CHRISTIANITY, SYRIACS, AND PERSECUTION

Turkey’s Syriacs Face Pressure Amid Local Bigotry and Opportunism

After a brief period of tranquility, the last remnants of Syriacs face new hardships in southeastern Turkey. This time local feuds and petty opportunism drive the pressure against them.

Syriac priest Sefer Aho Bilecen was briefly detained by Turkish military police in January.

The political modernity has shattered the traditional components of the social fabric in Anatolia; it tore apart various ethnic, religious and social sub-identities for the achievement of the sacred cause of nation-building launched by the founding fathers of the Republic. The Turkification of the entire nation, with little regard for the expression of different identities, was never without controversy and without fuss. As the century-old Kurdish conflict and the simmering Alevi question attest, Turkey’s ethnically-designed nation-building objective proved to be a costly blunder with lingering ramifications for today’s elusive social peace and political stability.

As Karen Barkey judiciously analyzes in an article, the hardly-maintained codes of inter-communal peace within the bounds of the Ottoman imperial social structure have become the biggest victim of this modernization program marked by militant secularism…