FEAR PREVAILS AFTER PRIEST’S MURDER
By Annette Grossbongardt
Spiegel Online, Germany
April 12 2006
Christians are a vanishing minority in predominately Muslim Turkey.
The murder of a priest in February shows that the situation has become
precarious — both for Catholics and for Turkey’s EU bid.
Father Pierre Brunissen is deeply immersed in thought as he bumps along
in the night bus along the Black Sea coast from Samsun to Trabzon in
northern Turkey. There is, on this trip, little for the priest to be
happy about. He is hurrying to a Christian congregation in Trabzon —
a city of 250,000 Muslims — which boasts barely a dozen members. And
he is needed because the former priest in Trabzon, Father Andrea
Santoro, was murdered in his church.
PHOTO GALLERY: THE MURDERED PRIEST OF TRABZON
Click on a picture to launch the image gallery (7 Photos).
It’s a church which is now casting about for a caretaker. In the
vicarage, which gives off a distinct air of neglect, a small plastic
tree left over from Christmas gathers dust in the visiting room.
Because no one volunteered to replace the murdered priest, the
75-year-old Father Pierre was instructed to travel the 250 kilometers
by bus from Samsun to Trabzon once a month to look after things in
the city’s tiny congregation.
The Catholic Santa Maria Church was founded by Capuchin monks
150 years ago. Santoro had the church restored, and now colorful
ornaments and images of the saints once again grace the building’s
walls and ceilings. But in early February, Santoro was shot dead by
two gunshots while he was praying in the last pew of the church. The
first shot penetrated his lung and the second went straight to his
heart. In the dark wood of the pew, a splintered mark made by one
of the bullets can still be seen. On this day, Father Pierre will
celebrate the first mass in the church since Santoro’s murder, but
the church bells remain silent — there is nobody there to ring them.
DER SPIEGEL Trabzon is on the Black Sea coast in northeastern Turkey.
Christians are a tiny, tolerated minority in Turkey, a country which
is 99 percent Muslim, and the Catholic priest is wary of being too
conspicuous. He even advises the members of his congregation in
Samsun not to wear any visible symbols of their faith, such as a
cross dangling on the outside of a blouse or shirt.
“Murdered priests aren’t good for Trabzon”
“We have nothing against Christians,” says Volkan Canalioglu, the mayor
of Trabzon. “On the contrary, we respect other religions; after all,
Turkey is home to many cultures.” A giant Turkish flag hangs in his
office, and he is a member of the Republican People’s Party (Cumhuriyet
Halk Partisi or CHP) founded by Kemal Ataturk, which promotes the
secular legacy of the founder of the modern Turkish state. “You will
find no one in Trabzon who approves of this horrible deed.”
The vice president of the local soccer team, Trabzonspor, is also upset
about the incident. “We were playing a match in Ankara when the murder
happened. We won the match, but we couldn’t really enjoy our victory,”
says Hasim Sayitoglu. “Headlines about murdered priests aren’t good
for Trabzon or for us.” Sayitoglu grew up not far from the Santa
Maria Church, although he says he doesn’t know a single Christian.
Trabzon, an ancient trading city that now hopes to develop a
thriving local tourist industry, places little value on its Byzantine
heritage. There are many churches and monasteries dating from centuries
of Byzantine Christian rule, although most have since been converted
into mosques. During the great population exchange between Turkey and
Greece in 1923, almost 1.5 million Orthodox Christians were expelled
from Asia Minor and replaced by 356,000 Muslims from Greece. As a
result of the mass murder and expulsion of the Armenians in World
War I, the country had already lost almost a million Christians. The
result was an almost entirely Muslim state.
Turkey is still home to about 100,000 Christians. Their status is
one of the barometers being used to determine Turkey’s suitability
for European Union membership, making the murder of Father Santoro
especially inconvenient for the administration in Ankara, which is
rooted in Islam but is doing its utmost to portray Turkey as tolerant
and liberal-minded. “The gunshots were not just aimed at Santoro,
but also at the atmosphere of stability Turkey enjoys today,” says
Interior Minister Abdulkadir Aksu. Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul
describes the murder as an “isolated case.”
But isolated cases have been on the rise in Turkey.
Churches have few rights
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Recently a young man attacked a monk and a priest with a kebab knife
in a Catholic monastery in Mersin, a small city on the Mediterranean.
