Turkish Daily News , Turkey
April 21 2007
Massacre stuns land of the apricot
Saturday, April 21, 2007
TAYLAN BÝLGÝC
MALATYA – Turkish Daily News
The mourning starts on the way to Malatya, the scene of the horrific
slaying of three Christians on Wednesday. Alternatively, you can
describe this eastern city, surpassing 400,000 in population, as
"the first city of the west for east Anatolians, and the first
city of east Anatolia for the West." Historically belonging to the
Upper Mesopotamia, Malatya has been a mosaic of different cultures,
ethnicities and religions for centuries. Its people are kind,
hospitable and warm. But the massacre stands there, its wounds still
bleeding. How did it come to this? In the words of Rakel Dink, the
wife of the late Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink, how did
these lands turn children into killers? Thinking of an answer that
makes sense a day after the killings, I wait at a crowded lounge
of the Istanbul Ataturk Airport for the gates to open. A sob,
and then crying. Seven adults and a child, forming a circle, are
praying for their loved ones. Here are those "heinous" Protestant
missionaries, who, according to some, are intent on converting Turkey
to Christianity, or dividing it. I offer my condolences. "We are,
at most, 4,000 people, most of them children," says Fikret Bocek,
the pastor of the Izmir Protestant Church. "How can we threaten the
state or the country?" Last year, one of their churches in Odemiþ,
Ýzmir, was bombed by Molotov cocktails, he says. "After the bombing
they took our people into custody and closed down the church."
Prison mates:
Ercan Þengul – the Izmir representative of the Zirve Publishing House,
the target of the assailants – talks of his days in prison. He is
very close to Necati Aydýn, 35, one of the victims. In fact, they were
put in jail together after the gendarmerie arrested them on March 1,
2000, on grounds that they defamed Islam. In a crowded cell, together
with 32 other detainees, they had to sleep on makeshift beds on a
concrete floor. Three villagers gave false testimonies against them,
Þengul claims. "First the accusation was defaming religion.
Then they said we "forcibly" sold Bibles. After that, the charge was
dropped and we were set free." Þengul and Aydýn had applied to the
European Court of Human Rights against the authorities, but Aydýn
did not live long enough to see the result, expected to be announced
over the next few months. "I am myself a Turk, but I have never seen
such racism and discrimination in any country," says Pastor Bocek. He
complains of an article, published in one of the conservative dailies,
that the three victims "were carrying fake IDs." Suddenly, a young man
joins the conversation. "Why doesn’t it make headlines when hundreds
of Muslims in Iraq are killed every day?" he asks, not bothering to
even offer a half-hearted condolence. The pastor stays silent. This
argument on Iraq is one that I will hear a lot in Malatya.
Conspiracy theories:
Malatya Erhac Airport, a military airport that is also open to civilian
flights, welcomes us with a poster celebrating the 162th anniversary
of the Turkish Police Forces. "Our Duty Is Your Safety," says the
poster. Must be quite ironic for those who died. I help an elderly
local carry her luggage and she offers me a ride to the city with her
relatives waiting outside. Leaving the mourners, I join them. The
frost last week has ruined nearly half of the apricot product, the
pride of Malatya, complains Mustafa Gezek, on the way to the city
center. Gezek, 38, is an apricot trader. He is of Kurdish origin,
but also a Turkish nationalist.
A gray wolf, to be precise, one of the ex-members of the
ultranationalist organization in Malatya, which also bred Mehmet Ali
Aðca and Oral Celik, the purported assassins of journalist Abdi Ýpekci,
killed Feb. 1, 1979. The world knows Aðca as the man who tried to
kill Pope Jean Paul II on May 13, 1981. Gezek, named "Misto the Kurd"
by his friends, condemns the murders. I inform him about the upcoming
demonstration of various leftist groups against the crime. His voice
rises. "Those who make the kids kill people and those who tell those
leftists to demonstrate against it are the same," he claims. Onur
Keklik, a student in his 20s, also condemns the killings, but then
offers the "Iraqi argument." As a political leader, he likes Devlet
Bahceli, the leader of the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP). "Are
you also a Kurd?" I ask. "No. But my father is," he answers, somehow
refusing the bloodline. He says there are two types of Kurds: those
who say they are Kurdish "because they support the PKK" and those
who say so "just because they speak the language." As I wait at the
city center for my colleague Bulent Kutluturk, who has come to be
the owner of a local newspaper, Yenigun (The New Day) years after
he left Istanbul for his beloved Malatya, I spoke to Aytac Bozkurt,
a supermarket worker. "We had no problems whatsoever with Christians,"
he says. "Some claim it is the state that did this. I can’t understand
what is going on in this city. What do you say?"
An unheeded warning:
Kutluturk is proud that he did his job as a journalist: his newspaper
had warned the authorities back in February 2005 that the Zirve
Publishing House was under threat. Thursday’s issue of Yenigun is a
reminder of that old story to its readers. Joining forces, we go to
the house of the bereaved family of Necati Aydýn. It is located in
the "Alevi section" of the city, perhaps in an attempt to act freely
under the tolerance of the Alevi sect. The same can be said of the
publishing house, as Zirve is sandwiched between the Cem Vakfý,
an Alevi foundation, and the Chamber of Mechanical Engineers, an
organization known for its democratic political stance, at the Aðbaba
office building. Malatya is loosely divided among sectarian lines,
with the south mainly Alevi and the north mainly Sunni. Alevis are
also concentrated at the west and Sunnis in the east. Still, it is
not that simple. The Cavuþoðlu district, which was home to around
10,000 Armenians back in the ’60s, is in the northwest. Hrant Dink was
also raised here, and last year, when he came to attend the Arguvan
Folk Songs Festival, took interest in re-opening the Armenian Church
there. Now only a handful of Armenian families live in the city.
