FEATURE NEWS from COMPASS DIRECT
Global News from the Frontlines
Summary:
ISTANBUL, August 30 (Compass) — Persecution against Christians in
Turkey is becoming more overt. Along with the usual delays in granting
permits to Protestant churches, Christians are seeing signs of open
hostility — both verbal and violent — toward their faith. In a country
where the victims of abuse are sued and plainclothes policemen act like
thugs, it is easy for Christians to get into trouble.
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Turkey’s Mistreatment of Christians Becoming More Brazen
Persecution worsening even as the country seeks entry into EU.
by Peter Lamprecht
ISTANBUL, August 30 (Compass) — Bektas Erdogan never expected his
Christian faith of 11 years to jeopardize his career as a fashion
designer in Turkey.
Hired five months ago by a designer jeans company in the Beyazit
district of Istanbul, Erdogan was assured by his Muslim boss that he
would be evaluated on the basis of his work, not his religion.
After his first collection sold successfully in Russia, Erdogan thought
the phone call he received earlier this month from his employer —
asking him to come to work on a Sunday afternoon — boded well. Maybe
there was a surprise company dinner.
But that evening at the shop, his supervisor angrily accused him of
“missionary work” and “brainwashing.” With the help of two employees and
a relative, he beat Erdogan for two hours. The men repeatedly struck the
designer’s head and face with their fists and the butt of a pistol.
Three times Erdogan’s boss attempted to shoot him, but the gun failed to
fire.
“He really wanted to kill me. It wasn’t just to scare me,” said Erdogan,
who told Compass that he prayed for help and meditated on Bible verses
while his attackers threatened to murder him and hide his body.
His co-workers released the 32-year-old Erdogan with a swollen and
bloody face around 9 p.m., warning that they would kill him later. Since
then, he has received three anonymous phone calls threatening his life.
Erdogan did not report the August 7 incident to the police, fearing that
his boss’ ties with local officials might make him the target of further
aggression. He also felt that once the authorities learned he was a
Christian, they would be unwilling to help.
He believes that his employer’s anger stemmed from shop employees’
interest in Christianity. During his last three months at the job,
Erdogan said, “Almost every meal [at work] became a question-and-answer
session about my religion.”
Plainclothes Police Brutality
Erdogan is not the only victim of increasingly overt, anti-Christian
sentiment within Turkish society. On the same day that he was attacked,
Istanbul police beat two Protestant converts in their early twenties and
told them they could not be both Turks and Christians.
Umit and Murat-Can, who asked to have their last names withheld, were on
their way to one of Istanbul’s 25 Turkish-speaking Protestant churches
on August 7 when they saw American David Byle and his 3-year-old
daughter surrounded by a small crowd of police and civilians.
Byle had been exercising the legal right to distribute Christian tracts
on Istiklal Caddesi, one of Istanbul’s main pedestrian thoroughfares,
when two plainclothes policemen accosted him. One of them grabbed his
chin and shouted at him for distributing literature, quickly drawing a
crowd of police and passersby.
When the two Christians tried to intervene on behalf of Byle, whom they
recognized as a member of a local church, a scuffle broke out between
Umit and one of the plainclothes policemen. According to Murat-Can,
about 15 policemen forced Umit to the ground, where they kicked and hit
him before handcuffing him and carrying him inside a nearby building.
“That’s when I first realized they were police,” said Umit, whose
plainclothes attacker never identified himself as an officer. The
policemen continued to beat Umit for three minutes before taking him to
a local police station with Murat-Can, who had followed the group
inside.
“They never showed us any ID or read us our rights,” Murat-Can told
Compass as he described the following hour in the police station. After
finding 100 Christian tracts in Murat-Can’s backpack, police accused the
youths of being “missionaries” who were bent on “dividing Turkey.”
Although finally releasing them without filing any formal report, they
told the young men that they could not be both Turks and Christians.
In another incident last month in Eskisehir (120 miles southeast of
Istanbul), three strangers in Kanli Kavak park assaulted Protestant
Salih Kurtbas. They attacked him from behind at 6 p.m. as he waited for
an anonymous caller who had asked to meet and discuss Christianity.
Shortly after arriving home with a bloody nose, split lip, black eyes
and a swollen ear, he received an irate phone call from his attackers.
They accused him of missionary activity and threatened to kill anyone
associated with a local U.S. businessman whom they claimed was spreading
Christian propaganda.
Eskisehir evangelicals have faced constant delays in obtaining legal
permission to start the city’s first Protestant church. “We applied to
the governor and haven’t received an answer, and the city government has
said that the building is not up to earthquake safety standards,”
Kurtbas told Compass. “Everything’s kind of gone downhill.”
Kurtbas didn’t even think of going to the police, explaining, “If they
found out that I was a Christian, nothing good would have come of it.”
Umit also wanted to avoid further problems with authorities, fearing
that legal proceedings might hurt his brother’s chances of entering the
police academy.
Fear of Court
“These sort of attacks are not shocking for me,” admitted Orhan Kemal
Cengiz, legal consultant for Turkey’s Alliance of Protestant Churches
(APC). “I was expecting them . but [Christians] should take this very
seriously.”
With European Union (EU) accession talks looming on October 3, Turkey is
attempting to improve its human rights image. A package of legal reforms
passed in June reasserted freedom of religion, instituting a three-year
prison sentence for anyone obstructing the expression of religious
beliefs.
But the EU has remained skeptical, challenging officially
99-percent-Muslim Turkey to implement these religious freedoms among its
non-Muslim minority communities. Fewer than 100,000 citizens follow the
ancient Christian traditions of the Armenian, Greek and Syrian Othodox
churches, which remain exclusively ethnic congregations.
By contrast, the emerging community of an estimated 3,500 Turkish
Protestants challenges the centuries-old perception that to be a Turk is
to be a Muslim.
Over the last 10 months, violence against Protestant Christians in
Turkey has become publicly visible, prompting former U.S. Ambassador to
Turkey Eric Edelman to make formal inquiries with Ankara officials in
April and again in June regarding 10 incidents.
“Turkey is not aware of the gravity of the problem,” Cengiz said. “Some
officials have good intentions, but I have a strong suspicion that they
don’t really grasp the freedom of religion issues.”
While most Turkish Protestants remain reluctant to open court cases for
fear of further persecution, others feel that the church can gain from
aggressive legal action without undermining its message of love.
“I’m a big fan of opening a court case,” APC spokesperson Isa Karatas
told Compass. “When we look at things from a Christian perspective, of
course we need to be forgiving. But this is not an obstacle for us to
pursue our rights.”
Cengiz, the legal consultant to the APC, also advises that abuse victims
go to court to protect themselves. “If you do not file a case against
the police, you may find yourself before a court or even in jail, in
spite of the fact that you are the victim of police misconduct,” Cengiz
said. Turkish law enforcers often sue abuse victims preemptively, Cengiz
said, in order to shield officers from legal prosecution.
Turkish Protestant church leaders have opened seven libel cases this
year against three TV stations to combat accusations aired nationally.
Statements on the television programs claimed that local Christians spy
for foreign governments that pay Turks to change their religion.
In the face of anti-Christian rhetoric from some government officials
and the latest attacks against Protestants, many Turkish Christians
admit that they are not expecting either the government or society to
change overnight.
“There is a segment of the government that supports anti-Christian
sentiment, but along with this section is a larger segment that opposes
it,” Karatas of APC told Compass. He said that if Christians who
suffered persecution for their faith “would open court cases now, I
believe they would receive support from the government.”
“In theory we have a free environment,” Umit told Compass only 10 days
after being beaten by the police. “I don’t think that there is a problem
with the state. But the Turkish people have not yet understood
democracy. They still see the state as a father. They don’t know that
it’s meant to serve us. Therefore, when people working for the state say
something bad about Christians, the people believe it.”
Despite ongoing death threats, Erdogan has no plans to leave the
country. When asked how he felt about losing his job, enduring a severe
beating and being threatened with death — all in one evening — he
smiled. Even if his situation doesn’t improve, he said, “God tells me to
rejoice, because He can bring glory to His name.”
END
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Copyright 2005 Compass Direct
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