“We are no longer safe here,” says the Vicar Apostolic for Anatolia,
Luigi Padovese. “Until now, Mersin was one of our most peaceful
congregations.” Nowadays, the bishop never travels without bodyguards,
a precaution the interior ministry has practically forced him to
accept.
Shortly after the murder in Trabzon, nationalist youth attacked a
Catholic priest in Izmir. They grabbed him by the neck and shouted:
“We will kill you!” and “Allahu akbar! God is great!” The priest
barely made it to safety. After the incident, police officers were
routinely posted in front of the church in Izmir, a measure that had
already been taken in other cities.
Turkey’s Christian minorities had hoped that reforms introduced by
the administration of Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan — as part of
its effort to gain EU membership — would not just lead to a few
improvements, but to complete religious freedom. Although Christians
are permitted to practice their faith freely, in many cases their
churches have practically no rights and often have no claim to the
property they stand on.
When Bishop Padovese requested work permits for two church employees
in Trabzon, the interior ministry denied his request, arguing that
because a Catholic Church doesn’t exist in Turkey, it cannot file
requests. “That’s the paradox,” says Padovese, “We are here, but
legally we don’t exist.” It was not until recently that pastors, who
were previously registered as consular employees, have been allowed
to register as members of their own profession.
“The basic level of anti-Christian sentiment has increased,” says
Felix Korner, a German Jesuit whom the Vatican sent to Ankara to
encourage a Christian-Islamic dialogue. Turkey’s efforts to enter the
EU have triggered nationalist counter-reactions, says Korner. “Even
in educated circles, people are saying that Turkish unity and national
sovereignty are in danger.”
Risking physical attack
Conspiracy theories have likewise been making the rounds in Turkey
for some time, producing a climate in which Christians distributing
the New Testament risk being physically attacked. In a sermon against
missionaries it distributed last year, the state religious authority
rails against what it calls “modern crusades,” claiming that their
goal is to “turn our young people away from the Islamic faith.”
Priests have been accused of seducing women in their churches or
encouraging young people to engage in sinful acts. Father Pierre
has already won four court cases for libel against defendants
who had spread rumors that he routinely watches porno films with
young people. To protect himself, he now maintains the best possible
relations with the local Turkish hierarchy, routinely paying visits to
the chief of police, the governor and the mufti. “It helps,” he says.
Sixteen-year-old Oguz, Andrea Santoros’s suspected murderer, is
currently being held under high security at the Trabzon prison. Four
bodyguards have been assigned to the boy to prevent him from harming
himself or being silenced by others. He has refused to make any
statements.
Was Oguz truly trying to avenge the humiliation of Muslims who saw
the Danish cartoon controversy as an affront to their prophet, as
his family claims? Or was the murder the work of the Mafia, which
was incensed over the church’s practice of giving shelter to Russian
prostitutes? Or perhaps the boy, apparently a loner, was a willing
tool for nationalist extremists.
According to his family, Oguz, a high-school student, had recently
become “very religious.” “He prayed five times a day,” says his brother
Alpaznar. His father, who runs a dental laboratory in Trabzon, claims
that he first heard about the Muhammad cartoons from his son. “He
was very upset, but I told him that it was none of his concern.”
The father, pale and bald, is constantly jumping up from his chair,
nervously rubbing his hands. He doesn’t have a photo of his son,
holding up a newspaper clipping instead. “I feel bad for the boy,”
he says, sounding almost as if “the boy” weren’t his own child.
Closed for a month
Oguz apparently spent most of his time in an Internet cafe in a
small shopping center in downtown Trabzon. “He was especially fond of
strategy games,” says the owner, Senol Sahin, adding that the boy had
recently become very aggressive. “He would send me e-mails in which he
used vile language. I even hit him once for doing it.” Sahin believes
the boy is “easily influenced.”
On the morning of the murder, Oguz apparently came home and asked for
directions to the Santa Maria Church. Then, according to his father,
he left the house with his younger brother. The murderer must have
known his way around, because the churchyard one passes through to
reach the church lies in the middle of a group of buildings, and is
in full view of half a dozen apartments, many displaying the Turkish
flag in their windows.
The priest’s young Italian housekeeper, startled by the shots, claims
that she saw a silhouette, and that it was that of a man, not a boy.
The church remained closed for one month. Meanwhile, Bishop Padovese
has sent two lay assistants and a visiting Polish pastor to Trabzon,
so that the church can be kept open at least two or three times a
week for the few Christians who still live in Trabzon.
Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan