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TURKEY: CHURCHES TARGETED IN DURING ATTEMPTED COUP

The World Watch Monitor reports on attacks against churches which took place against the backdrop of the attempted coup last weekend…

santa maria 2007

World Watch Monitor

Two churches in cities in eastern Turkey – infamous as the sites of historic killings of Christians – were vandalised during the attempted coup on 15th July, reports Middle East Concern.

One of the attacks took place in the city of Malatya, where three Christians were tortured and killed in 2007, leading to a still-ongoing court case against the five suspects. Turkish Christians had hoped for a final verdict last month, but the trial was instead adjourned until September. 

santa maria 2007

Santa Maria Catholic Church in Trabzon, Turkey, in a 2007 photo. PICTURE: World Watch Monitor

“Now more than ever there needs to be a Christian presence here in this country. It may come with some repercussion, but we must faithfully declare God’s truths to the people here without belittling anyone. People are even more ready to seek out a new belief system and definitely need a new source of hope.”

– Press release from Radio Shema, an Ankara-based Christian radio station

During the night of 15th July, unidentified assailants broke the glass panels in the door of the Malatya Protestant Church. The pastor, Tim Stone, said he thought someone with a grudge against the church had taken advantage of the general unrest.

Meanwhile, in Trabzon, on the northern coast, around 10 people smashed the windows of the Santa Maria Catholic Church, where in 2006 a priest, Fr Andrea Santoro, was murdered. The attackers tried to break into the church, but a group of Muslim neighbours drove them away, before contacting a priest.

During the lengthy trial for the Malatya murders, which has seen over 100 hearings, the prosecution cited evidence that the murders were linked to the assassinations of Fr Santoro, who was killed while kneeling at the altar of his church, and an Armenian journalist, Hrant Dink, killed in January 2007 in Istanbul. 

Three suspects accused of helping to orchestrate the brutal Malatya murders had in October, 2014, blamed their crime on the Hizmet movement, the influential Islamic group led by Muslim scholar Fetullah Gulen, accused of masterminding the failed coup by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. 

Testimony from two former military officers and an Islamic university researcher claimed then that the Hizmet movement had been behind the savage torture and stabbing to death of the two Turkish converts to Christianity and a German missionary in Malatya in April 2007. 

The three defendants had declared that the socio-religious group, which had once been a strong ally of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), had planned the murder plot to discredit the Turkish military and overthrow the government. 

However, lawyers representing the Malatya victims’ families dismissed these defendants’ “parallel-structure” accusations at the time as political manipulation, in an attempt to deflect concrete evidence pointing at military and ultra-nationalist involvement in the murders. (Links were cited to the JITEM and TUSHAD units, allegedly formed illegally within various Turkish military forces to create disinformation and eliminate enemies of the state.)

In effect, the lawyers said in October 2014, the three suspects had been exploiting the government’s “witch-hunt” against the Hizmet movement in order to try to get themselves acquitted.

The latest attacks on churches are a painful reminder to Turkey’s Christians of their vulnerability, particularly during periods of unrest.

A group of Christian and Jewish religious leaders in Turkey issued a joint declaration condemning the coup and calling for love, peace and justice. The Association of Turkish Protestant Churches also issued a press statement condemning the coup, asking for wisdom and understanding for the country’s leaders and praying for peace.

After the attempted coup, Radio Shema, an Ankara-based Christian radio station, sent a press release, reporting that the “fatihah” (Muslim prayer for the dead) was “continuously broadcast from the mosques…The news showed the civilians in downtown Ankara chanting ‘Allahu akbar’ (God is greater), the Islamic battle cry…Huge crowds gathered at 110,000 mosques around the country on Sunday at noon to remember those who died in the attempted coup, who were ‘martyrs’; soldiers, police and innocent victims who fought to prevent [the] coup.”

But now, the station reported that life “looks normal”, although “the overall general feeling of Turks is anger; anger towards different targets or personalities about the current situation, all that happened…Now more than ever there needs to be a Christian presence here in this country. It may come with some repercussion, but we must faithfully declare God’s truths to the people here without belittling anyone. People are even more ready to seek out a new belief system and definitely need a new source of hope.” 

Estimates provided in the 2013 International Religious Freedom Report suggest that Christians account for approximately 0.2 per cent of the total Turkish population of about 75 million. The largest Christian minority group in Turkey is the Armenian Orthodox. It is estimated that there are 90,000 Armenians, 25,000 Roman Catholics, 20,000 Syrian Orthodox, 15,000 Russian Orthodox, 3,000 Iraqi Chaldeans, 2,500 Greek Orthodox and around 7,000 Protestants residing in Turkey.

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