Category: Syria

Syrian opposition postpones Istanbul meeting meant to choose prime minister

The main Western-backed Syrian opposition group has postponed an upcoming meeting in Turkey where it was to choose a prime minister for a transitional government in rebel-held areas.

Free Syrian Army fighters from the Knights of the North brigade move to reconnaissance a Syrian army forces base of al-Karmid, at Jabal al-Zaweya, in Idlib province, Syria, Wednesday, Feb. 27, 2013. Syrian… (Associated Press)

The Syrian National Coalition said in a statement posted on its Facebook page Thursday that the March 2 conference in Istanbul was canceled for “logistical reasons.” It said it would announce a new date as soon as possible.

The opposition umbrella group has struggled to agree on the leadership of a transitional administration since the Coalition was formed late last year. The group has met on previous occasions to select an interim prime minister, but has failed to reach a compromise.

The announcement comes despite a U.S. pledge to provide an additional $60 million in assistance to the opposition.

via Syrian opposition postpones Istanbul meeting meant to choose prime minister – 2/28/2013 9:01:46 AM | Newser.

March 1, 2013
This Is Simply Our Home

Syriac Orthodox Christians in Turkey

”This Is Simply Our Home”

In recent years, around 60-100 Syriac Orthodox families have returned from central Europe to Turkey. Encouraged by changes in the political atmosphere, the minority nonetheless faces a host of problems, from the expropriation of land belonging to a monastery, to a ban on special schools and kindergartens, and also a lack of places of worship in Istanbul. By Ekrem Eddy Güzeldere

A sign in Aramaic at the side of the road defiantly bids visitors “Welcome to Kafro” next to the official Turkish sign on which the village is called “Elbeğendi”. Here, some 15 kilometres south of Midyat, live 17 Syriac Orthodox families. There are no shops in the village, but there is a café that allegedly serves the only decent pizza in the area.

“German is the lingua franca amongst the children in the village,” says the pizza maker in flawless German, which he learned while living close to Stuttgart. All of the families here have returned to Kafro after living in Germany and Switzerland, some of them for decades.

Among them is also the muhtar, the elected village chief, Aziz Demir, who lived with his family in Zurich and near St. Gallen. “Even if our lives there as Christians were very pleasant, something was still missing,” he says on the terrace of his house, where he lives with his wife, from a neighbouring village, and their youngest son, Josef, who attends secondary school in Midyat. With a sweeping gesture beyond the newly landscaped garden out onto the plain, he says “This is simply our home.”

Urgent need of restoration

The Demirs and the other 16 families all live in new houses, because the buildings of the old village, within site of the new developments, were for the most part destroyed in the clashes between the army and the PKK. As was the old church, which is in urgent need of restoration but still awaits the necessary permits.

Land dispute with the Turkish government and Kurdish village leaders: The Mor Gabrial is the oldest surviving Christian monastery in the world. There have been claims that the monastery was built on the grounds of a previous mosque – regardless of the fact that the monastery was founded over 170 tears prior to the birth of MohammedThe inhabitants of Kafro have therefore erected a small chapel with the help of the “Evangelical-Lutheran Church in Württemberg”, as the sign next to the entrance indicates. Services only take place here once in a month, however, as the village does not have its own priest. From the roof of the old church, Demir points out the surrounding villages from east to west: “One is Christian, one Arabic, one Kurdish, one Yazidi and then another one Christian: Enhil (in Turkish Yemişli), where Tuma Çelik comes from.”

Çelik already moved with his family to Istanbul as a ten-year old, in 1974, and then emigrated to Switzerland in 1985. There, he became an activist fighting for the interests of the Syriac Orthodox church. He wrote for Aramaic magazines and was one of the founders of “Suroyo TV”, which broadcasts in Aramaic from Sweden. He has been living again mostly in Tur Abdin since 2010.

Legal proceedings against Mor Gabriel

Last summer, he founded the first Turkish-Aramaic monthly magazine, Sabro (Hope), which is published by volunteers in Midyat. Also last summer, he launched a website called “We have grown up in this world together”, devoted primarily to the legal proceedings against the region’s oldest monastery, Mor Gabriel.

