<div dir="ltr"><h1>In eastern Turkey, a rare renaissance for Middle East Christians</h1>
<h2>
<p>Ethnic cleansing and forced migration drove Assyrian Christians out
of eastern Turkey decades ago, but Prime Minister Erdogan's policies
have drawn a number of them home.</p></h2>
<p>
By
<span>Alexander Christie-Miller</span>, <span>Correspondent</span> /
October 30, 2013
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<p title="Photo Caption">Turkish
Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan addresses the media in Ankara September
30, 2013. Erdogan announced plans to return monastery property belonging
to Syria Christians that was seized by the state.</p>
<p title="Photo Credit">Umit Bektas/Reuters/File</p>
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<p>
Kafro, Turkey</p>
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<p>Outside the window of Israil Demir’s home, the arid plains of Midyat are shrouded in the dense ochre fog of a sandstorm.</p>
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<a href="http://www.csmonitor.com/var/ezflow_site/storage/images/media/content/graphics/2013/1007-weekly/ochristian-map-g1/17328631-1-eng-US/OCHRISTIAN-map-g1_full_600.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://www.csmonitor.com/var/ezflow_site/storage/images/media/content/graphics/2013/1007-weekly/ochristian-map-g1/17328631-1-eng-US/OCHRISTIAN-map-g1_thumbnail_90.jpg" alt="The Middle East's beleaguered Christians" title="The Middle East's beleaguered Christians" height="118" width="90"></a>
<p>
<span>Graphic</span> <a href="http://www.csmonitor.com/var/ezflow_site/storage/images/media/content/graphics/2013/1007-weekly/ochristian-map-g1/17328631-1-eng-US/OCHRISTIAN-map-g1_full_600.jpg" target="_blank">The Middle East's beleaguered Christians</a>
<br>(Rich Clabaugh/Staff) </p>
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<a name="1420ef7a7ed8a8bd_nextParagraph"></a>
<p>“A lot of people think we’re crazy for coming back here,” says Mr.
Demir of Kafro, a village of 17 Assyrian Christian families who have
left comfortable lives in Europe to move back to their historic homeland
in southeastern Turkey.</p><p>Lured by Turkey’s growing security,
prosperity, and strengthened minority rights, around 80 Assyrian
families have returned to the region since 2006. <a href="http://www.csmonitor.com/tags/topic/Turkey" title="Title: Turkey" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Turkey</a>’s
Islam-rooted Justice and Development Party, which won power in 2002,
has styled itself a protector of religious and minority rights, in
contrast to earlier secular governments, which harbored a nationalistic
mistrust of minorities. </p><p>Still, the transition has been a hard
one. Turkey's Muslim majority and Christian minorities have a fraught,
bloody history. The Assyrian community, which once numbered in the
hundreds of thousands, was decimated by an ethnic cleansing campaign,
forced migration, and fallout from the fighting between the Turkish
government and Kurdish separatists.</p>
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<p>Assyrians are still barred from opening their own seminaries, while
priests are still denied the state salary afforded Sunni Muslim imams.
They complain of bureaucratic and legal harassment.</p><p>But on Sept. 30 <a href="http://www.csmonitor.com/tags/topic/Recep+Tayyip+Erdogan" title="Title: Recep Tayyip Erdogan" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan</a>
announced a "democratization package," for the first time allowing
minority groups to open private schools teaching in their own languages.
He also agreed to return land confiscated from the 1,600-year-old Mor
Gabriel Monastery, which lies eight miles from Kafro and is a talisman
for Assyrian Christians worldwide.</p>
<div>
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</div><p>There
were between 600,000 and 700,000 Assyrians in Turkey prior to the 20th
century, but today there are only 20,000 remaining in Turkey, 17,000 of
them in Istanbul – most of them relocated from the southeast.</p><a name="1420ef7a7ed8a8bd_eztoc17313375_1"></a><h2>Fraught history</h2><p>Assyrians
who remained in the Midyat area after the World War I ethnic cleansing
and forced migration campaign by the Ottomans largely fled in the 1980s,
when they were caught in the crossfire between the Turkish army and the
<a href="http://www.csmonitor.com/tags/topic/Kurdistan+Workers%27+Party" title="Title: Kurdistan Workers' Party" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Kurdistan Workers' Party</a> (PKK). With each side accusing them of supporting the other, around 50 to 60 Assyrians were killed, says Aziz Demir, Kafro’s <i>mukhtar</i> – elected village headman.</p>
<p>“We
had to make a choice: we were either with the Kurdish people or the
state. Of course we could not make this choice, so our only option was
to leave.”</p><p>Even before the PKK, the Assyrians were frequently
targeted amid an atmosphere of general lawlessness. Israil Demir’s
father was murdered in Kafro in 1972 while guarding the village from
thieves at night. “They never found the killer,” he said. By the late
1980s, the village was entirely abandoned.</p><p>During these
years, nearby Mor Gabriel was a lonely place, says Isa Dogdu, the vice
chairman of the Mor Gabriel Foundation, which runs the monastery.</p><p>“It
was very dangerous to be here,” he says. The road from the nearest
city, Mardin, was marked with a half-dozen aggressively manned military
