ICC Note:

“[Prime Minister Recep Tayyip] Erdoğan and his AK Party have faced an uphill battle to deepen Turkey’s democratic institutions and culture.  Their moves to bolster civilian rule have positive implications for respecting international human rights norms, including religious freedom,” The Hill’s Congress blog reports.

By Elizabeth H. Prodromou and Nina Shea

8/26/11 Turkey (The Hill) – The recent resignation of Turkey’s military high command, along with reports that Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan will subordinate the military to civilian rule, could mark a new era for that nation.  Sweeping constitutional changes, however, are still needed to ensure fundamental rights and avoid exchanging one form of repression for another.  The United States should challenge Turkey’s civilian leadership to make such long-overdue changes, especially regarding religious freedom, including for religious minorities.

While Turkey has long been a formal democracy, it has been a decidedly imperfect one.  Since Kemal Ataturk founded the Republic of Turkey in 1923, his rigid state secularism has stifled religious freedom.  Restrictions have hindered the majority Sunni Muslim community and have discriminated against and threatened religious minority communities, including Greek, Armenian, and Syriac Orthodox Churches; Catholic and Protestant Churches; the Jewish community; and the Alevis.

Constitutionally, the military was the protector of the secular state apparatus that engaged in or tolerated religious freedom violations.  Indeed, the context for the recent military resignations was Erdoğan’s refusal to promote officers who allegedly plotted within Ergenekon, a clandestine ultranationalist group, to topple his Islamic-oriented government and commit violence against numerous faith communities and their houses of worship.

As the inheritor of this legacy, Erdoğan and his AK Party have faced an uphill battle to deepen Turkey’s democratic institutions and culture.  Their moves to bolster civilian rule have positive implications for respecting international human rights norms, including religious freedom.

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When it comes to religious minorities, however, Turkey’s record remains disappointing. 

To be sure, the AKP government has ushered in some improvements, including the addition of worship services allowed for a particular church, citizenship for the leaders of another, accurate national identity cards for converts, and continued engagement with Alevis. Yet, Turkey’s widely publicized constitutional reform process currently omits any attention to religious freedom, thereby suggesting no systematic relief for Turkey’s smallest minorities, such as Christians and Jews.

Turkey’s Christian minority has dwindled to just 0.15 percent of the country.  In the words of one church leader, it is an “endangered species.”  In past centuries, violence exacted a horrific toll on Turkey’s Christians and their churches.  This provides a frightening context and familiar continuity to a number of recent high-profile murders by ultranationalists. 

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Religious communities are being strangled by legal restrictions on internal governance, education, houses of worship and wider property rights. It is difficult even to have a frank national discussion about their plight; those who have tried can face constitutional charges for insulting “Turkishness”, as well as a broader climate of impunity.

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Another is the government’s refusal to allow non-Muslim clergy to be trained in Turkey.  The military’s shuttering in 1971 of the Greek Orthodox Theological School of Halki, once the educational center for global Orthodox Christianity, is a case in point.   Successive governments’ policies have put at risk the very survival of the Ecumenical Patriarchate and its Greek Orthodox flock.

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