United States Issues Religious Freedom Report

The United States Department has issued its annual International Religious Freedom Report. For DRL's report on Turkey, click here.

Though many accusations might be leveled at the United States for not taking a consistent position on democracy and human rights issues, a difficult task for any country, the State Department's reports on human rights and religious freedom are refreshingly objective.

Issued by the State Department's Bureau for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, the reports are issued independent of the State Department's other policy making arms. For a bit on how, why, and the history behind these reports, click here.

Power and Discipline?: Religion and Identity Cards

The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has ruled that religion cannot be listed as a field on Turkish national identification cards, which all Turkish citizens are required by law to carry. In 2006, Turkey began allowing people the right to leave the field blank or change their religious designation by application, though the ECHR ruled that the new regulation did not go far enough. The ECHR decision also said it was not the duty of the state to collect religious information about its citizens, which the Turkish Statistical Institute collects all the same regardless of whether religion is left blank or entered on the ID card.

The case that resulted in the ECHR decision came from an Alevi man who claimed state authorities would not allow him to change the religion on his identifiation card from "Islam" to "Alevi," and that this violated Article 9 ("freedom of thought, conscience, and religion") of the European Convention of Human Rights, as well as the Turkish constitutional prohibition against anyone being coerced to disclose religious beliefs (Article 24).

At the moment, the Turkish government has only a limited number of categories citizen may declare on their identification cards: Muslim, Greek Orthodox, Christian, Jew, Hindu, Zoroastrian, Confucian, Taoist, Buddhist, Religionless, Other, or Unknown. As the U.S. Department of State's report on religious freedom in Turkey observes, some religions, such as the Baha'i, have complained about not having their religion included in the listing. As the report also documents, several non-Muslim minorities have complained of exposure to harassment and discrimination as a result of the inclusion of their religion on their identification cards, and as is the case with the Alevi petitioner, others have complained of harassment by local authorities when seeking to change their religious designation. Additionally, some groups, like Protestants and Syriac Christians, have faced particular difficulty opting out of otherwise compulsory religion classes if their identification cards did not include a religion other than "Islam." The courses teach world religions, but minorities, including Alevis, have long complained about a Hanafi Sunni Muslim slant.

There is also the question, of course, of the sheer construction of such categories by the state, in particular the consideration of "Alevi" as apart from "Muslim," the lack of specific categories for Syriac Christians (who are not Greek Orthodox or Rumeli), and as aforementioned, the fact that some religions in Turkey are simply not represented in the choices available.

Also of interest are demands from women and gender groups to remove marital status and gender from religious identification cards, as well as to change the current law governing women's surnames. Divorce can result in discrimination and other difficulties fror women that men simply do not experience, and LGBT and other gender-conscious groups have long decried the blue and pink color of the cards in terms of LGBT rights.


UPDATE I (2/11) -- Ayse Karabat of Today's Zaman has written more about the demands from women's groups. The article expounds on the Bianet article linked above, and gives some more specific examples of discrimination. In regard to surnames, several women's groups are also demanding amendment of Article 187 of the Civil Code, which restricts women's surnames. A local court has petitioned for the Constitutional Court to consider the matter, implying that the article might violate the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). According to the Turkish Constitution, and thanks to the EU-inspired reform process, treaty law supercedes the Civil Code.

Postmodernity and the Arc of Turkish Identity

Ferhat Kentel, Professor at Istanbul Sehir University / PHOTO from the Balkans Project

The Balkans Project recently featured a fascinating interview with Ferhat Kentel, a sociologist at Istanbul Sehir University. Working on the construction of Turkish national identity, Kentel is examining one of the most controversial and heuristic themes in Turkish politics -- in many ways, a theme that defines, and most certainly pervades, every aspect of political discourse, be it Turkey's efforts to come to terms with its minorities (Muslim and non-Muslim), its attempts to reconcile Islam and the Turkish naton-state, its ongoing EU accession process, its confrontration with ultra-nationalist elements like Ergenekon, its international relations, etc. I have provided excerpts in this post, though I most definitely recommend reading though the whole interview.

This new situation is not just about the disappearance of the old Turkish national identity. Someone can feel that he or she is Kurdish, another Turkish, another Moslem, and these all together. All are negotiating identities. Turkishness is a negotiation as well. It becomes a crisis situation for the integration and unity of this society. I am working on this polarization between the early national construction and the new emerging complex identities and trying to find if there is a possibility of a new language, another way of speaking about this society.

I’m not just focusing on identity, but also people’s relationship with everyday life. Everyday life is the humus that lies beneath these identities. These different identities emerge from everyday life.

What does it mean to be a Turk today? The most prominent aspect of this established modern identity is a defensive one. When it emerged at the end of the Ottoman Empire, Turkishness was new. It was promoted in the name of a modernizing subject, in the name of enlightenment. It was connected to the creation of a new modern nation-state, to Ataturk, to Kemalism, to secularism, to the flag. To be Turkish was to be something modern. But today, it is more and more defensive. It refers to an older time. For that reason, it is more and more aggressive against the new voices.

