When thinking about the relatively short history of the Republic of Turkey since its inception in 1923, there are many groups who have been persecuted and oppressed by the state. Recently, such oppressed groups also include the influx of over three million Syrian refugees, with whom many Turks are not happy to live in close quarters in cities traditionally dominated by ethnic Turks. In this post, I will address three groups who are exploited in Turkey: Christians, Kurds, and Gülenists.
The Turkish state’s struggle with these three entities dates to the formation of its ethnic supremacist Turkish ideological core. The Turkish state oppresses these groups because they do not fit its ethnic and religiously charged definition of Turkish nationalism combined with Sunni Islam. In other words, one reason minorities in Turkey are oppressed is because they are not considered to be true Turks. Understanding the history of the synthesis of Turkish nationalism and Sunni Islam in Turkey gives insight into the history of Turkish state oppression of non-Muslim and non-Turkish minority groups.
The Turkish-Islamic Synthesis
Influenced by the ideas of the Turkish scholar Ziya Gökalp, Mustafa Kemal, the founding father of the Turkish Republic, wired Turkism into the fabric of the Turkish state. Through a state enforced process called “Turkification,” the new Republic was formed into a homogenous unit which “ignored minority rights” (Turnaoğlu, 2017, 438). Banu Turnaoğlu provides a shocking statement from the Turkish Prime Minister which illustrates Turkish mindset of superiority in the formation of the Republic: “Our immediate duty is to make all those who live in the Turkish fatherland Turks. We will cut and throw away those minorities who are opposing Turks and Turkism” (Turnaoğlu, 2017, 438). The preeminence of the Turk over all other ethnicities defined Turkey’s state agenda and it was forged alongside the religion of Islam.
Though many scholars rightly argue that Mustafa Kemal wanted the Turkish Republic to completely break from its Ottoman Islamic past, the reality is that Sunni Islam continued to play a role in what it meant to be a Turk. Carter Vaughn Findley points out, “The goal was not to separate religion from the state but to do something more radical, to subordinate religion to the state (Findley, 2005, 223).” While Islam was seen as backward and a detriment to the new Republic, the Kemalists tried to “Turkify Islam” by proposing reforms such as wearing shoes in mosques and through the promotion of a Turkish translation of the Qur’an (Shaw, 1977, 304).
Since 1980, Turkish society has been progressively re-Islamized through a political experiment called the Turkish-Islamic synthesis (Yavuz, 2005, 38). Many secular Turks consider themselves to be Muslims, whether they actually practice their faith or not. In short, to be Turkish is defined by the state and those who do not fit the mold are excluded.
The Oppression of Christians in Turkey
Recently, a tourist traveling to the ancient Christian city of Ephesus asked, “With such an abundance of Christian history in Turkey, why are there hardly any Christians left?” This is a complex question which cannot fully be answered here but there are at least two reasons: massacres and deportations.
The Armenian Genocide (1915-1917) is one of the shameful representations of how the Ottoman Turks massacred Christians. Before WWI, there were around two million Armenians in the Ottoman Empire but most were deported and hundreds of thousands were butchered during the course of the war. The Republic of Turkey and many Turkish scholars still do not acknowledge this genocide though Turkish President Erdoğan has called the Armenian massacres in 1915 “inhumane” (Kirşci, 2018, 135).
Many Greek Christians were forcibly deported from Turkey after the Turkish Republic came into being in 1923 through a mutual population exchange between Greece and Turkey. In this exchange, Greece gave Turkey their Muslims and Turkey gave Greece their Christians. Sarah Shields points out that when Greece invaded Anatolia, the “Turkish nationalist forces pushed back against armies invading from Greece, [and] they rounded up thousands of local Greek Orthodox Christians, forcing them from coastal areas and incarcerating them in labour camps. Hundreds of thousands of Greek Orthodox Ottoman subjects began flooding into Anatolian cities, homeless, destitute, and in many cases exhausted from fleeing oncoming nationalist troops” (Shields, 2016, 133). The Greek-Turkish exchange was based upon religion or as Shields claims, religion became the basis of one’s “racial identity” and the perceived strength of the new Turkish state was not based on ethnic diversity but a unified national Turkish-Muslim identity (Shields, 2016, 72).
In more recent history, persecution against Christians within Turkey is often not acknowledged as being religiously motivated. Kemal Kirişci points out that the Turkish government under the leadership of the AKP political party has prevented Armenian churches and monasteries from operating by claiming security or safety concerns (Kirişci, 2018, 136).
Citing just one of many human rights violations against Christians in 2017, The Association of Protestant Churches in Turkey reported that “on September 5, 2017, the Izmir Cigli Church…had its sign removed, was sealed and closed by the Izmir Cigli Municipality in response to negative press coverage concerning the church as well as the word “church” being written on its sign” (www.protestankiliseler.org).
On November 19, 2019, a Korean Christian pastor named Jinwook Kim was stabbed to death in the city of Diyarbakir. Local Turkish authorities claim it was a robbery, but the church believes it was religiously motivated (www.hristiyanhaber.net). These historical and recent persecutions demonstrate that Christians are not Muslim, and non-Muslims are not true Turks; therefore, the Turkish state believes it is okay to subjugate minority Christian communities.
