Will Non-Muslims Return to Turkey?
Although Turkey's Minister of Culture Omer Celik of the AKP is inviting Turkey's non-Muslims to return to their country, many do not feel welcome because of a complicted history, writes Orhan Kemal Cengiz.
Omer Celik, minister of culture of Turkey's Justice and Development Party (AKP) government, has made repeated calls recently in which he invited non-Muslims to come back to Turkey. In his most recent TV interview on March 29, Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan himself repeated this call and he said their government is calling non-Muslims back to Turkey. Do these calls have any potential to create a mass return of non-Muslims to Turkey? Has Turkey made profound changes in the way it handles its non-Muslim citizens?
I do not think that these questions have simple yes-or-no answers. Before I try to give my own answers, I have to give little bit background to illustrate to what extent Turkey’s non-Muslim policies have changed.
Modern Turkey was based on the exclusion of non-Muslims from Turkey. You can understand this by simply looking at the percentages of non-Muslims in the population in Turkey. Before 1915, 25% of Turkey’s population consisted of non-Muslims. With the current population of 70 million citizens, we should have 17 million non-Muslims. But today, all non-Muslims (including Greeks, Jews, Armenians and Assyrians) just barely exceeds 100,000. So the current rate is well below 1%.
Some of these people certainly had fallen victim to massacres in 1915 and onward. Some had left the country in population exchanges with Greece, and some went to Israel. But during the whole Republican era, non-Muslims continued to leave the country to escape from the endless suffering they were subjected to. In 1934, Jews were targeted in the Thrace region, their homes and shops looted. In 1942, the so-called “wealth tax” dealt a huge blow to all non-Muslims who had to sell everything in their possession to pay these extremely arbitrary fees. In September 1955, Istanbul’s Greek and Armenian residents fell victim to a two-day brutal pogrom. In 1974, with an extremely arbitrary judgment by the Supreme Court of Appeals, non-Muslim foundations lost all properties they had gained since 1936, as a result of legal tricks created by courts which made their acquisitions illegal.