Kentel goes onto discuss the origins of Turkish national identity, and the haven Muslims in the Balkans found here in the face of Christian racism and European nationalism following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. As Kentel notes, these Turks are the most keen to identify themselves as Kemalists, and eager to embrace Turkey as a newfound home, largely left their old identities behind for something new and modern. In the epigram of his epilogue to Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, Tony Judt quotes Ernest Renan:

Forgetting, I would even go so far to say historical error, is a crucial factor in the creation of a nation; thus the progress of historical studies is often a danger for national identity . . . The essence of a nation is that all individuals have many things in common, and also that they have forgotten many things.

Turks, like other European nations, have forgotten many things. At the same time, what awaited those immigrants was a refuge from the discrimination, suffering, and war they had known in the past; in Turkey, they found a new home. Kentel's analysis of ultranationalists is different: not having immigrated from the Balkans, they were often left outside of the Kemalist project. According to Kentel, ultranationalists generally look to the Caucasus and Asia for their roots, often pointing to Central Anatolia as the origin of Turkish identity. Yet, I have met plenty of people who share both perspectives, often the products of mixed marriages between Balkan and Anatolian Turks, merely all the more proving Kentel's argument of the negotiation, multiplicity, and inherent complexity underlying Turkish national identity.

Kentel also explores the lack of understanding between Turks and Turkish minority groups, who are all too routinely bifurcated from one another in the literature into the oversimplified categories of "majority" and "minority." One need only to look at Hrant Dink to see how reality is far more complicated. Dink, proud of his Armenian heritage, never rejected his "Turkishness," but rather understood it differenty; sadly, it was this "different" understanding that led to his murder by people who adopted a defensive understanding of what it meant to be Turkish, and in turn, conspired to kill Dink. Similar kinds of negotiation and multiplicity also hold true for Kurds, Alevis, Greeks, Circassians, Laz, Roma, all of these groups and the diverse individuals in them approaching what it means to be Turkish differently. Many of the identities overlap, and few break down into the nice, neat categories in which they are often placed. Yet, for those Turks who did leave so much of their history behind, the issue of settling these multiple identities and the insistence that they be recognized is difficult. Kentel explains:

These Balkan-origin Turks are also the most reticent on the Kurdish issue. It seems to be a psychological dimension: These Turks left behind their traditional sense of belonging, so they cannot accept another people claiming their original identity. “We gave up ours,” they say, “why can’t you give up yours?” I hear this even from the Uyghur-origin people who came to Turkey during the last decades. “We were oppressed by the Chinese state,” they say. “We came to Turkey and this state protected us. We cannot betray this state. How can you Kurds do what you are doing?” Of course, the Kurds were not migrants to this country. Nor were the Armenians. They are autochthonous peoples of the Anatolian territories.

Holding the traditional/pre-modern construction of Turkish national identity in opposition to the modern, Atatürkist understanding, Kentel highlights the conflicts and convergences between the two. Though Kentel does dwell too much on Ottomanism in his analysis, I think it too is probably worth examining in the mix, conflicting and converging with the other two in all sorts of ways relevant to political identity. And when religion is added into the mix, identity becomes all the more complicated, pushing and pulling with all of these other elements in what I have described elsewhere in this blog as a kaleidoscopic fashion, shifting and turning to suit the situation at hand or whatever the mood of the moment may be. Identity not being something intractable and constant, but rather adaptable and changing, Turks may well be all the richer for the multi-dimensional complexity of their specific identity(ies) despite the difficulties in its negotiation.

And, yet, though Turks have long negotiated these identities, and too often with a good bit of phobic defensiveness, the increased travel and business between countries (which Kentel assesses as weakening the defensive posture of Turkish nationalism -- see my post, "Article 301: An Imperialist Discourse," on the Sevres syndrome), the rise of political Islam, and European discourses about a postnational, multicultural Europe have all drastically pushed that negotiation into a new realm. I perhaps too optimistically evaluate the role of Europe, but the former two have certainly had a tremendous impact on just what observers of Turkish politics are seeing. Yet, as Kentel describes, this "opening" is not unqualified.

There are two contradictory tendencies, each one feeding and reinforcing the other. As we open up, the fear inside becomes more intense. Imagine all the people living under this ideology that says that we are alone, that we are superior, but that everyone fears us. What do you with the burden of this ideology? The opening of frontiers – in the world at large and in our minds – radicalizes the Turkish defensive identity. We are now living in the middle of this clash.

What I mean by a new Turkish identity is not just a global, liberal, or cosmopolitan identity. It is more complex. Part of this new identity is the overcoming of the ruptures of Kemalism. Kemalism required a rupture with the Ottoman era that defined it as an ancien regime. It involved a rupture around borders. It created a Turkishness on this territory with Arabs, Kurds, and others, but this required a rupture with the Arabs of Arabia, the Kurds of other countries and so on. Today it is not necessary for a nation-state to isolate itself this way. Our task is to reconstruct the bridges with all those populations and histories with which we have ruptured.