The Oppression of Kurds in Turkey
After a visit to a Kurdish restaurant in Nashville, Tennessee, USA, two Kurds expressed to me their desire to see a Kurdish state formed. After looking around to see who else heard these men’s comment, and after seeing the cameras around the restaurant, I declined to speak to this topic.
Having lived in a predominantly Kurdish area in Turkey in the Southeast region, and through my interaction with Kurds over the last several years, I have heard story after story of atrocities committed against the Kurdish people by the Turkish government. Several Kurdish families in Turkey told me how their family members were dragged out into the street and publicly beaten by the Turkish military. Through the Turkish Republic’s war with the Kurdish nationalistic terrorist group, the PKK, whole Kurdish villages have been eradicated, displacing thousands of Kurdish families leaving Kurds “traumatized by military repression” (Bozarslan, 2008, 351).
Over the last ninety-six years of the Turkish Republic, Turkish-Kurdish relations have been strained because of Turkey’s narrow definition of Turkish nationalism which promotes its ethnic superiority over the Kurds. Such racism has led the government to either not acknowledge the Kurds even exist as a separate ethnicity or to suppress public expressions of Kurdishness and Kurdish nationalism (Bozarslan, 2008, 333). Until 2009, Kurds have not been allowed to publicly speak their own language, normally Kurmanji, without fear of being arrested (Zürcher, 2016, 173). Many Kurdish villages were given Turkish names and recently, democratically elected Kurdish mayors have been forcefully removed by the AKP (Zürcher, 2016, 134). Since Kurds are not ethnically or linguistically Turkish, they will continue to be oppressed by the Turkish government.
The Oppression of the Gülenists in Turkey
On July 15, 2016, a darbe girişimi (coup attempt) was carried out in Turkey which killed hundreds of people, including many civilians. The Turkish president immediately blamed the failed coup on his former friend turned enemy, Fethullah Gülen. The millions of followers who look to Fethullah Gülen as their Islamic spiritual leader comprise the Gülen movement (GM).
The GM is the largest subgroup of the Nur movement and is based upon the teachings of Bediüzzaman Said Nursi, particularly his magnum opus, the Risale-i Nur. The Gülenists draw similarities and even hope for their future from the Risale-i Nur, remembering that Nursi also suffered ‘unjustly’ at the hands of the Republican Peoples’ Party in the first half of the twentieth century.
While the US still does not recognize the Turkish government’s claim of Gülen’s role in the coup attempt, the AKP seems certain of it; so certain that following the coup attempt in 2016, the AKP began a global cadı avı (witch hunt) which has led to the arrests of thousands of GM members and closures of GM institutions across the world.
Such a rivalry is interesting considering Erdoğan and Gülen worked together in both the controversial 2008 Ergenekon and 2010 Sledgehammer trials (Taş, 2018, 5), which prosecuted hundreds of suspects accused of fomenting subversive plots against the Turkish government. The struggle between the AKP and the GM is not secular state verses Islamic movement, but a significantly pro-Islamist state administration verses Islamic movement.
The Gülen movement is now using their situation under the AKP’s watchful and vengeful eye to highlight the AKP’s human rights violations across the globe against its members. The GM has officially been labeled a terrorist organization called FETÖ, and thus, all its members are not truly Turkish citizens, but terrorists, according to the AKP. With such an inhumane label, the AKP has justified the imprisonment of many Gülenists since 2016 and has even utilized torture (Kirişci, 2018, 132.) From the perspective of the GM, such ‘persecution’, which has driven many Gülenists from their Turkish homeland and forced them into refugee status across the world, has been too painful to even put in words.
Conclusion
The current dominant political party in Turkey, the AKP, has carried on the Republic’s ideological core by oppressing groups who do not fit its definition of Turkish nationalism that is combined with Sunni Islam. Dwelling within the borders of Turkey does not make one a Turk but only those who are Turkish ethnically, linguistically, religiously and legally. The good news is that the Turkish state has been known to partially reconcile with and to provide concessions to some of these groups, so it is possible for the state to stop its systematic persecution of Christians, Kurds, and the Gülenists.
Unfortunately, Christians, Kurds, nor ethnic Turks turned terrorists fit the definition of ‘Turk’ and will continue to be subjugated by the state’s narrow characterization of a Turkish citizen. Until the meaning of ‘Turkish’ is redefined and infused with new meaning that incorporates all ethnicities, religious positions, and even political rivals which are represented across the Republic, these groups and other minorities will suffer under the hands of the state.
Further Reading
Bozarslan, Hamit. “Kurds and the Turkish State.” In The Cambridge History of Turkey: Volume 4; Turkey in the Modern World, 2008, 333-356.
Findley, Carter. The Turks in World History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Kirişci, Kemal. Turkey and the West: Fault Lines in a Troubled Alliance. Washington, D.C: Brookings Institution Press, 2017.
Shaw, Stanford J. History Ottoman Empire & Turkey V2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977.
Shields, Sarah. “Forced Migration as Nation-Building: The League of Nations, Minority Protection, and the Greek-Turkish Population Exchange.”In the Journal of the History of International Law 18, 2016, 120-145.
Taş, Hakkı. “The 15 July abortive coup and post-truth politics in Turkey.” In Southeast European and Black Sea Studies, 18:1, 2018, 1-19.
Turnaoğlu, Banu. The Formation of Turkish Republicanism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017.
Yavuz, M. Hakan. Islamic Political Identity in Turkey. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Zürcher, Erik J. Turkey: A Modern History. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017.
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