Associated Press Worldstream
November 16, 2004 Tuesday 7:50 AM Eastern Time
Minority demands for rights calls into question Turkish national identity
by SELCAN HACAOGLU; Associated Press Writer
ANKARA, Turkey
As a child, Hrant Dink dreamed of becoming a detective, a hope that was shattered by Turkey’s unwritten rule that Jews and Christians may not join the police, the Foreign Ministry or become officers in the military.
But Dink’s dream is now at the center of a growing debate in Turkey over minority rights sparked after European Union officials recommended that the bloc begin membership talks with Turkey but insisted that the country must improve its treatment of minorities.
The debate, which is being carried out in newspapers, on television and in the streets, calls into question the very definition of what it is to be a Turk, a national identity that many regard as the glue that holds the country together.
Is being Turkish a matter of ethnicity, religion, or simply citizenship?
The controversy is so emotional that nationalists have been accusing supporters of minority rights of “treason” and attempting to break apart the country, while liberals are saying that nationalists are “violating freedom of thought.”
At the heart of the conflict is whether all of the nation’s Muslims must consider themselves Turks, regardless of their backgrounds, and whether non-Muslim minorities can have equal rights.
For some eight decades, the Turkish state insisted that all of the nation’s Muslims were Turks. Kurds, for example, were considered Turks and speaking Kurdish was illegal until 1991. Non-Muslims like Dink – an Armenian Christian journalist – have been blocked from key offices, including the national intelligence agency, amid questions of their loyalty.
The debate almost came to blows this month at a press conference called by an official human rights body. A man grabbed a statement out of the hand of a professor and tore it up after the academic suggested equal treatment for minorities, including Muslim groups.
“We don’t recognize this report, it is aimed at dividing the country,” Fahrettin Yokus shouted after he ripped the statement into pieces. “We are also against demands by the EU that are threatening our unity.”
Ibrahim Kaboglu, chairman of the rights body, which was created by the Prime Ministry, was so shaken that he asked for police protection saying that he could be targeted by extremists.
“What the EU is saying is that we should treat all subcultures equally,” said Baskin Oran, who prepared the minority report for the prime minister’s office. “Civilization is multicultural.”
Nationalists quickly petitioned the prosecutor’s office to file treason charges against Kaboglu and several other academics and activists who signed the statement that he read.
The European Union report said that Turkey, “has to comply with basic EU standards, which include the protection of minorities.”
It also urged Turkey to grant more rights to ethnic Kurds and recognize Alawites, a religious sect rooted in Islam, as an ethnic minority, explosive suggestions in a nation where children open the school day by saying “Happy is the man who says ‘I am a Turk.”‘
More than a quarter of Turkey’s 71 million people are either Kurds, Alawites or share both identities.
“The nation is a whole. It cannot be seen as made up of pieces,” Gen.
Ilker Basbug, deputy chief of the military said, reading from a statement about whether Muslim groups could be considered minorities.
“If it is seen so … this would open the way to the breakup of the state.”
President Ahmet Necdet Sezer dismissed the debate over minority rights as “destructive” and reminded people that the constitution states that “everyone bound to the Turkish state through the bond of citizenship is a Turk.”
Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul ruled out any official recognition of Muslim minorities.
“We shall never accept things such as this is minority, that is majority which could bring political consequences,” Gul told the Cumhuriyet newspaper in an interview.
Gul, however, said the government was trying to address “possible snags” in granting rights to non-Muslims.
The issue goes back to the founding of the Turkish state in 1923 on the ashes of the Ottoman Empire, a theocratic state that considered all Muslims within its territory as subjects and Jews and Christians as protected minorities.
The new Turkish state that was created was based on Turkish nationalism and its founders considered all Muslims within its territory – regardless of their backgrounds – as Turks. That avoided tensions between Anatolian Turks and the hundreds of thousands of Ottoman refugees from places like Greece, Bulgaria and Arab countries who fled to Turkey as the empire disintegrated.
Many Turkish Muslims continued to regard Christians and Jews as foreigners and guests in their new state and there was deep suspicions toward Greeks and Armenians, the main Christian communities, who rose up against the Ottoman Empire as it collapsed.
Those uprisings led to the forced expulsion of most of Anatolia’s Greeks as part of a population exchange with Greece. They also were the trigger for one of the darkest chapters of modern Turkish
history: The mass killings of Armenians, which Armenians say amounted to genocide. Turkey denies the genocide allegation.
The new definition of “Turkishness” was strictly enforced and there were repeated rebellions by Kurds, a group that dominates the southeast and speaks a language related to Persian.
Since 1984 the Turkish army has been battling autonomy seeking Kurdish rebels in the southeast, a fight that has left 37,000 dead.
Many Turks fear that recognizing Kurds or Alawites as minorities could lead to the disintegration of the state into ethnic enclaves.
They also continue to suspect that Greeks and Armenians – who together number about 65,000 – might not be loyal citizens. There are a total of 130,000 non-Muslims in Turkey, making up less than 0.2 percent of Turkey’s population.
Sectarian clashes between Alawites and Sunnis – who form about 80 percent of the country – took place in the late 1970s and again in the 1990s. Many Alawites say they are discriminated against by Sunnis and that compulsory religion classes in schools have a Sunni curriculum. Many Sunnis consider Alawites to be heretics.
For Dink, the issue was just about becoming a detective.
“In my childhood, I dreamed of becoming a homicide detective. I would capture the murderers quickly,” Dink said on private NTV television.
“But I was barred from becoming a detective in this country because I am seen as a security concern.”
Dink said he was sad to see that Turkey was only recognizing its “multicultural identity and differences” due to foreign pressure.
“Why don’t we solve our internal problems on our own?” he asked.
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