checkpoints. “Only a handful of people would visit: a few journalists
and a few pilgrims," he says.</p><p>Turkey’s war with the PKK partially
subsided after the capture of the rebel group’s leader, Abdullah Ocalan,
in 1999. Currently the two sides are engaged in peace talks. On a
recent visit to Mor Gabriel – a fortress-like complex of yellow
sandstone in an otherwise empty landscape – has a steady stream of
tourists wandering through its cloisters and chapels, mainly Turkish
Muslims sightseeing during the national holiday marking the Islamic
festival of Eid al-Adha, the Feast of the Sacrifice.</p><p>The monastery
has survived repeated calamities. It was devastated by plague in the
8th century; attacked by Turks, Kurds, and Persians over the years;
and sacked by the Mongols in the 14th Century.</p><p>In its heyday
during the 7th century, it was home to more than 1,000 monks. Today,
while its vaults contain the remains of 12,000 saints and martyrs, the
monastery’s only living denizens are the bishop, three monks, and 14
nuns.</p><p>The return of a handful of its flock to the Midyat region “lifts our morale and helps us spiritually,” says Mr. Dogdu.</p><a name="1420ef7a7ed8a8bd_eztoc17313375_2"></a><h2>Replanting roots</h2><p>Mor
Gabriel’s more recent travails illustrate the authorities’ mixed
attitude towards Christian minorities. In 2008, state bureaucrats
stripped it of a large portion of its land after neighbouring Muslim
villages claimed title to it. The monastery has fought an unsuccessful
court battle for its return ever since.</p><p>“The Turks arrived here
yesterday, and who was here before? It was us,” says Mr Dogdu. "Logic
cannot accept the idea that we have been [illegal] occupiers for 1,600
years.”</p><p>Although the government agreed to return 240,000 square
meters of Mor Gabriel's land, 270,000 square meters remain confiscated.
Israil Demir and other villagers in Kafro are unimpressed. He points out
that it was under the Erdogan government that the land was confiscated
in the first place, a move which “showed that the state doesn’t want
Assyrians.”</p><p>Some villagers in Kafro also expressed unease over the
alleged Islamist tendencies of Turkey’s religiously-conservative
government. Most conceded, however, that it has done more for them than
their secularist predecessors.</p><p>Much of the improvement in minority
rights in Turkey has been due to the government’s efforts to reform
laws after the country began European Union accession talks in 2005.
Many reforms relating to freedom of religion had the dual benefit of
helping both minorities and pious Muslims, who until recently also faced
state-imposed restrictions.</p><p>Assyrians were first invited to
return in 2001 by then-Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit. The emigrant
community, living mainly in Germany and <a href="http://www.csmonitor.com/tags/topic/Switzerland" title="Title: Switzerland" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Switzerland</a>, held meetings and sought assurances from the Turkish government before several families decided to return.</p>
<p>Aziz
Demir’s was one of the first, in 2006. The transition from Switzerland
was particularly hard for his son, Ishok, who had never lived in Turkey.</p><p>“I
was against the whole project but at 16 you can’t do a lot about these
decisions,” Ishok says. “There was no Internet, no café, no streets
even… Everything was very strange. We didn’t know what we were doing
here. We left our friends behind.”</p><p>With more families moving back,
the village has slowly become livelier, he says. There is now a café
that serves pizza and a small chapel built on the site of an older one.
But the sandstorm still cast a pall over the village outside as he
showed the Monitor an older ruined church, pointing out graffiti and
bullet holes left by Turkish soldiers.</p><p>Ultimately, Ishok says, the
future of the village, and of Assyrians in Turkey, depends on whether
young people like him decide to stay. He, at least, has bought in,
recently starting a job as a tour guide around Mor Gabriel and other
Assyrian sites in the region.</p><p>“I believe in a future here," he
says. “Very slowly we [young people] learned about this place and other
families came back and brought children with them and we didn’t feel so
alone any more.”</p><p><a href="http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Middle-East/2013/1030/In-eastern-Turkey-a-rare-renaissance-for-Middle-East-Christians">http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Middle-East/2013/1030/In-eastern-Turkey-a-rare-renaissance-for-Middle-East-Christians</a><br>
</p><p><br></p><br clear="all"><br>-- <br>=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+<br><br> Harold F. Schiffman<br><br>Professor Emeritus of <br> Dravidian Linguistics and Culture <br>Dept. of South Asia Studies <br>
University of Pennsylvania<br>Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305<br><br>Phone: <a href="tel:%28215%29%20898-7475" value="+12158987475" target="_blank">(215) 898-7475</a><br>Fax: <a href="tel:%28215%29%20573-2138" value="+12155732138" target="_blank">(215) 573-2138</a> <br>
<br>Email: <a href="mailto:haroldfs@gmail.com" target="_blank">haroldfs@gmail.com</a><br>
<a href="http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/" target="_blank">http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/</a> <br><br>-------------------------------------------------
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