The Syriac Orthodox Church claims to derive its origin from one of the first Christian communities. It uses Syriac, a dialect of Aramaic spoken by Jesus Christ and his Apostles, as its official and liturgical language. Pictured: Altar in the Curch of KafroMor Gabriel was founded in 397. 1,611 years later, a complaint was filed by the surrounding villages alleging that the monastery was illegally occupying land, some of it even located inside the monastery walls and for which the monastery has paid property taxes regularly since 1937. Nevertheless, the courts have been handing down decisions against the monastery since 2008 and have granted around 28 hectares of its land to the Turkish forest ministry; the last judgement was passed in July 2012.

Now the only hope is to take the case before the European Court of Human Rights. Erol Dora, the first Syriac Orthodox member of the Turkish parliament, who was elected for the Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party (BDP) in Mardin in 2011 and previously worked as a lawyer for minority foundations, commented: “We as the BDP and as the Assyrian people will do all we can to support the monastery at the international level, because we believe that in this trial we have justice on our side.”

Just one of many problems

For Çelik, however, Mor Gabriel is but one problem among many: “This is just a small drop in the ocean. Assyrians lived mainly in rural areas, where the land registry system was the least active. That’s why so many churches, monasteries and community buildings are not even registered.”

In Switzerland, he became an activist fighting for the interests of the Syriac Orthodox church: Tuma ÇelikToday, the great majority of the Syriac Orthodox faithful lives in Istanbul. Sait Susin, chairman of the Syriac Orthodox Foundation in Istanbul, estimates that about 17,000 of the approximately 20,000 members live in Istanbul. Currently, there is only a single Syriac Orthodox church there, in the trendy district of Beyoglu, which was built in 1844 for the around 40-50 families living in the city at that time. The community, most of whose members now live in Bakirköy, close to Atatürk Airport, therefore also uses Catholic churches for services.

In addition, the foundation has been submitting applications for years to build a new church, for which it needs land to be assigned to it by the municipal administration. Last year, the city made two “immoral offers” of land confiscated from Catholic and Greek Orthodox communities. The Syriac Orthodox leaders therefore rejected the offers for the time being. Should the plot in question be returned to the Catholic Church, however, they would be prepared to try to reach an agreement with the Catholic priests to erect a new church next to the Catholic cemetery.

“You are not a minority”

But that is not the only problem confronting the Istanbul community. Outside of Tur Abdin, only a minority of its members are fluent in Aramaic. Çelik estimates that “around 3,000 people in Istanbul speak the language, but only about 200 can also read and write it.” The foundation had therefore submitted a request to open a kindergarten with instruction in Aramaic. The response of the ministry of education was: “You are not a minority; therefore you cannot teach your children a foreign language.”

Although Syriac Orthodox Christians are clearly not Muslims and thus should be able to benefit from the minority rights stipulated in the Lausanne Treaty of 1923, the Turkish State has granted these rights thus far only to Greeks, Armenians and Jews, with numerous infringements.

An adjustment of Turkish laws to European minority rights standards, long overdue, would not only solve the problem of the kindergarten, but would also create a modern frame of reference for all the other issues. Nothing revolutionary, just equal rights for all.

Ekrem Eddy Güzeldere

© Qantara.de 2013

Translated from the German by Jennifer Taylor

Editor: Lewis Gropp/Qantara.de

February 28, 2013
Turkey’s Foray Into the Fertile Crescent

The rebel-controlled Atmeh refugee camp in northern Syria is only yards from the border with Turkey, which provides strong support to the Syrian rebels.

By SONER CAGAPTAY

The biggest open secret in Ankara is that Turkey detests Iran, which it sees as undermining its interests in Syria and Iraq. Turkish leaders will not admit this publicly, for their country desperately needs Iranian natural gas and oil to continue its phenomenal economic growth.

