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Pope Francis' visit to Turkey puts spotlight on region's Christians

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  • Pope Francis' visit to Turkey puts spotlight on region's Christians

    Los Angeles Times
    Nov 30 2014

    Pope Francis' visit to Turkey puts spotlight on region's Christians

    By Umar Farooq


    Dressed in a neatly pressed dark suit, Bedri Diril, 41, stood
    patiently Saturday among a crowd of hundreds in front of St. Esprit
    Cathedral in Istanbul awaiting the arrival of Pope Francis.

    "We Christians do have problems here, but they are not brought up in
    public much," Diril said, clutching a cherished invitation to Mass
    with the pontiff, one of only a few hundred such invites distributed
    among the city's dwindling Christian communities. "Me and some of my
    friends, we no longer wear crosses, or we put them inside our shirts,
    [to hide] being Christian," he said.

    Francis arrived in Istanbul on Saturday on the second day of his
    three-day visit to this overwhelmingly Muslim nation. His agenda
    included meetings with fellow clerics, both Muslim and Christian, and
    visits to the city's landmarks, including Sultan Ahmed (the Blue
    Mosque), and Hagia Sophia, the former Orthodox cathedral that was
    converted into a mosque and then into a museum, its status for most of
    the last century.

    In Ankara on Friday, the pope cast a spotlight on the flight of
    religious minorities from Iraq and Syria, where Christians and others
    face persecution by Sunni Muslim extremists.

    "Hundreds of thousands of persons have been forced to abandon their
    homes and countries in order to survive and remain faithful to their
    religious beliefs," the pope said.

    For many Christian Turks, the exodus reminds them of their own
    nation's legacy of intolerance for Christians, a history that Turkish
    society has still not entirely accepted.


    A century ago, Christians accounted for as much as 20% of the
    population of Turkey. Today, Christians and other non-Muslims make up
    less than 1% of all Turks.

    An Assyrian Christian turned Roman Catholic, Diril moved to Istanbul
    with his family 22 years ago, a time when violence between the Turkish
    military and Kurdish rebels made life difficult in their village in
    eastern Turkey. Nationalist Turks antagonistic to the Kurds were also
    hostile to Assyrians, Diril said.

    "Even though we were Turkish citizens, they called us foreigners," he said.

    Religious diversity was once much more a part of life in Turkey. A
    hundred years ago, in the waning days of the Ottoman Empire, Istanbul
    was home to large numbers of non-Muslims, including Greek and Armenian
    Christians and a sizable Jewish community. Today, about 120,000
    Christians remain in the entire country.

    Hundreds of thousands of Armenian Christians were deported in 1915-18,
    many violently, resulting in the deaths of as many as 1.5 million
    people, the first genocide of the 20th century. The Turkish
    government, successor to the Ottoman empire, rejects the term
    "genocide" and says the deaths of Armenians and others at the time
    were the result of war, displacement, disease and other factors.

    After World War I, hundreds of thousands of Greek Orthodox Christians
    were forced out as part of a population exchange that saw Muslim
    Greeks sent to Turkey. Additional expulsions of Greek Orthodox
    Christians followed.

    Decades later, many Christians say they still sense resentment.

    "They hate us, they want to finish us off," Simon Barsamian, a young
    Armenian said at the Armenian Patriarchal Church, one of only 34
    functioning Armenian churches in Turkey.

    The Armenian Patriarchate was established in 1461, eight years after
    Ottoman Turks overran Constantinople, now Istanbul.

    "We don't get much trouble from the Islamists," Barsamian said. "Our
    problems are usually from nationalists."

    In the last decade, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's Justice and
    Development Party, or AKP, which has Islamist roots, has made a series
    of conciliatory overtures. Universities have held conferences to
    discuss the Armenian deaths, the centenary of which will be marked
    next year throughout the Armenian diaspora community.

    The Turkish government has returned some property seized from
    minorities, introduced Christianity into theology classes in schools,
    and publicly acknowledged the events of 1915-18, while still denying a
    mass extermination of Armenians.


    "We don't know the AKP's real intentions," said Nejla Karabulut, one
    of a small number of Turkish Muslims hoping to catch a glimpse of the
    pope at St. Esprit Cathedral. "They use religion for politics."

    The reforms are inadequate, she says, attributing them to the ruling
    party's desire to build support among minorities against a secular,
    often nationalist, opposition.

    "There is still a very long way to go," said Karin Karakasli, a former
    editor of Agos, a prominent Armenian-Turkish newspaper, pointing out
    that Turkey's border with Armenia remains closed, and leading
    politicians still refer to Armenians as "traitors."

    In 2007, a Turkish nationalist gunned down the newspaper's editor,
    Hrant Dink, after he highlighted the fate of Turkey's Armenians. One
    person was convicted of the murder, but a wider investigation that
    appeared to implicate the military, police and politicians was
    abruptly halted.

    (In 1981, Mehmet Ali Agca, a member of a Turkish ultra-nationalist
    organization known as the Gray Wolves, shot and wounded Pope John Paul
    II in St. Peter's Square in Vatican City. The pontiff recuperated and
    later forgave Agca for the assassination attempt.)

    Karakasli says many Turks are moving on in regard to the Armenian
    issue, even if their government remains reticent about the
    catastrophic events.

    "Younger Turks have questioned the official history ... [for] more
    than a decade," she said. "There are alternative sources for research;
    talking about the issue is no longer a taboo."

    Farooq is a special correspondent. Times staff writer Patrick J.
    McDonnell in Beirut contributed to this report.


    http://www.latimes.com/world/europe/la-fg-pope-turkey-20141129-story.html

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