Turkish Armenian Patriarch Mesrob Mutafyan yesterday criticized a bill aimed at returning confiscated property to minority foundations, saying it was contradictory to the principle of equality as set forth in the Constitution.
He said if the bill was legislated in its current form, it would not bring a solution to Turkey’s decades-old problem on minority foundations.
Mesrob II sent letters to Parliament Speaker Bülent Arýnç, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoðan and Foreign Minister Abdullah Gül to express his views on the bill, which Parliament has been considering as part of a European Union-backed reform package prior to the release of the EU Commission’s key progress report next month.
“We have no request other than equal citizenship,” he said, expressing disappointment that the bill was being evaluated on the basis of reciprocity without taking into account the views of Turkish Armenians.
Parliament was continuing debate yesterday on the controversial bill, which caused tension when Parliament’s Justice Commission discussed it last month. On that occasion, the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) claimed that a decision to restore property rights for minority foundations as envisaged by the bill would violate the Lausanne Treaty’s principle of reciprocity, which stipulates that improvements in rights for the Greek minority in Turkey should be mirrored by improvements in the rights of Greece’s Turkish minority. In a move to soothe such concerns, Deputy Prime Minister Mehmet Ali Þahin submitted a proposal, saying that the principle of reciprocity would be upheld at the implementation phase.
“We are citizens of this country, so we believe that there is nothing more natural than our informing you of our problems and asking you to resolve them,” the patriarch said.
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