Erdogan to Introduce "democratization package"

[man]

In this news report today September 30 there is no mention of Armenians, of Armenian properties in Turkey, and Armenian minority rights

 

Erdogan said the so-called "democratization package" would also allow for education in languages other than Turkish at non-state schools, another long-held demand by Kurdish politicians.

Erdogan also said the state would return land belonging to Mor Gabriel, the world's oldest Syriac monastery in southeastern Turkey. Some 20,000 Syriac Christians live in Turkey, mostly in Istanbul, having fled their ancient homeland for economic and security reasons.

However, Erdogan did not float any plans that would allow a Greek Orthodox seminary to reopen on the Istanbul island of Heybeliada (Halki in Greek). Shut in 1971, the school is seen as key for the survival of the Church in Istanbul, where it has been based since the 4th Century, and the European Union and the United States have urged Erdogan to allow it to operate.

Erdogan further announced reforms to improve the rights of the Roma community but made no mention of the largest religious minority, the Alevis, who comprise 15-20 percent of the population and have been lobbying for enhanced rights for decades.

The new reforms are also being scrutinized by the European Union, with which Turkey entered into formal accession talks in 2005, negotiations that have since faded.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/09/30/us-turkey-reform-idUSBRE98T09D20130930

[onjig]

They are living on stolen land in stolen buildings eating stolen food. The names have been changed to disinherit the innocent. Every now and then there is: We will rebuild something of yours, for us, we will not be so obviously oppressive, look how clean our hands are, we are brand new. we are good and honest living and eating, doing well with what we have. We will change our spots, we have done nothing wrong in the past, we will be even nicer. We are Europeans, look at our alphabet, our clothes, our clean hands. Let us into Europe as one of you.

[gamavor]

I bet Hillary Clinton is again behind this (just like the last time). Democracy to "democratization" is like Canada to "canalization". Edited October 1, 2013 by gamavor

[man]

Armenians, too, get nothing — not even a promise of an impartial inquest into allegations of genocide against them in 1915

 

Erdogan taking Turkey back 1,000 years with ‘reforms’
By Amir Taheri
October 4, 2013
NY POST
http://nypost.com/2013/10/04/turkeys-erdogan-taking-turkey-back-1000-years-with-new-reforms/

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyib Erdogan this week unveiled his long-promised “reform package” to “chart the path of the nation” for the next 10 years — that is, through 2023, 100 years after the founding of Turkey as a republic.

Which is ironic, since Erdogan seems bent on abolishing that republic in all but name.

His plan to amend the Constitution to replace the long-tested parliamentary system with a presidential one (with himself as president and commander-in-chief) is only part of it. He’d also undo the key achievement of Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey.

In the 1920s, Ataturk created the Turkish nation from the debris of the Ottoman Empire. Ataturk and the military and intellectual elite around him replaced Islam as the chief bond between the land’s many ethnic communities with Turkish nationhood.

Over the past 90 years, this project has not had 100 percent success. Nevertheless, it managed to create a strong sense of bonding among a majority of the citizens.

Now Erdogan is out to undermine that in two ways.

First, his package encourages many Turks to redefine their identities as minorities. For example, he has discovered the Lezgin minority and promises to allow its members to school their children in “their own language.”

Almost 20 percent of Turkey’s population may be of Lezgin and other Caucasian origin (among them the Charkess, Karachai, Udmurt and Dagestanis). Yet almost all of those have long forgotten their origins and melted in the larger pot of Turkish identity. [What about the Armenians who converted to Islam and melted in the larger pot of Turkish identity?]. What is the point of encouraging the re-emergence of minority identities?

Meanwhile, Erdogan is offering little to minorities that have managed to retain their identity over the past nine decades. Chief among these are the Kurds, 15 percent of the population.

Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party, the AKP, partly owes its successive election victories to the Kurds. Without the Kurdish vote, AKP could not have collected more than 40 percent of the votes. Yet his package offers Kurds very little.

They would be allowed to use their language, but not to write it in their own alphabet. Nor could they use “w” and other letters that don’t exist in the Turkish-Latin alphabet but are frequent in Kurdish.

