Two churches in cities in eastern Turkey infamous as the sites of
historic killings of Christians were vandalised during the attempted
coup on 15 July, reports Middle East Concern.
One of the attacks took place in the city of Malatya, where three
Christians were tortured and killed in 2007, leading to a still-ongoing
court case against the five suspects. Turkish Christians had hoped for a
final verdict last month, but the trial was instead adjourned until September.
During the night of 15 July, unidentified assailants broke the glass
panels in the door of the Malatya Protestant Church. The pastor, Tim
Stone, said he thought someone with a grudge against the church had
taken advantage of the general unrest.
Meanwhile, in Trabzon, on the northern coast, around 10 people smashed
the windows of the Santa Maria Catholic Church, where in 2006 a priest,
Fr. Andrea Santoro, was murdered. The attackers tried to break into the
church, but a group of Muslim neighbours drove them away, before
contacting a priest.
During the lengthy trial for the Malatya murders, which has seen over
100 hearings, the prosecution cited evidence that the murders were
linked to the assassinations of Fr. Santoro, who was killed while
kneeling at the altar of his church, and an Armenian journalist, Hrant
Dink, killed in January 2007 in Istanbul.
Three suspects accused of helping to orchestrate the brutal Malatya murders had in October 2014 blamed their crime on the Hizmet movement,
the influential Islamic group led by Muslim scholar Fetullah Gulen,
accused of masterminding the failed coup by President Recep Tayyip
Erdo?an.
Testimony from two former military officers and an Islamic university
researcher claimed then that the Hizmet movement had been behind the
savage torture and stabbing to death of the two Turkish converts to
Christianity and a German missionary in Malatya in April 2007.
The three defendants had declared that the socio-religious group, which
had once been a strong ally of the ruling Justice and Development Party
(AKP), had planned the murder plot to discredit the Turkish military
and overthrow the government.
However, lawyers representing the Malatya victims’ families dismissed
these defendants’ “parallel-structure” accusations at the time as
political manipulation, in an attempt to deflect concrete evidence
pointing at military and ultra-nationalist involvement in the murders.
(Links were cited to the JITEM and TUSHAD units, allegedly formed
illegally within various Turkish military forces to create
disinformation and eliminate enemies of the state.)
In effect, the lawyers said in October 2014, the three suspects had
been exploiting the government’s “witch-hunt” against the Hizmet
movement in order to try to get themselves acquitted.
The latest attacks on churches are a painful reminder to Turkey’s
Christians of their vulnerability, particularly during periods of
unrest.
A group of Christian and Jewish religious leaders in Turkey issued a
joint declaration condemning the coup and calling for love, peace and
justice. The Association of Turkish Protestant Churches also issued a
press statement condemning the coup, asking for wisdom and understanding
for the country’s leaders and praying for peace.
After the attempted coup, Radio Shema, an Ankara-based Christian radio
station, sent a press release, reporting that the “fatihah” (Muslim
prayer for the dead) was “continuously broadcast from the mosques … The
news showed the civilians in downtown Ankara chanting ‘Allahu akbar’
(God is greater), the Islamic battle cry … Huge crowds gathered at
110,000 mosques around the country on Sunday at noon to remember those
who died in the attempted coup, who were ‘martyrs’; soldiers, police and
innocent victims who fought to prevent [the] coup.”
But now, the station reported that life “looks normal”, although “the
overall general feeling of Turks is anger; anger towards different
targets or personalities about the current situation, all that happened …
Now more than ever there needs to be a Christian presence here in this
country. It may come with some repercussion, but we must faithfully
declare God’s truths to the people here without belittling anyone.
People are even more ready to seek out a new belief system and
definitely need a new source of hope.”
Estimates provided in the 2013 International Religious Freedom Report
suggest that Christians account for approximately 0.2% of the total
Turkish population of about 75 million. The largest Christian minority
group in Turkey is the Armenian Orthodox. It is estimated that there are
90,000 Armenians, 25,000 Roman Catholics, 20,000 Syrian Orthodox,
15,000 Russian Orthodox, 3,000 Iraqi Chaldeans, 2,500 Greek Orthodox and
around 7,000 Protestants residing in Turkey.
