Not a country in which you'd want to live
Turkey likes to think of itself as an enlightened, westernized country, worthy of admission to the European Union. But according to the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom's annual report, Turkey is not such a country. Far from it (Hat Tip: Joshua I). However, the Turkish government‘s formal, longstanding efforts to control religion by imposing suffocating regulations and by denying full legal status to religious institutions results in serious religious freedom violations. The government has failed to take decisive action to correct the climate of impunity against religious minorities and to make the necessary institutional reforms to reverse these conditions. Instead, Turkey continues to intervene in the internal governance and education of religious communities and to confiscate places of worship. The alleged involvement of state and military officials in the Ergenekon conspiracy, which included alleged plans to assassinate minority religious leaders and to bomb mosques, is also of serious concern, as is the alleged use of preventive arrests to repress critics of the AK Party. Also concerning is the rise in anti-Semitism in Turkish society and media. Additionally, Turkey‘s military control over northern Cyprus supports a web of arbitrary regulations implemented by the local Turkish Cypriot authorities, which results in serious limitations on religious freedom.No wonder they support Syria, Hamas and Iran.
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In Turkey, the site of Constantinople, which was the center of Byzantine Christianity from the 4th to the 15th century, only some 90,000 Christians remain, less than 0.2 percent of the population. As this report makes clear, they are now being suffocated by a web of state regulations that cripple their ability to pass on the faith to the next generation, and make it difficult even to carry out worship services. Turkey also has about 23,000 Jews, 10,000 Baha‘is, 5,000 Yezidis, and 3,300 Jehovah‘s Witnesses.
Turkey has never held a transparent investigation into charges of genocide against its Armenian, Assyrian, and Greek populations in the early part of the 20th century and makes it a crime of ―insult‖ even to raise this issue. Armenian journalist Hrant Dink was convicted for such ―insult,‖and he was murdered in 2007; the murder trial continues to drag on, raising a legitimate concern that justice may be denied.
Labels: Turkey, Turkish anti-Semitism, Turkish religious persecution
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 9:49 AM
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