Kurdish leaders tell me that the package grants no more than 5 percent of what they had demanded in long negotiations with Erdogan.

Another real minority that gets little are the Alevites, who practice a moderate version of Islam and have acted as a chief support for secularism in Turkey. While Erdogan uses the resources of the state to support Sunni Islam, Alevites can’t even get building permits to construct their own places of prayer.

Armenians, too, get nothing — not even a promise of an impartial inquest into allegations of genocide against them in 1915.

The second leg of Erdogan’s strategy is to re-energize his Islamist base. Hundreds of associations controlled by the Muslim Brotherhood are to take over state-owned mosques, religious sites and endowment properties — thus offering AKP a vast power base across Turkey.

Indirectly, Erdogan is telling Turks to stop seeing themselves as citizens of a secular state and, instead, as minorities living in a state dominated by the Sunni Muslim majority. Call it neo-Ottomanism.

Erdogan is using “Manzikert” as a slogan to sell his package. Yet this refers to a battle between the Seljuk Sultan Alp Arsalan and the Byzantine Emperor Romanos in 1071, the first great victory of Muslim armies against Christians in Asia Minor. It happened centuries before the Ottoman Turks arrived in the region.

Invoking the battle as a victory of Islam against “the Infidel,” Erdogan supposedly has an eye on the battle’s thousandth anniversary. Does he mean to take Turkey back 1,000 years?

The Ottoman system divided the sultan’s subjects according to religious faith into dozens of “mullahs,” each allowed to enforce its own laws in personal and private domains while paying a poll tax.

It’s doubtful most Turks share Erdogan’s dream of recreating a mythical Islamic state with himself as caliph, albeit under the title of president. His effort to redefine Turkey’s republican and secular identity may wind up revitalizing it.

[man]

all of Turkey's Armenian, Syriac, Catholic and Protestant communities are prohibited from opening seminaries or Bible schools to train their clergy

 

Christian seminaries or Bible schools are not allowed in Turkey

4 October 2013

After decades of waiting, the high hopes of Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I and Turkey's tiny Greek Orthodox community for a green light to reopen the Halki Seminary were again shattered.

The Turkish state's forced closure of Halki Seminary since 1971 has prevented Eastern Orthodoxy's most prominent seminary from providing its clergymen with a theological education for more than 40 years. Founded in 1844 atop Heybeli Island near Istanbul, the Halki Seminary's status has been tied for decades to the principle of 'reciprocity' with Greece's handling of its ethnic Turkish minority.

"Certainly the minorities' issues could have been addressed more actively in the package," Vingas said to Bianet. "Unfortunately, the [Greek] theological school will remain shackled."

The government's refusal to open it, Today's Zaman columnist Orhan Kemal Cengiz wrote, leaves the Ecumenical Patriarchate which leads 300 million Orthodox worldwide "at the edge of total extinction".

In parallel, all of Turkey's Armenian, Syriac, Catholic and Protestant communities are prohibited from opening seminaries or Bible schools to train their clergy.

Seized monastery lands 'returned'

However, the nation's small Syriac Christian community welcomed the prime minister's announcement that state-confiscated land belonging to the Mor Gabriel monastery in southeastern Turkey would be returned to the church.

But Tuma Celik, owner and chief editor of the Syriac-language Sabro newspaper, objected to Erdogan's implication that any of the 1,700-year-old monastery's land had ever belonged to the Turkish government.

"The attitude of 'returning' Mor Gabriel, as if it was ever the property of the state, is wrong. Actually, this land belonged to the [syriac] foundation," Celik told Today's Zaman.

In a controversial Supreme Court of Appeals verdict last November, the government had wrested away legal control of 680 disputed acres of land around the monastery. After Ankara suffered heavy international criticism over the final ruling, Celik said, the decision to reverse it was drafted "with the concern of decreasing international pressure".

In terms of actual implementation, Deputy Prime Minister Bulent Arinc specified that a formal decision regarding Mor Gabriel would be issued by the Foundations Council "at the latest by the end of next week".

From article: "Promised Legal Reforms Disappoint Turkey's Religious Minorities"
http://www.aina.org/...31004162923.htm