This new identity is looking for new words, new definitions.

As Barrington Moore described the transition to democracy as wrought with discord and violence, so perhaps is the journey to new, more open, more complex cultural identities. Much has been made of the rise of ultranatonalism in Turkey in recent years, the street protests and ethnic clashes that have erupted on the streets of Turkey's cities with an unwielding, defensive sort of hatred (see Ece Temelkuran n the Guardian, 2007); yet, is this perhaps a sign that things are getting better, that Turkey is moving forward in some sort of cultural transition of which we have yet to see the arc?

Provocatively, Kentel lays out a possible journey, eschewing cosmpolitianism, liberalism, and racist traditionalism for something far more intriguing -- and perhaps, liberating.

So we can make a three-fold distinction. The first is cosmopolitanism or the loss of specific Turkishness. The second is the concentration, redefinition, and reshaping of Turkishness in a more racist way. And the third is an open-ended alternative: we don’t know where we are going but there is another way. This third situation, the creation of new meanings, is the revolutionary tendency.

This new identity, if we summarize, is made also by linking to the past. It doesn’t involve returning to the past but, rather, struggling against the ruptures of history, against the categorizations of old/new, rational/irrational and so on, and against all the modernist constructions created by these categories.

Examining the construction of Turkish identity as affected by a series of historical ruptures, Kentel goes onto explore how Islam is bringing to light the ruptures of Kemalism.

Right now society is caught midway between Islam and modernity. Or, rather, there is no distinction between Islam and modernity as it was defined by modernist approaches. When you listen to some Islamic actors who focus on the authenticity of the Islamic message, they say that the majority of Muslims are lost now, that they have become almost like Protestants, that they only think about symbols of wealth, that they have lost the original message of the religion. But other, modernist voices inside the Islamic universe say that, no, the religion is not frozen in the 7th century, that Moslems as individuals must adapt to the new situation. This is a more liberal, maybe “Protestant” Islam, more individualized. They don’t forget that they are Moslem. They are still good believers. “I am essentially a businessman,” this kind of believer will say. “But five times a day I pray and then it is finished. My practice of Moslemhood doesn’t take more than one hour a day.” There is no difference with people who do gymnastics for one hour a day or do Indian meditation. This person’s identity is that of a businessman first.

So, they are not just Moslems, but they have a class position too. The Moslem businessmen’s union and the labor union of Moslem workers do not necessarily share the same communitarian Moslemhood. They are in conflict. The bourgeois Moslems say, “We are all Moslems, so accept your salary.” But the workers say, “No, we are not all Moslem brothers. You are rich and we are poor!”

There was a declaration recently launched by three Moslem women. “We are not free yet,” they said, referring to the liberalization of headscarves for a couple months before the constitutional court forbad them again. During this period, they said, “We will not be free until the Armenians, the Kurds, the Alevis are free too. We will not be free until the rights of shipyard workers are recognized.” They are very Moslem. They wear headscarves. They dream of living in an Islamic society in which Islam is recognized totally. But in their minds there are other possibilities for how to live with others. If someone doesn’t want to wear a headscarf, she is free to do so. This is something new. This is not the traditional Islam or the Islam of Kemalism. This third version has links with the new Turkish identity, which in turn has links to the past. They are important actors for this new Turkishness. Their Turkishness is not defensive. It is not racial. They are Turkish because they live in Turkey.

Turkey can be perceived as a model or a laboratory for the whole world.

Just what that model will be or laboratory yield remains to be seen, but it truly is incredible, not to mention intellectually humbling, to be the midst of it.

Turkey Another Yugoslavia?

A very sinister analysis from Kerem Öktem in The New Humanist:

Xenophobia and racism have become a serious problem in a country whose citizens are used to thinking of themselves, particularly in Germany, as the victims of racist abuse. According to the latest Pew Global Attitudes Survey, Turkey has become one of the most xenophobic countries in the world. More than 70 per cent of Turkish citizens dislike both Christians and Jews, almost 70 per cent think unfavourably of Hamas, the cause célèbre of virtually any Muslim society, around 45 per cent dislike Saudi Arabia and, believe it or not, almost 10 per cent disapprove of Islam, in a country whose population is nominally 99 per cent Muslim.

These figures fly in the face of marketing narratives of Turkey as “the mosaic of religions”, a “country of tolerance”, and Istanbul as a city where mosques, churches and synagogues sit back-to-back peacefully. But counter-evidence, like the Altinova attacks, has been amassing in the last few years: since 2006, two priests have been killed, many more attacked, and three Christian missionaries, two of them converts from Islam, slain. The most prominent murder of a Christian was that of the Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink, who advocated a new approach to history based on the recognition of Turkish atrocities, an advocacy that flew in the face of the state-enforced denial of the 1915 genocide.

The present state of affairs seems to confirm the worst fears of Turkish secularists, who have always argued that the government of the Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP), who have now been in power for six years, would lead to a rise in religious tensions, and precipitate the destruction of the secular Turkish Republic and establishment of a theocratic regime based on Sharia law. In this light, the legal proceedings brought against the party earlier this year, which threatened to outlaw the AKP (and were only narrowly averted by a majority of one in the constitutional court), would appear almost justified. It would also be a justification for the secular-minded army taking further steps to prevent Turkey from slipping any further down the road to regime change.