But Ankara increasingly regards both Iraq and Syria as arenas for proxy conflict with Iran; in the former, Turkey backs the Sunni Arabs and Kurds against the central government in Baghdad under Shiite Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, seen by Turkey as an Iranian puppet; in the latter, Ankara supports the rebels against the Tehran-backed Assad regime.

Turkey has answered Iran’s challenge by building influence in the northern parts of both Iraq and Syria. This signals the rise of a yet-undeclared Turkish policy in the Middle East: Anticipating the decentralization of post-Assad Syria, and hoping to take advantage of Iraq’s autonomous Kurdish north, Turkey is carving out a cordon sanitaire across the northern Fertile Crescent, building influence in the Kurdish population as well as in large commercial centers such as Aleppo and Mosul.

When Turkey moved to foster closer ties with its Muslim neighbors about a decade ago, it hoped that such relations would help boost Iraq’s stability and improve political ties with Syria and Iran.

But the Arab rebellions have rendered these designs obsolete. At first Ankara provided the Assad regime with friendly advice to stop killing civilians. But the Damascus regime refused, and Turkey’s stance flipped in August 2011: Ankara went from being Assad’s friendly neighbor to his chief adversary. Turkey started providing safe haven to the Syrian opposition, and, according to media reports, even arming the rebels.

This policy has cast Ankara and Tehran, Assad’s patron, as chief rivals in Syria. And this, in turn, has exacerbated competition in Iraq, where Ankara supported Ayad Allawi’s secular Iraqiya bloc in the run-up to the 2010 elections, poisoning relations with Maliki.

In the aftermath of Maliki’s reelection, Ankara has favored closer contacts among Sunni Arabs and Kurds in northern Iraq. Turkey’s trade volume with northern Iraq has climbed to $8 billion per year compared to only $2 billion with the southern portion of the country, and Ankara is seeking lucrative oil deals with Iraqi Kurds.

In short, for all practical purposes, northern Iraq has become part of the Turkish sphere of influence. This is especially surprising considering that only a few years ago Turkish hostility toward Iraqi Kurdish leaders seemed ready to boil over into an outright invasion of the area.

Today, by contrast, Turkish Airlines offers daily flights to Sulaymaniyah and Erbil inside the Kurdistan Regional Government (K.R.G.) in northern Iraq, and Iraqi Kurds take vacations in Antalya, a Turkish resort city on the Mediterranean.

Mosul, a Sunni-majority province in northern Iraq, is also pivoting toward Ankara. Turkey currently provides safe haven to Tariq al-Hashimi, Iraq’s Sunni vice president, whose arrest warrant has become a rallying cause for many Sunnis. At the same time, historic links between Mosul and Turkey, dating back to the Ottoman Empire, are being resurrected: When I last visited Gaziantep, a city in southern Turkey, my hotel was full of Arab businessmen from Mosul.

Before the Syrian uprising began, a similar development was taking place in Aleppo, another Fertile Crescent city that enjoyed deep commercial ties with Turkey under the Ottoman Empire.

Located only 26 miles from the border, Aleppo had become a focal point of Turkish businesses in northern Syria, and there is no doubt that the strong support the Turks have provided to the rebels in northern Syria will increase Turkey’s influence in the city after the end of the Assad regime (it is no accident that the largest contiguous rebel-controlled areas in Syria are around Aleppo).

The missing part of Turkey’s prospective influence in the northern Fertile Crescent were the Syrian Kurds — until Turkey announced peace talks with the Kurdistan Workers Party (P.K.K.). This group, which has waged a war against Turkey for over three decades, is also known to be the best-organized movement among the Syrian Kurds.

Ankara hopes that peace talks with the P.K.K. will help heal the bad blood with Syrian Kurds. Indeed, Turkey has reworked its Middle East policy: It now views the Kurds as the foundation of its zone of influence across the northern Fertile Crescent.

Yet not all is rosy for Turkey. The peace talks with the P.K.K. could go awry, driving P.K.K. rejectionists into the arms of Iran or even Baghdad. There is also an emerging threat in allowing radical fighters into northern Syria. This is a dangerous game, for once the Assad regime falls, Turkey might find itself with a jihadist problem in its newly acquired sphere of influence.

