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ABSTRACT
Turkey’s numerous issues with its main minority groups, Kurds, Alevis, Christians, and Jews, continue to disrupt its domestic peace and complicate its foreign relations. In building a nation the founders of the Republic and successive governments have sought to compel minority assimilation with harsh measures such as expulsion, deprivation of property, resettlement, and discrimination, while ignoring anti-minority violence. As a result, most Christians and Jews have emigrated, though Alevis and Kurds more actively continue to demand recognition and equality. To address these issues Turkey might look to other members of the Council of Europe for examples the Republic could adopt to balance minority rights with national loyalty.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to my Emmanuel College research assistants, Leah Batarseh, Jacob DeKlerk, Brooke Van Ackooy, and Peter Vannini and Harvard’s CMES students Reilly Barry and Giulia Benvenuto for their research help.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Prime Minister İsmet İnönü, talk to the Teacher’s Union, describing the Republic’s national education policies. Cited in Bali, Model Citizens, 6.
2 Butler and Al-Khalidi, “Turkey Vows.” There are no definitive numbers on deaths due to the Kurdish conflict.
3 Akgönül, The Minority Concept, 2.
4 Ibid., 71–2.
5 CIA, The World Factbook Turkey (Türkiye).
6 US Dept. of State, 2021 Report.
7 Rodrigue, “Territorial Autonomy,” 36–7.
8 Oran, “Exploring Turkishness,” 24. Turkey’s interpretation also excluded other Christian minorities such as Assyrians. See Kunnecke, “The Turkish Concept,” 81.
9 Oran, “Exploring Turkishness,” 30–31.
10 Ibid., 31.
11 Ülker, “Assimilation,” 1.
12 Ibid., 3.
13 Aslan, “Turkey to Remove,” 311–2.
14 Wilson, “Ritual and Rhyme.”
15 Öylek, “Turkey’s Alevis.”
16 Gall, “Erdogan’s Plan.”
17 DuvaR.english, “Alevi groups.”
18 Ertan, “Turkish Government Criticized.”
19 Ertan, “The Latent Politicization,” 939.
20 Soner and Toktaş, “Alevis and Alevism,” 423–6.
21 Karakaya-Stump, “The AKP,” 57.
22 Ibid., 58
23 Letsch, “Turkey: Syria Conflict.”
24 “ A man follows the religion of his friend; so each one should consider whom he makes his friend.” Sunan Abi Dawud 4833 https://sunnah.com/abudawud:4833
25 Hurriyet Daily News, “Gov’t Slams”
26 Eppel, A People Without a State, 113.
27 Akçam, A Shameful Act, 134, 174, 180–1.
28 McDowell, A Modern History, 126–30.
29 Ibid., 188.
30 Yeğen “‘Prospective-Turks’,” 599. Yeğen cites: Mustafa Kemal, Eskişehir-İzmit Konuşmaları (1923) [Eskisehir-Izmit Speeches (1923)] (Istanbul: Kaynak Yayınları, 1993), The full speech was not published until 1993.
31 McDowell, A Modern History, 191–8.
32 Yegen, “‘Prospective-Turks’,” 600–5.
33 Tezcür, “When Democratization Radicalizes.”
34 Savran, “The Peace Process,” 780–3.
35 Savran, Turkey and the Kurdish Peace Process, 131–2.
36 Srivastava and Guler, “Turkish Police Arrest.”
37 Hurriyet Daily News, “HDP Given 30 Days.”
38 Knights, “Turkey’s War.”
39 Szuba, “Pentagon: Iran-Backed Militias.”
40 See Kaliber, “Re-engaging, ” for the 1964 expulsion of Greeks.
41 Şahin and Kesik, “A Critical Review,” 10.
42 Bardakci et al., “The Ambivalent Situation,” 80–3.
43 See Sheklian, “Promises of Property,” 411–5.
44 Bardakci et al.,“The Ambivalent Situation,” 135–6.
45 Ibid. Bardakci and his co-authors break the post-Helsinki minority descuritization reforms into four periods covering such issues as the use of foreign languages, the Law on Foundations, and the replacement of the Sub-Commission on Minority Issue with the Council for the Evaluation of Minority Issues. These reforms were sometimes halting and left many of the demands of the minority communities unanswered.
46 Ibid., 155–9.
47 Bali, Model Citizen, 415–6.
48 Bali, Model Citizen, 16, and Giesel, “Status and Situation,” 66–7.
49 Bali, Model Citizen, 445–6.
50 See Bali, Antisemitism, 99–137.
51 Côrte-Real Pinto et al., “Choosing Second Citizenship,” 793.
52 France 24, “US Condemns.” President Erdoğan was using the anti-Semitic trope of the blood libel that originated in the Middle Ages. See ADL, “Blood Libel.”
53 Özerkan, “Turkey Denies Minority Deal.”
54 Baillie, “Protection,” 630–2.
55 See Anderson, “Overview,” who proposes six categories. The two categories omitted from the list in this paper consist of minorities satisfied with the status quo and central government repression that I combined with the autonomist factions.
56 Ibid., 6.
57 Carla and Constantin, “Territorial,” 154–82.
58 Spanish Constitution of 1978.
59 Ruiz Vieytez, “Territorial Autonomy,” 133–54.
60 See Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship.
61 See Fox, “Religious Discrimination.”
62 The author has no illusions that persuading the current AKP political leadership to do so will be easy given its “majoritarian drift” towards a “delegative democracy” identified by Özbudun, 163.
63 See Byman, “How Hateful Rhetoric.”
64 See Zaman, “Kurdish Diva Brokenhearted.”
65 Cited in Gunter, “Reopening,” 89
66 See Kuzu, Multiculturalism in Turkey, 3.
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Lenore G. Martin
Lenore G. Martin is Professor in the Department of Political Science and International Studies at Emmanuel College in Boston, and an Associate of both the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs and the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University. She co-chairs the Middle East Seminar at Harvard. She has written books and numerous articles analyzing national security in the Persian Gulf, the larger Middle East, and Turkey.