But this picture is far too simplistic: neither the AKP proper nor rogue elements within the party are behind the recent religious hate crimes. Nor are the military command the doughty champions of secularism they claim to be. Indeed the idea that Turkey has ever been a secular country is itself a myth. The Turkish version of state secularism foresees neither separation nor disestablishment, but rather the state-financed administration of a certain type of Sunni Islam. This is beaucratically entrenched through the Diyanet, a vast religious services agency with more than 80,000 imams on its payroll, which provides substantial state support for religion across Turkish society, and imposes its orthodox version of Islam on all communities in Turkey, including those of different beliefs, like the Alevis, and the non-religious.

. . . .

As it appears now, the two large blocs vying for hegemony are not secularists and moderate Islamists, but isolationalists and nationalists – ranging from the military to the Republican People’s Party – on the one side and authoritarian Islamists on the other. Both blocs are determined to impose their ideological straitjacket on society, both are ready to use religion for their political ends, both base their politics on the vilification of others and both are happy to exclude the two large minority groups, the Kurds and the Alevis, without whose enfranchisement Turkish democracy will remain incomplete. Yet both blocs are also Machiavellian enough to drop almost any ideological commitment, if this would bring them closer to power.
Turkey might soon be waking up to a sinister spectacle: a wave of ethnic and religious violence erupting in its main cities and in areas where Kurds or Alevis are sizeable and visible minority communities. This would be a sad repetion of the inter-sectarian and political violence that almost ripped the country apart and culminated in the military coup of 1980. Against this worst-case scenario one can count the immense progress in civil society, liberal thinking and independent academic institutions that has been made in the last decade of rapprochement with Europe.

Lurking in the background is one terrifying possibiity. It was summed up by one AKP liberal, frustrated by the lack of progress regarding his government’s policy towards religious minorities, who told me recently during a visit to Ankara, “Yugoslavia always remains an option.”

For full article, click here.

CHP to Embrace Minority Rights . . . Hmm?

From Hürriyet:

The main opposition Republican People’s Party finalizes the draft of a new party program. Race, religion, language, difference in origin and sect will be considered the richness of our cultural mosaic, a condition of our pluralism and a necessity for our democracy, reads the draft

The main opposition Republican People’s Party, or CHP, the target of harsh criticism in recent years due to its lack of transformation, has taken up the challenge to change in a new party program.

The draft program, updated after 14 years and to be put into effect mid-December, foresees a more active role for the CHP in solving the country’s controversial issues, including the Kurdish problem and minority rights. The draft, “From 21st century to bright future through a compass for change,” offers integration instead of assimilation to solve the Kurdish issue.

“The Kurdish problem is a problem of democracy and development. Ethical and cultural differences are our richness. Different ethnicities, cultures, sects and religious beliefs of those living within national borders cannot prevent synergy and the creation of a nation,” the draft says, adding that the removal of differences can never be a policy of the state.

“We offer integration, not assimilation. A mother tongue is a means of dialogue, official language is a means of political unity,” it says.

. . . .

According to the draft, the CHP will also launch a daring initiative on the status of “cemevis,” Alevi prayer houses.

The main opposition defends the existence of the Department of Religious Affairs, saying it should be open for each sect wanting to join and promises to grant equal status to cemevis as given to mosques, so that they too can benefit from state facilities.

We will see where this goes, but if the new party program does indeed lead to significant reversals of CHP policy on Kurdish and other minority issues, it will definitely place pressure on AKP and its reluctance to embrace cultural and minority rights. Such a party platform would also diminish the power of ultra-nationalist MHP, which has been able to form alliances with CHP in taking hardline positions on issues involving ethnic and religious minorities.

More Allegations of Discrimination Toward Alevis

PHOTO FROM the Turkish Daily News

From Jenny White's KamilPasha:

It has been alleged that the beating of a shopkeeper in Keçiören, a suburb of Ankara, for selling alcohol after 11 pm has another side: AKP discrimination against Alevis. The shopkeeper [Metin Şahin] is an Alevi living in an AKP-run neighborhood where Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan also resides. Other Alevis have complained about discrimination and threats from the municipality and police. Alevis are a syncretistic Muslim sect whose members have often supported left-leaning parties as well as Ataturk’s secularist reforms, which Alevis hoped would free them from Sunni Muslim oppression dating back to Ottoman times. There are estimated to be around 20 million Alevis in Turkey. Many Kurds are Alevi. The mayor of Keçiören denies that there is targeting of Alevis or that alcohol is banned in his district.