Soner Cagaptay is director of the Turkish Research Program at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and the author of “Turkey Rising: 21st Century’s First Muslim Power.”

A version of this op-ed appeared in print on February 28, 2013, in The International Herald Tribune.

February 28, 2013
Turkey, the Unhelpful Ally

STOCKHOLM

For Op-Ed, follow@nytopinion and to hear from the editorial page editor, Andrew Rosenthal, follow@andyrNYT.

AMERICA’S stated goal is to remove President Bashar al-Assad from power in Syria. The United States also insists that any solution to the Syrian crisis should guarantee religious and ethnic pluralism. However, this rosy vision of a moderate and secular Syria after Mr. Assad’s downfall will not be achieved if the United States continues to depend on regional allies that have little interest in such an outcome.

President Obama has relied heavily on Turkey in seeking to oust Mr. Assad and Secretary of State John Kerry is scheduled to visit the Turkish capital, Ankara, later this week. But Turkey is part of the problem. It is exacerbating Syria’s sectarian strife, rather than contributing to a peaceful and pluralistic solution.

While the Obama administration has encouraged a broad Syrian opposition coalition, in which the influence of Islamists would be circumscribed, Turkey has not been of any assistance whatsoever. Instead, the Turkish government has continued to throw its weight behind the Muslim Brotherhood. The Brotherhood dominated the Syrian National Council, which is headquartered in Istanbul, and has succeeded in eclipsing other groups within the new opposition coalition, effectively thwarting the American effort to empower non-Islamists.

Moreover, while sponsoring the Sunni cause in Syria, the Turkish government has made no attempt to show sympathy for the fears of the country’s Alawite, Christian and Kurdish minorities. The Alawites and the Christians have backed the government in large numbers and fear retribution if Mr. Assad is toppled.

Turkey has provided a crucial sanctuary for the Sunni rebels fighting Mr. Assad and has helped to arm and train them. Even more ominously, Turkey is turning a blind eye to the presence of jihadists on its territory, and has even used them to suppress the aspirations of Kurds in Syria. Last November, Islamist rebels from Jabhet al-Nusra, which has reputed links to Al Qaeda in Iraq, entered the Syrian town of Ras al-Ain from Turkey and attacked fighters from the Kurdish Democratic Union Party, known as the P.Y.D., which had wrested control of parts of northeastern Syria. The Nusra fighters were initially repelled, but have continued to cross into Syria from their safe haven in Turkey.

Mr. Obama has invested considerable political capital in Turkey, cultivating a close relationship with Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. American and Turkish officials have held regular operational planning meetings since last summer, aimed at hastening the downfall of Mr. Assad. In a recent interview with the Turkish newspaper Milliyet, Mr. Obama thanked “the Turkish government for the leadership they have provided in the efforts to end the violence in Syria and start the political transition process.”

But this praise is undeserved. America can’t expect the Sunni Arab autocracies that have financed the Syrian uprising, like Saudi Arabia and Qatar, to help empower secular and moderate leaders in Syria. However, Turkey, a NATO ally, should be expected to promote a pluralistic, post-Assad Syria. It has not.

The Obama administration must therefore reassess the assumption that Turkey is playing a constructive role in ending the violence in Syria; it must also take a hard look at its own role in contributing to religious strife.

America’s policy of punitive sanctions and not-so-veiled military threats toward Iran has encouraged Turkey to assert itself as a Sunni power. The perception that Turkey enjoys American “cover” for a foreign policy that directly confronts Iranian interests emboldened the Turkish government to throw its weight behind the armed Sunni rebellion against Mr. Assad, Iran’s main regional ally.

Turkey quickly abandoned its stated ambition to have “zero problems with neighbors” and decided to join the United States in confronting Iran. It agreed to the deployment of parts of NATO’s antimissile shield, which is meant to neutralize a supposed Iranian missile threat.

