Christian Science Monitor (Boston, MA)
November 18, 2004, Thursday
Identity politics: Is a Christian or Kurd ‘a Turk’?
By Yigal Schleifer Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor
ISTANBUL
An advisory council report that calls on the country to broaden its
official definition of minorities and to embrace multiculturalism is
stirring a bitter public debate here about national identity.
It has become so heated, in fact, that when the head of the council
tried to present the document at a press conference Nov. 1, another
council member tore the notes out of his hands and publicly denounced
the report, forcing the event to be canceled.
Turkey’s prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and foreign minister,
Abdullah Gul, meanwhile, have distanced themselves from the report.
The document, which cites a lack of cultural rights and freedoms in
Turkey for minorities, comes on the heels of a recent European Union
progress report on Turkish political and human rights reforms which
detailed problems with the country’s treatment of Kurds and
non-Muslims.
The overwhelmingly Muslim country, meanwhile, is pinning its pro-West
dreams on an EU summit Dec. 17, when a final decision will be made on
its pending membership in the organization.
Some of the backlash to the advisory council’s work appears to be
fueled by a fear that further highlighting human rights shortcomings
in Turkey could jeopardize its EU bid.
But analysts here say the debate reflects something much deeper.
The struggle, they say, is between a Turkish national identity forged
in the crucible of World War I and its aftermath, and the growing
desire to create a more inclusive, multicultural society.
It is something akin, they say, to a second modernizing – and
sometimes difficult – transformation for the country.
“The search is for a democratic reconceptualization of what a Turk
is,” says Etyen Mahcupyan, a researcher on democratization at the
Turkish Economic and Social Studies Foundation (TESEV), an Istanbul
think tank. “We need to redefine what a Turk is based on citizenship,
not any single ethnic identity.”
Officially, the only minorities in Turkey are Jews, Greeks, and
Armenians, as spelled out by the 1923 Lausanne Treaty, which led to
the establishment of the Turkish Republic after the fall of the
Ottoman Empire.
But the board’s report says Turkey has fallen behind modern norms in
its understanding of minority communities.
It calls for Turkey to recognize groups such as non-Sunni Muslims,
Assyrian Christians, and cultural and linguistic minorities. It also
calls for constitutional changes to protect individual and minority
rights.
Elcin Macar, a political scientist at Istanbul’s Yildiz Technical
University, who specializes in the study of Turkey’s minorities, says
the report’s recommendations have tapped into long-held Turkish fears
that trace their roots to the waning days of the Ottoman Empire, when
European powers tried to carve up its territory through appeals to
the empire’s minority groups.
As the report puts it, there is a widespread “paranoia” in Turkey
that giving minorities equal rights will lead to the country’s
breakup.
“The Turkish republic still sees minorities as a tool of other
powers. This is a legacy that still lives in the mind of the Turkish
bureaucracy,” Mr. Macar says.
Indeed, the reaction by Turkey’s political elite to the report’s
suggestions was a dismissiveness verging on hostility. “The
definition of the concept of minority is clearly written in the
Lausanne Treaty. It won’t change,” Turkish President Ahmet Necdet
Sezer said in Ankara.
General Ilker Basbug, second chief of staff of Turkey’s powerful
military, was even more explicit. “The Turkish Republic is unitary
and it is wrong to create minorities in it. The Turkish Army cannot
approve such a thing,” he said.
Critics of the report, and even European diplomats in Turkey, point
out that many EU countries themselves struggle with the question of
pluralism. Sweden, for example, recognized the existence of
minorities in the country only three years ago. France still does not
recognize Breton as a minority language. Athens, meanwhile, is the
only EU capital without an official mosque.
But in many ways, the reforms put in place by Turkey’s EU process
have already started to create significant changes in terms of
minority cultural rights. For example, radio and television
broadcasts in Kurdish, once banned, are now allowed, along with those
in Bosnian, Arabic, and Circassian.
“I think groups are looking at the EU process as something that will
let them express their cultural rights more easily,” says Ingmar
Karlsson, Sweden’s consul general in Istanbul.
Dogan Bermek, one of the founders of the Cem Foundation, an
organization that advocates on behalf of Alevi Muslims, an offshoot
of Shiite Islam, says Turkey’s engagement with the EU has given his
group’s demands for equal treatment as Sunni Muslims more traction.
Although Alevis are estimated to represent some 20 percent of the
Turkish population, the government does not provide them with funds
to build prayer houses, as it does for Sunni mosques.
“What we have been asking for for the last 10 years, and now the
European Union is asking for it also, is for the country’s Religious
Affairs Department to be reorganized to reflect all the beliefs in
this country,” says Bermek.
“Any culture and any belief that exists in this country should be
accepted and should be supported to the best ability of the society,”
he adds.
That kind of multiculturalism may not be difficult to achieve, says
TESEV’s Mahcupyan. During 600 years of Ottoman rule, Turkey was one
of the most culturally diverse places on the planet, he notes.
“It’s not a question of going back, but remembering what was there
and recognizing … that it still exists today and also opening the
road to these cultures for their own politics,” Mahcupyan says.