TURKEY’S FIRST ASSYRIAN MP DISCUSSES CANDIDACY, MINORITY RIGHTS
SES Turkiye
2011-11-01
Lawmaker Erol Dora says the neglected state of his people has made
them the minority of minorities in Anatolia.
Erol Dora, Turkey’s first Assyrian MP, was selected as an independent
candidate of the Labour, Democracy and Freedom bloc — a coalition
of Turkish socialists and the pro-Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party
(BDP). The bloc entered the election as independent candidates only
to unite under BDP in parliament.
Turkish MP Erol Dora. [Ozgur Ogret]
Although he was interested in politics as an observer, Dora never
considered entering the political arena since there are too few
Assyrians to elect a deputy in Turkey.
There are about 20,000 Assyrians — also known as Suryani and Chaldeans
— remaining in Anatolia. Many emigrated after World War I to Syria,
Iraq, Russia, Europe and North America.
“BDP contacted me. They called me and said they wanted to have an
Assyrian candidate in this electoral process,” Dora, a lawyer living
in Istanbul at the time, explained.
He said his election is meaningful in two ways. First, BDP was being
criticised as a party of only Kurds that did not reach out to Turkey
as a whole. Second, Kurds and Assyrians have been living in Anatolia
for centuries but have experienced “dissociation”.
His election was a positive step in overcoming differences he says,
noting that he received votes from Arabs, Assyrians and Kurds.
Dora says the dissociation occurred not only with the Kurds, but also
Turks. “Distrust has appeared between the peoples of Anatolia during
certain historical processes,” he said, adding that the economic,
political and other reasons for Assyrian emigration from Turkey should
be investigated.
As a non-Muslim group, Assyrians are defined as a minority according
to the Treaty of Lausanne, but Dora says the definition of minorities
as only non-Muslims is quite narrow. The first draft of the Treaty
of Lausanne included Kurds, Laz, Circassians and other peoples of
Anatolia he says, but the Turks objected to minority status for other
Muslim groups.
“Minority is recognised differently in Turkey; it is not a positive
word,” he argues, citing the example of the Turkish Supreme Court of
Appeals definition of non-Muslims as “foreigners” in the 1970s.
According to Dora, the bureaucracy and government traditionally think
of Armenians, Greeks and Jews when the word minority is mentioned.
“The Assyrians did not really have awareness of their rights; they
didn’t have an ideal nor thought on claiming them.”
However, in the 1990s, Lausanne began to be a topic of discussion in
Turkey — driven largely by the EU process. That changed many things
for minorities, since they all shared the “oppressed” mentality and
“they started to feel more relaxed and like a member of this country,”
Dora says. “An evolution from the mandatory citizenship to volunteer
citizenship has started.”
“The structure of the state is unitary: one language, one state,
one nation and that was an assimilative policy. Therefore, it was
a ball and chain for the people’s freedoms. It is required that we
should say this openly and face the history and truths in order to
acquire change and reform,” Dora said. “None of us can be at ease
before the Kurdish problem is solved.”
From: Baghdasarian