Şahin's accusation has received a good bit of attention in Turkey's print and broadcast press, and the mayor of Keçiören, Turgut Altınok, has vigorously denied discrimination of Alevis and even noted in media reports that he appreciates the contribution made by shops which sell alcohol. Altınok, the presumable AKP challenger of the mayor of Ankara's greater municipality, Mehli Gökçek, has further alleged that all of the media hype has more to do with CHP politics than the legitimacy of Şahin's accusations. However, Şahin's accusations are very disturbing and he is not the only Alevi in Keçiören making such charges. From the Turkish Daily News:

In Keçiören, with a population over 800,000, there are no restaurants selling alcoholic beverages, with a mere 163 shops selling alcohol allowed to remain open only until 11:00 p.m. In 1994, there were 14 restaurants serving alcohol, but all of them were shut down a few years after the election in 1994 of Altınok, who is affiliated with the ruling Islamic-rooted Justice and Development Party, or AKP.

Locals said, however, that what was reflected in the media about the recent incident was just the tip of the iceberg of the discriminatory municipal practices.

“There is a municipality-motivated polarization and discrimination in the region, which was almost divided into two sections -- where the leftists, including Alevis, are gathered and where the AKP electorate lived,” said Hacı Ali Gölpınar, an executive member of the Freedom and Democracy Party, or ÖDP, and Keçiören Solidarity Center director.

“The municipality makes a great investment in the areas where their electorates live, ignoring the others parts including İncirli, Piyangotepe and Ovacık, where people with leftist ideas reside.”

Gölpınar also said the alleged “A Team,” a group of people working under the authority of the municipality, beat couples for holding hands and attacked shop owners who sold alcoholic beverage after 11:00 p.m., in order to intimidate locals.

“Altınok actually is satisfied with this situation as he gives a message to his party and electorates via this event that he carries out his duty as mayor and at the same time, he paves the way for the religious and traditional customs to be maintained in his constituency area,” he added.

Other shop owners, who wished to be anonymous, also complained about the municipality's rules that shops that do not sell alcohol are allowed to stay open after midnight, while those who sell alcohol are forced to close their doors at 11:00 p.m.

Altınok meanwhile refuted the allegations yesterday and said he did not confirm the incident. He said the municipality had terminated the employment of the municipal police and the prosecutor had launched an investigation into the action. The case was an individual incident.

For Altınok's take on the allegations, click here for an article in Today's Zaman.

With the Keçiören community so polarized, and with national press coverage of these events so infused with the usual strong political bias, it is difficult to ascertain just what happened. However, again, AKP is faced with difficult questions in regard to their treatment of Alevis and, again, I would feel much more able to dismiss these as accusations made in a singular instance if it were not for AKP's documented discrimination of Alevis in other areas of public and religious life. For more, see July 23 and June 16 posts.

AKP-Alevi Standoff on Religious Education

To follow-up on my post of June 16 . . .

From BIA-Net:

Fevzi Gümüş, president of Pir Sultan Abdal Culture Association (PSAKD), an Alevi organization, criticizes the insistence of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) to keep the religion classes in schools mandatory in spite of the decisions by the European Human Rights Court (EHRC) and the Turkish State Council.

“It does not look like the AKP will be able to solve this problem with its own version of the freedom of belief, which is reflects the desires of its own constituency.”

“With the lawsuits, a few Alevi youth were able to save themselves from the assimilation that surrounds them. However, millions of Alevi youth continue going through the same torture.”

Gümüş told Bianet that the Alevi community might consider other options such as mass lawsuits and boycotting the mandatory religion classes, if the AKP kept this attitude.

EHRC: Content and Implementation

The ERHC had stated in its November 2007 decision that the mandatory religion classes were a violation of “the right of education.”

In Hasan Zengin and his daughter Eylem’s application, the court had emphasized that the content of these classes were based on Islam’s sunni interpretation. Moreover, the court had claimed that keeping the non-muslim students exempt from these classes was not enough for “the freedom of belief.”

Minister of Education (MEB) Hüseyin Çelik had stated previously that this decision was about the old curriculum. Since Alevi belief was included in the new curriculum, according to the minister, this decision by the ERHC was inapplicable.

“Complaint Line”

Lawyer of the Zengin family and president of the Federation of Alevi-Bektaşi Associations Kazım Genç applied recently to the ministry regarding this subject.

Although Genç’s application was accepted by “ALO 150” complaint line a month ago, it has not been answered yet.

“It has to be removed”

In spite of the government’s claims, the jurists and experts say ERHC’s decision demands that the religion classes become voluntary.

President of the Education and Science Workers Union (Eğitim-Sen) Zübeyde Kılıç also confirmed to Bianet that this was the only solution; there was no place for religious education in a secular and scientific education system.

“It may at the university level, but it is unacceptable for children who are still developing.”

It is against legal rights and pluralism

Both Kılıç and Gümüş said the mandatory religion classes were added to the curriculum after the September 12 Military Coup in 1980, they reflected the coup mentality.

Both names added that the government was insisting on not fulfilling its obligations demanded by the international conventions.

Gümüş said, “The AKP and the other political formations that share its mentality keep seeing the cultural differences in Anatolia not as richness, but as a separatist component in the country.”

“The court decisions are a turning point in the struggle of Alevis and the democratic forces. Now it is time for the government to remove the mandatory religion classes, which are in contradiction with secularism, human rights and the international conventions.”(EÜ/EZÖ/TB)

Pains of the Past, Hopes for the Future

More Alevi demands go unmet (see June 16 post), more calls to reconcile a troubled past . . .

From BIA-Net:

Fifteen years passed since the Madımak massacre at Madımak Hotel in Sivas in eastern Central Turkey, where the Muslim-Sunni crowd that surrounded the hotel intellectuals and activists for an Alevi celebration were staying and forced thirty seven of them burn to death.

According to the European Peace Assembly, “Fifteen years passed since this massacre done by the reactionary forces under the state protection. But Sivas is still burning, because those responsible for it have not been caught yet.

“We protest the Justice and Development government”
The demands of the assembly are the following:

“Madımak Hotel must be closed down immediately and turned into a museum as soon as possible. A monument for those massacred at Sivas must be built. Those responsible for the massacre and their collaborators inside the state must be brought to justice and punished. The rightful democratic demands of the Alevi society must be met without further delay.

Criticizing that Madımak Hotel is not closed down ad is still open as a “meat restaurant”, the assembly said, “The demands by the democratic social dynamics, foremost among them are victims’ relatives and the Alevi society, have not been met. Even though Etuğrul Günay, Minister of Culture and Tourism, had said that this place would be opened as a florist, this did not happen.”

Firstly the Alevi society and then the whole democratic public realize what AKP’s Alevi approach mean, when they see some of the perpetrators as AKP members. We protest the AKP government for trying to make people forget Sivas massacre.

Other religions such as Christianity, Judaism, Alevi and Yezidi must be as close to the state as Islam is and Alevi religion must be recognized as a separate belief. The obstacles that prevent Cem Houses from functioning as houses of worship must be removed. The state must get out of the field of religion, abolish the Department of Religious Affairs, whose budget comes close to the budgets of three ministries combined, and discontinue the religion box of the identity cards. (EZÖ/TB)

Assimilation with a Sunni Islamist Taint

The Alevi community has long been skeptical of AKP as a Sunni Islamist party desirous to expand the role of Sunni Islam in public and private life. However, this January, some hope was presented when AKP deputy Reha Çamuroğlu was appointed by Erdoğan to lead an initiative to resolve conflicts between AKP and the Alevi community. While most Alevis were highly skeptical, the mood in the moderate Islamist press was quite positive. However, any goodwill has since vanished with Çamuroğlu's resignation.

Principal among the Alevis' concerns are that Alevi children not be subject to Sunni-Islam based religious classes, which are compulsory for all Turkish students. Director of Education Hüseyin Çelik has been anything but accommodating and this despite a decision by the European Court of Human Rights that held mandatory religious education to be in violation of the European Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms. The ruling in Hasan and Eylem Zengin v. Turkey urged that Turkey come into conformity with Article 2 of Protocol No. 1, which covers the right to education. The protocol reads:

In the exercise of any functions which it assumes in relation to education and to teaching, the State shall respect the right of parents to ensure such education and teaching in conformity with their own religious and philosophical convictions.

In response, the AKP government said it would change its policy so as to offer an optional course teaching "universal religious knowledge" and said at the time that it would change its standard curriculum to come into compliance with the ECHR decision. Since then Çelik has affirmed that no number of court decisions will influence the state to end compulsory religious education, mandatory under the current constitution. Çelik's statement came after the Council of State, an appeals body charged with administrative law, decided that compulsory education as it was carried out by the Directorate of Education's current curriculum is illegal. At the time, AKP reacted strongly against the ruling and accused the Council of State of acting outside its bounds. Directorate of Religious Affairs head Ali Bardakoğlu said that religion was essential to the education of all children, going so far as to conclude that Alevism cannot be included as a religion outside of Islam and is therefore most respected by including its teachings in the state's curriculum. Most disturbing is that despite EU calls to do so, AKP refuses to lift the requirement in its draft of the new constitution. According to Ali Balkız, president of the Alevi Bektasi Organization that brought the Zengin case to the ECHR, “The AKP is an Islam-based Party that has two sensitive spots, Alevis and women. These two are the last not on the democratization list for AKP."

Alevis are further discriminated against insomuch as their religious institutions, cemevis, are not afforded the same legal protections as mosques and churches. Bardakoğlu has continued to withold government funding from the support of cemevis on the grounds that they are not alternatives to mosques, and despite the director's repeated utterances that a majority of Alevis worship in mosques, the truth of the matter is that the cemevi—where women and men pray together—is the center of Alevi religious communities. Further, the government continues to post Sunni imams to Alevi villages over the petitions of residents. From the Turkish Daily News:

Tahir Aslandaş, president of the Sivas Ali Baba Association, said the group gave a petition to the Sivas governor in January to demand withdrawal of an imam sent to the Beykonağı village populated by Alevis. “The petition was never heeded,” he said. “This is a general phenomenon in Sivas. It is an attempt for an assimilation policy. No one goes praying, but the Imam reads the call to prayer nevertheless.” He added that the Beykonağı village also suffers from poverty and a lack of medical care, with eight households and elderly people in need of medical attention and only a small clinic that has no doctors or nurses.