Turkey’s shift flowed from the belief that it would gain power and stature and reap the benefits if America succeeded in rolling back Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

All of this suited the United States. Washington no longer had to fear that Turkey might be “drifting eastward,” as it did during the short-lived Turkish-Iranian rapprochement a few years ago, when Turkey broke ranks with its Western partners over the Iranian nuclear issue. Turkey also appeared to be an American asset insofar as it could potentially offset the influence of more conservative Sunni powers like Saudi Arabia.

But the Syrian crisis has had a radicalizing effect on all parties, including Turkey’s more moderate Islamist government. Under more peaceful circumstances, Mr. Erdogan might be able to live up to American expectations and promote a pluralistic vision for the Middle East. That won’t happen if the region is increasingly torn apart by violent religious conflict and its leaders believe that playing the sectarian card will enhance their power.

Removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq in 2003 had the undesirable consequence of empowering Iran. A decade later, America’s effort to remove Mr. Assad is partly an attempt to remedy this geopolitical setback. But, as in Iraq, it has had unwelcome consequences. Moreover, American policy toward Iran is encouraging opportunistic Sunni assertiveness that threatens to trigger Shiite retaliation.

The United States must beware of doing the bidding of Sunni powers — especially Turkey — that are advancing sectarian agendas that run counter to America’s interest of promoting pluralism and tolerance. Left unchecked, rising sectarianism could lead to a dangerous regional war.

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Halil M. Karaveli is a senior fellow at the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute and the Silk Road Studies Program, which are affiliated with the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, in Washington, and with the Institute for Security and Development Policy, in Stockholm.

February 28, 2013
Christian Exodus from Syria Raises Hopes for Resurrection in Turkey

Christian Exodus from Syria Raises Hopes for Resurrection in Turkey

Civil war pushes more Christian refugees into nearby Armenia and Turkey.

Melissa Steffan

Escalating violence in northern Syria is forcing Christians to flee their homeland and take refuge in nearby regions of Armenia and Turkey.

The New York Times reports that several hundred Syrian Christian refugees have arrived in Turkey throughout the past few weeks, heading for “the monasteries and towns of Mardin and Midyat in Tur Abdin, an ancient region in southeastern Turkey, less than 50 kilometers, or 30 miles, from the Syrian border that is the historical heartland of the Syriac Orthodox Church.”

The exodus from Syria is raising hopes of resurrecting the Christian presence in southeastern Turkey, which “is still dotted with Syriac churches like Mor Gabriel, which was founded in the year 397 and is one of the oldest active monasteries in the world today,” reports the Times. “But apart from the monks, very few Syriacs remain.”

USA Today also reports that an “estimated 7,000 of Syria’s Christian-Armenian community have arrived in Armenia since the start of the uprising.” Christian refugees have headed for Aleppo, which is now the temporary home for nearly 8 in 10 of the Syrian Christians in Armenia.

CT previously has reported on Syria, including how many Christians backed Assad’s regime and have been working to avert an all-out civil war. CT has also noted the legal troubles of Mor Gabriel.

CT has also reported on Syriac Christians, who speak Aramaic (the language of Jesus), and “religicide” in the Middle East.

posted by Melissa Steffan | Comments (0)

via Christianity Today Gleanings: Christian Exodus from Syria Raises Hopes for Resurrection in Turkey.

February 27, 2013
Syria’s opposition to chose provisional PM in Istanbul

CAIRO | Fri Feb 22, 2013 1:15pm EST

(Reuters) – Syria’s National Coalition will meet in Istanbul on March 2 to chose a prime minister to head a provisional government to operate in rebel-held areas of the country, a coalition source said on Friday.

The date was set after a compromise was reached between a bloc in the coalition that includes the powerful Muslim Brotherhood and other members who favor speedy formation of a government, the source told Reuters at the end of a two-day meeting of the coalition in Cairo.

(Reporting by Khaled Yacoub Oweis; Editing by Jon Hemming)

via Syria’s opposition to chose provisional PM in Istanbul: source | Reuters.

February 23, 2013