Escaping death:
Protestants from all over the country are in Aydýn’s house, grieving
and trying to decide what to do. Gokhan Talas, who discovered that
the murderers were inside the publication house on Wednesday, and his
wife, Ozge, are also there. So is Ihsan Ozbek, the chief pastor of
the "Salvation Church," the man who appears frequently on television
nowadays. Talas escaped certain death because he did not do what Uður
Yuksel, 32, did. The assailants, entering the small apartment, had tied
up Tillman Geske, 46, and Necati Aydýn on that bloody morning. Then
Yuksel went to the place and when the door was not opened, tried to
get inside as opposed to going to the police. The murderers then took
him in at knifepoint.
Talas did the same sometime after Yuksel, but when there was no
reply from inside, phoned him. When Yuksel, with a trembling voice,
said they were meeting at the Altýn Kayýsý (Golden Apricot) Hotel,
he immediately called the police. But it was too late. "Everything
happened in, like, an hour and a half," he said. Ercan Þengul points
to the political climate that resulted in the murders. "Starting from
the beginning of the 2000s, Malatya was singled out," he says.
"They claimed we brought 90,000 Bibles to the city. That was
actually the figure for all Turkey and all Malatya got out of that
was three-four parcels." The killers are being used by some other
forces, as every sign shows this was a planned murder, he adds. They,
like everyone I spoke to in the city, also say their community had no
problems whatsoever with the local Muslim population, and treated each
other with respect. Everybody has the right to speak their thoughts
and express their beliefs, says Fevzi Dua, 33, a taxi driver. "The
Christians never disturbed us," he adds. His colleague, Ayhan Kayýþ,
agrees wholeheartedly. But the new generation seems to walk on another
path. Students, aged 13 or 14, have said the victims "deserved more,"
and that they "should have been ripped apart," in classrooms, says
Ali Karataþ, 33, a teacher. "They justify the massacre by saying that
the murderers did it for the nation and for Islam," he adds.
A different perspective:
Hasan Kýrteke, 56, offers a perspective. He notes that in the ’60s,
Malatya was a place where the socialist Turkish Workers’ Party (TÝP)
succeeded in sending a politician to Parliament and its votes were
just short of sending a second one. Those were the days of the great
peasant demonstrations. "The state launched a systematic campaign
to disperse this democratic climate," claims Kýrteke, who spent 16
years in jail for his political activities. "Starting from the ’70s,
Alevis and Sunnis were pitted against each other. After the Sept. 12,
1980 military coup, the city was indoctrinated with religious bigotry
by the generals." A wave of migration started during the same years,
from villages to the city center, he adds, and those who came were
indoctrinated by the ultranationalists and Islamists. "The state
has been working on this for 30 years," Kýrteke concludes. "Here is
the result."
Malatya ‘singled out’:
We leave for the demonstration of various democratic parties and
organizations, led by the local chapter of the Human Rights Association
(ÝHD). The crowd, not more than 300, shouting slogans such as "The
people of Malatya are not killers" and "Long live the brotherhood of
peoples," starts from the ÝHD building and marches toward the crime
scene. People around watch them in silence. After the Jan. 19 murder
of Hrant Dink, thousands of people marched here.
"In Hrant’s case, his political thoughts were the determinant," says
Þenel Karataþ, the President of ÝHD Malatya, offering an explanation
for the discrepancy. "Here the issue is religious identity. Thus
there is some sort of an abstention today." "It is as if they have
singled out a city in each region," she adds. "Trabzon, Malatya and
who knows where else tomorrow. This massacre is the fruit of the seeds
of nationalism. But it is not inherent in the people of Malatya. It
was imposed from the top. We are experiencing the dire reflections
of the general political climate in Turkey." Tillman Geske’s wife,
Susanne, demanded from the governor that her husband be buried
here. As the governor told her that this is not possible as there
is no Christian cemetery here, she turned to the ÝHD. Karataþ has
received her application for help on Thursday evening, and says they
will do their best. As I write this, Geske’s body was being taken to
the Kiltepe Armenian Cemetery for burial.
Cover-up on the way?:
The Golden Apricot, where Protestants are going to meet, is our
next stop. We manage to squeeze into their meeting at a time when
Pastor Behnan Konutgan from Istanbul is making a speech on the
"success" of their evangelic action. He talks of the Protestant
conversion activities in northern Iraq and Iran, and for the first
time, I get a glimpse of what may be disturbing and provocative for
the Muslims in these lands. Then, they pray for the souls of their
"three martyrs." After the meeting everyone starts watching the news
from the giant screen at the hall. The attackers, under custody, have
claimed that Emre GunAydýn, their supposed leader, slit the throats
of the three. He is also the man who tried to escape by jumping
from the third floor and is now in critical condition. Interesting
coincidence: Dink’s murderer, under the age of 18, will probably
get away with a few years in prison, while the "declared murderer"
of the three Protestants is now struggling at a hospital. The air
seems ripe for another cover-up of those hands that pull the strings,
which might well lead to more of the same…
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