An expert on the Alevis from Middle East Technical University, Assistant Professor Aykan Erdemir, noted that the AKP top administration is made up of people raised with prejudices against the country's 15 million Alevis, prejudices that also create material divides in the society. “From promotions to bids and contracts, from employment to nomination to key state posts, being a Sunni conservative is a great advantage over being an Alevi,” he underlined.

President of the Pir Sultan Abdal Cultural Association Fevzi Gümüş noted that mosque construction in Alevi villages has resumed with greater speed. “Discrimination against Alevi students increased to unprecedented levels. Our demands about Cemevis merely served as a government show who wanted to appease the European Union. It is clear that the AKP only cares about freedom of religious beliefs when it concerns headscarf wearing,” he underlined.

Alevis are very much exceptional to the Turkish mainstream and have long discriminated against for their heterodox Shi'a beliefs. They are also frequently the targets of Sunni Islamist extremists and right-wing paramilitarists (see April 13 post).

USCIRF Reports on Religious Freedom

Turkey appears in the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom's 2008 annual report on the status of religious freedom in 22 different countries. Founded in 1998 to monitor religious freedom in conjunction with the State Department, USCIRF considers Turkey a country under review rather than a country of of particular concern or in which religious freedom violations warrant being put on its watch list. Nonetheless, USCIRF observes the country's struggle with its laicist understanding of religion and the state, as well as state discrimination against Muslim minorities, e.g. the requirement that Alevi children be subject to Sunni religious education. The report also includes a description of discrimination against Turkey's non-Muslim minorities, e.g. the lack of legal recognition afforded to the Greek and Armenian Patriarchates. The report also alludes to the anti-Semitism still encountered in the Turkish media and other sectors of civil society.

USCIRF joins other groups in criticism of the recently passed Foundations Law. Although the Foundations Law is a positive step in the right direction of returning property of religious minorities seized by the state, it makes no provision for the re-appropriation of property sold by the state to third parties. Admirably, the bill does allow non-Turkish citizens to open up foundations and reduces legal barriers to gaining foundation status for Turkish citizens as well.

A Missing Dimension: MHP and the Right-Left Stalemate

PHOTO from Today's Zaman

I have been remiss to comment much about the Turkey's far right, but the recent violence at Akdeniz University in Antalya seems an excellent way to introduce the topic. The incidents speak to a conflict between Turkey's right and left, a dimension in Turkish politics that has largely been overshadowed in recent years by a conflict between secularists and AKP. Papers early in the week linked the unusual bout of violence to that characteristic of the late 1970s between rightist and leftist student groups.

So, what happened at Akdeniz University? This is not an easy question to answer, but last weekend, a series of fights occurred between leftist and rightist student groups. Although it was reported by the university's rector that the violence was provoked by a personal conflict between two students, the conflict took political tones when it spread to political groups to which the students belonged. The groups fought one another with fists, stones, and knives in two separate incidents and Antalya police had to be called in to break up the fighting. The members of the rightist student group are said to be sympathetic to MHP while the leftist students seemed to be an amalgam of socialists and Kurdish sympathizers. Some of the students in the latter group are being reported by Turkish papers to be "PKK-sympathizers," but this is not an uncommon claim leveled against radical Kurds with strong leftist leanings.

The rightist students were apparently joined on Friday by a gunman identified as Ömer Ulusoy who might or might not have ties to MHP, but is at least sympathetic to the party's nationalist ideology and is said to have visited Antalya MHP headquarters earlier in the week. Revelations of links to MHP have led MHP leader Bahçeli to denounce the actions of the rightist students and move to distance himself from Ulusoy. Indeed, Bahçeli even portrayed the incidents as "traps" aimed to weaken the national movement—inevitably that of the 'true nationalists' as opposed to the man with a gun and a bizarre nationalist tattoo blazoned across his face.

Why did Bahçeli act so quickly to distance himself from Ulusoy and the rightist student group? The answer lies in MHP's past. The party was founded by ultra-nationalist Alpaslan Türkeş in the late 1960s. Türkeş held high rank in the military before the 1960 coup and was chosen by the National Unity Committee (NUC) to announce the military's overthrow of the Menderes government in 1960. Türkeş was a pan-Turkist whose normative vision of the Turkish state bordered on fascism and he soon parted ways with the much more moderate NUC and was quietly moved to a diplomatic post in Dehli.

The political party he founded upon his return reflected his nationalist ideology and a belief in a unitary Turkish state in line with his interpretation of Kemalism. This interpretation rested on the idea that Atatürk's vision of the Turkish state rejected the regional, ethnic, and sectarian differences and called for Turks to be united under a government for Turks, by Turks. The singularity of Türkeş' vision is thought abhorrent by many of Turkey's religious and ethnic minorities (many of whom also consider themselves Turks), but made perfect sense to Türkeş when combined with the Ergenekon myth that all Turks share a common ancestry (being led out of their ancestral homeland by a wolf and through the mountains to their new home in Anatolia).

Although the early party was not particularly successful in electoral politics, it gained notoriety when it founded its youth organization, the Hearths of the Ideal (Ülkü Ocakları). Members of the group began to call themselves the "Grey Wolves" ("Bozkurtlar") and the group soon took on a paramilitary dimension when it opened camps to train members to engage in violent acts against the Turkish left. The enemy of the time was not Islamist, but communist, and the Grey Wolves became an increasing threat to those who it saw as opposed to their Sunni Muslim-Turkish identity. By the late 1970s, political violence against the left was rife and reveals itself most violently in the slaughter of Alevis that took place in Kahramanmaraş in December 1978 when well over 100 Alevis were murdered in a pogrom organized by the Grey Wolves. The Grey Wolves had two reasons to hate the Alevis: first, they practice a heterodox form of Shi'a Islam that was at odds with their Sunni bigotry, and second, the Alevis were generally aligned with the left. It is also likely that the group was responsible for the May Day violence of 1977 in which 39 people lost their lives when unknown gunmen opened fire on leftist protesters and operated with the cooperation of some sectors of the Turkish Armed Forces as part of the theorized "deep state" (see Jan. 25 post).

Violent acts were also engaged in on the part of the extreme left, but did not compare to the prolific heinousness of the Grey Wolves. Indeed, the violence of both groups attributed to the political instability that the military coup of 1980 claimed as justification for their political intervention. After the military seized control in September of that year, it closed down all political parties, began work on a new constitution, and arrested and tortured several people it claimed to be trouble-makers. Those arrested included Türkeş and members of the Grey Wolves, but the principal aim of the military was to end what it saw as an emerging threat coming from the radical Turkish left (a view it had in common with the Grey Wolves). As in Iran in the 1970s, several leftists were detained for indefinite periods of time in political prisons and subjected to tortured. Interestingly, there is evidence that implicates United States-CIA involvement in the coup and that puts these events in the Cold War context in which they occurred.

It is interesting to think of how exogenous the events at Akdeniz seems in the stalemate of the current political climate. The factors for this stalemate are twofold: first, the moderation of the radical right to a degree that it is now able to represent itself in the form of an establishment party; second, the demise of the Turkish left to such a degree that its policies now seem more in line with the far right than with its own history (see Feb. 12 post).

To explain the first factor, it is necessary to understand the development of MHP in the post-coup years. In many ways, the 1980 coup tamed it and with its reconstitution in 1983, MHP began to move past its involvement in paramilitary activities and at the same time seek a greater role in electoral politics. With the death of Türkeş in 1997, Bahçeli further moderated the party's positions while also seeking to expand its base by appealing to pious Muslim voters with strong natioanlist leanings. The party became declared its opposition to the türban ban at universities and argued that türban-wearing women should be able to work in government. In 1999, the party won 18 percent of the vote thanks to this more religious platform and promises to execute Abdullah Öcalan.

Some have attributed the rise of MHP as symptomatic of an increase in nationalist feeling in recent years, but others have pointed to the party's success as rooted in the turbulent political situation in which Turkey found itself when the old center-right parties weakened in the closing years of the 1990s. Worthy of examination is Bülent Aras and Gökcen Bacık's 2000 article, "The Rise of the Nationalist Action Party and Turkish Politics" in Nationalism and Ethnic Politics (Vol. 6:2, pp. 48-64), in which the authors argue the latter.

The entrance of MHP as a legitimate and powerful political player was in many ways made possible by the confusion of the left. Much like MHP, CHP is vehemently opposed to lifting restrictions on freedom of expression and is increasingly hostile toward the country's aspirations to join the EU. These attitudes are largely driven by a refusal to negotiate the meaning of secularism and the fierce nationalism with which it is accompanied. As a result, MHP and CHP are much similar to each other now than they were in the 1970s when MHP represented the extreme right and CHP a much less reactionary center-left. With the threat no longer being communism, but political Islam, CHP has come to embrace a reactionary ideology akin to MHP while the latter has less to react against.

More food for thought is MHP's Islamic identity sans its embrace of democratic liberalism. If a comparison is to be made between MHP, RP, and AKP, it seems that the first two would have much more in common than the latter two in that AKP has at the very least espoused a belief in democratic liberalism whereby an Islamic observance like wearing the türban is merely allowed, not mandated. MHP has most definitely not argued that religious observances should be forced on all Turks, but its linking of Islam with a hegemonic conception of Turkish identity seems much more a potential threat to secularism.

One additional note: The idea of Turkish superiority fostered by the right is far from disappeared. Following the İzmit earthquake in 1999, the Minister of Health, Osman Durmuş, tried to prevent the delivery of much needed blood donated from other countries because he claimed that Turks do not need foreign blood.

And, as a footnote, the terms "right" and "left" are deeply contextualized in Turkish politics and can mean very little sans historical references, as the terms are often used by political actors to suit particular political exigencies.