Background
Necati Aydin, Ugur Yuksel and Tilmann Geske were murdered on 18 April,
2007 at the Zirve Christian publishing house in Malatya. Five men, aged
19 and 20 at the time, were arrested at the scene and charged with the
murders. Their trial became increasingly complicated as a result of
efforts to identify those behind the perpetrators and to link the trial
to political events in Turkey. The reassignment of judges, prosecutors
and other court officials also resulted in significant delays. On 10
March, 2014, the five perpetrators were released from prison and put under house arrest with electronic tags. However, they have been seen moving around freely.
Relatives of the victims expressed their disappointment in the Turkish
justice system. In an interview with journalists, Geske's widow Susanne,
present with her three children at what she hoped would be the last
hearing on June 30th, said: “Nine years have now passed and I haven't
seen anything. A lot of things have changed. I now only have confidence
in God's justice. I will be surprised if a fair decision will be given.”
The mother of Yuksel, Hatice, also present, said that she was very
tired of coming and going over the last nine years: “I lost my child. On
this holy day at least won't they [the defendants] speak the truth? How
is it that the murderers remain free?”
Other recent incidents
Diyarbakir
In April, in Diyarbakir, 250km further east of Malatya, the Turkish government expropriated the city’s handful of Christian congregations, including all its Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant churches, apparently to rebuild and restore the city’s historical centre.
The decision effectively made the Diyarbakir churches – one 1,700 years
old, another built only in 2003 – state property of Turkey.
Turkey’s southeast is heavily populated by Kurds – an ethnic Muslim
group also extending across Turkey’s borders into Iran, Syria and Iraq,
where Kurdish militias are prominent in all the regional fighting.
Fierce fighting, centring heavily on Diyarbakir, has escalated since the
end of a two-year ceasefire between the Turkish armed forces and the
militants of the Kurdish Workers’ Party (the PKK) in June 2015.
Last autumn, the PKK youth declared self-rule over large parts of the
Diyarbakir district of Sur, digging trenches and building barricades to
keep authorities out. Blanket curfews left the populace under siege for
weeks at a time, causing more than 30,000 to flee the city.
Then in late March, the government announced the “urgent expropriation”
of 6,300 plots of land in the Sur district. Six churches are now under
state control: the Virgin Mary Syriac Orthodox Church, the Surp
(Armenian for “Saint”) Sarkis Chaldean Catholic Church, the Diyarbakir
Protestant Church, the Apostolic Armenian Surp Giragos Church, an
Armenian Catholic church, and the Mar Petyun Chaldean Catholic Church.
Bursa
In February, the local government of the north-western Turkish city of Bursa ordered that its only church, which serves four congregations, be vacated, before rescinding the order.
Ismail Kulakcioglu, the pastor of the Protestant congregation, said
they were given less than a week to vacate the building. Approximately
200 Christians share the church for their Sunday worship services.
The Directorate General of Foundations originally gave oral notice to
church leaders on 18 Feb. that they had only five days to leave. It
eventually extended the deadline by three days, before removing the
order to vacate altogether on 23 Feb.
Nationwide
In January, the Association of Protestant Churches released a report, detailing repeated threats and attacks against Protestant churches and their leaders.
In an interview with Al-Monitor,
Pastor Ihsan Ozbek said Christians remain “anxious and distressed”,
naming two major obstacles to his community’s quest for true religious
freedom: the Turkish judiciary’s failure to respond to their members’
security concerns, and the government’s exclusion of Protestants from
the state’s protocol dialogue with other religious minorities.
The report referenced graffiti scrawled on a church in Balikesir and an
assailant insulting and striking the leader of the Batikent Bereket
Church in Ankara. Another attacker shot at the Torbali Baptist Church
pastor in Izmir with a hunting rifle, as he worked in the fields at his
family farm. Two weeks earlier, the Friday sermon from the nearby
village mosque had broadcast hate speech from its loudspeakers, well
within the pastor’s hearing.
During August 2015, a campaign of vicious threats
targeted 20 church leaders from 15 Protestant congregations, who
received a barrage of text messages, Facebook postings and emails.
Although these death threats were phrased in strident Islamic State (IS)
terminology and reported to the police, none of the pastors were given
protection. Soon afterwards, two would-be IS suicide bombers were
arrested in Ankara, caught on security-camera footage, as they conducted
surveillance of churches in the capital.
Courtesy: World Watch Monitor
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