; instead, they have to operate indirectly through foundations or associations. Turkish authorities have always objected to the recognition of those titles, claiming they would be in contrast to the country’s secularism, and the use of ‘ecumenical’ by the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate (a title used since the sixth-century) has been seen as suspicious by the authorities. However, the lack of legal identity creates practical problems for the Christian communities in terms of access to courts, property rights, employment rights and the right to train the clergy.[17]

In the last ten years, intolerance also resulted in episodes of violence. In 2006, an Italian Catholic priest, Andrea Santoro, was killed in Trabzon by a fanatic, and Bishop Luigi Padovese, the head of Turkey’s Catholic Church, was killed in İskenderun by his driver and bodyguard on 3 June 2010. If these two episodes were conducted by single individuals, other episodes were much more complex and investigations have also involved members of the security forces. On 18 April 2007, three employees of the Bible publishing house (two Turks and one German) in Malatya were brutally assassinated by five individuals. This case was linked to the court case against the ‘deep state’—the deviated state apparatus—but not all details have been unveiled yet. The homicide on 19 January 2007 of the Armenian intellectual and journalist Hrant Dink also shocked the country. The killer was arrested a few days after the homicide and convicted with another suspect. However, until today, courts have not been able to identify eventual connivance or misconduct by the law enforcement agencies. The only positive aspect of the homicide of Dink was that, for the first time, civil society reacted swiftly to condemn the killing and to push for a full enquiry.

Unfortunately, the correlation between foreign relations and the internal minority issue is still present. The Heybeliada Orthodox Theological College (or Halki Theological Seminary) is a good example of this. The college was established in 1844 to educate the clergy but closed in 1971 under a Constitutional Court judgement that declared all private superior schools unconstitutional. Today, through many declarations, Muslim authorities and also AK Parti officials have demonstrated support for the reopening of the school. However, they made also appeals to the principle of reciprocity with Greece, which has refused to allow Turkish minorities to elect their own religious officials and (until recently) has refused to allow the construction of a mosque in their capital.

The principle of reciprocity used as a pretext is unjustified because non-Muslim minorities in Turkey consist of Turkish citizens present on its lands well before the establishment of the Republic. However, this attitude illustrates how relations with non-Muslim minorities are still bound by the Turkish state to foreign policy issues and are not seen as internal democratic issues. Moreover, the sorrowful events that brought about the emergence of modern Turkey are still much too vivid in the public imagination, which is still unable to distinguish history from the present reality.

Other religious groups have also reported difficulties opening, maintaining, and operating houses of worship. Although a 2003 amendment to the law permits cultural associations, as well as foundations, to establish legal places of worship, authorities have approved only one new Christian church as a place of worship since the founding of the Republic in 1923.

 The majority of Protestants met in unregistered places of worship. The government reportedly recognized only 15 Protestant churches as official places of worship throughout the country, including several chapels run by foreign diplomatic missions. Protestant groups reportedly used approximately 40 rented buildings and more than 100 residences for unregistered worship services. Several Protestant churches also reported difficulties obtaining permission to modify rented space and to use public space for community activities, as other civil groups are allowed to do. Jehovah’s Witnesses reported that by 2012, they had made 46 unsuccessful attempts in 27 different municipalities to register Kingdom Halls as places of worship. On occasion, police broke up worship services in unregistered locations. Some lay leaders reported multiple arrests.[18]

Future Challenges

The Turkish authorities have swiftly condemned the cases of violence, but have failed to condemn the widespread suspicion and hostility among different strata of society and the bureaucracy. Nevertheless, some few but very positive actions have been taken. For instance, the tenth century Akhtamanar Armenian Cathedral of the Holy Cross was restored and reopened as a museum in 2006. In 1950, the cathedral was saved at the very last moment by the Ministry of Education after the governor ordered the demolition of all buildings on the island. In 2010, the Turkish government also allowed the celebration of the mass and some religious celebrations. Secondly, the land of the Mor Gabriel Monastery—the oldest surviving Syriac Orthodox monastery—, which was involved in a land dispute where the Supreme Court granted substantial parts of its land to the state, was returned to the Christian community in a democratization pack announced by Prime Minister Erdoğan on 30 September 2013.

The emergence of an Islamic-oriented government was seen at the beginning as a possible threat to non-Muslim minorities. The Special Assembly for the Middle East, however, has rightly pointed out—without discussing it, though—that Turkish secularism has been unable to protect minorities: ‘In Turkey, the idea of “laicity” is currently posing more problems for full religious freedom in the country.’[19] The monist vision of the secular republic has been the biggest obstacle to religious freedom in the country.

The AK Parti government has indeed worked more than others to transform the monist vision of Turkish identity and to improve the conditions of the minorities in the country. Since 2002, the state has been forced to accept the existence of the Kurds, the largest ethnic and linguistic minority in Turkey, and, consequently, to break the taboo of the Kemalist ‘organic society’ as a central political ethos and the purpose of the state. Today, however, the biggest obstacle for the normalization of relations with Christian minorities is represented by widespread intolerance. Through the promotion of a non-emotional study of history and separating foreign policy from the minority issues, the government could do more to stop suspicion of non-Muslim minorities, which represent no more than 1 per cent of the population, but are crucial for the image of Turkey worldwide and its democratic record.