Thank you, Chair Levitt, Vice-Chairs Sweet and Hardcastle, and distinguished members of the Subcommittee on International Human Rights.
On behalf of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, I thank you for the opportunity to discuss with you today the human rights situation in Turkey. In my testimony, I will focus mainly on the state of freedom of religion or belief in Turkey, and specifically the situation of religious minorities.
Under the 15-year rule of the Justice and Development Party, the Turkish government has had a mixed record on freedom of religion or belief. These freedoms have shown slight improvement in some areas, while they have deteriorated in many others.
The government's positive gestures include restitution of properties expropriated from religious minority communities, state funding for the restoration of a number of churches and synagogues, the provision of dual citizenship to Orthodox archbishops, Turkey's observer status in the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, participation of Turkish officials at the International Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremonies, removal of religious affiliation data from official identity cards, and the lifting of the ban on the hijab in the Turkish civil service.
There has, however, been an alarming lack of respect for fundamental rights and freedoms since the abortive coup of July 2016 and the ensuing state of emergency, which the government recently extended for the seventh time.
Although Turkey's religious minorities were quick to demonstrate their loyalty in the immediate aftermath of the failed coup attempt, they still became victims of a wave of hatred and violence for their supposed complicity in the coup.
Three weeks after the coup attempt, in a demonstration of solidarity, Turkey's Jewish and Christian religious leaders joined the government's anti-coup demonstration in Istanbul. Three of the officials who spoke at the rally, however, in denouncing the coup plotters, insulted religious minorities by tarring the plotters as “seeds of Byzantium”, “crusaders”, and as a “flock of infidels”.
There has been an alarming trend among pro-government media to connect the coup plot to religious minorities. A pro-government journalist insisted two days after the abortive coup that Fethullah Gülen, a U.S.-based Sunni cleric who is widely considered by the Turkish public to be the coup's mastermind, has a Jewish mother and an Armenian father, and is a member of the Catholic clerical hierarchy. Another pro-government daily even published a fabricated Vatican passport to show that Gülen was a Catholic cardinal. The ecumenical patriarch of the Orthodox Church was slandered for plotting the coup with the CIA, while another pro-government columnist claimed that the plotters may be hiding in churches. Unsurprisingly, it was not long before incitement led to physical attacks against religious minorities.
Churches in Malatya and Trabzon, the scenes of lethal attacks against Christians a decade ago, were the first to be targeted. Later, an Armenian high school in Istanbul was vandalized. An Alevi worship hall there and homes in Malatya were next and Christian tourists were harassed in Gaziantep.
Attacks against religious minorities have remained at the elevated level reached shortly after the failed coup. On March 6 this year, a lone gunman fired a shot through the window of the Saint Maria Catholic Church in Trabzon. This is the fifth confirmed attack against the church since the assassination of its priest, Andrea Santoro, in 2006.
Meanwhile, Turkey's culture of impunity continues to make Christians an attractive target for hate crimes. A month and a half after the coup attempt, Turkey granted an early release to Father Santoro's murderer. The killer, who refused in court to express remorse for his crime and even made a short-lived escape from prison in 2012, managed to walk free after serving only 10 years of his 18-year sentence. In a 2011 letter to a relative he had bragged that he was treated like a king in prison, and he even vowed to kill the Pope. He added that he wanted to become even more famous than Mehmet Alì Agca, the Turkish assailant who shot and critically wounded Pope John Paul II in 1981 only to walk free from a Turkish prison in 2010.
Besides failing to tackle Turkey's culture of impunity, the Turkish government is also responsible for its ongoing crackdown on religious minorities. On October 8, 2016, authorities banned the Protestant church in Antioch, an ancient cradle of Christianity, for conducting Bible study “without a permit”. Soon afterwards, two officials of Turkey's Association of Protestant Churches reported the police had questioned them about their pastoral work. On October 17, 2016, airport officials denied entry to an American Protestant who headed the Ankara Refugee Ministry by saying that he was a national security threat. In November 2016, authorities handed control of the Syriac Church in the city of Sanliurfa, to a nearby university's faculty of Islamic theology.
It is also alarming to see that Turkey's state-run media outlets are active in smearing and scapegoating religious minorities, using state funds for incitement, particularly against Jews and Christians. For example, The Last Emperor or Payitaht: Abdülhamid, an historical series funded and broadcast by Turkey's state-run Turkish radio-television, TRT, is a blatantly anti-Semitic and anti-Christian drama. Each episode of The Last Emperor has led to an upsurge in hate speech and incitement online. One Twitter user, after watching this state-funded drama, vowed to turn the territory between the Euphrates and Nile rivers into Jewish graveyards. Another Twitter user, after watching the drama, said, “The more I watch ‘The Last Emperor,’ the more my enmity to Jews increases—you infidels, you filthy creatures.”
Turkey's state-run media outlets demonstrated a similar attitude during the July 2017 attack against the Neve Shalom Synagogue in Istanbul. Turkey's official Anadolu news agency and its state-run television network, TRT, used photos of the Istanbul synagogue attack to promote the next day's anti-Israel protests. Turkey's Jewish community reacted by stating that the government media's coverage amounted to “making Turkish Jews” a target. Both state-run outlets later deleted the incendiary tweets and removed the photo from their reports.
One case that best illustrates the smearing and scapegoating of religious minorities in Turkey is that of the U.S Pastor Andrew Brunson. On April 16 of this year, Pastor Brunson, a Presbyterian minister from North Carolina, who had been unjustly detained in a Turkish prison for 18 months, finally got to defend himself in court. His trial ended in a continuation until May 7, and he was sent back to prison to face up to seven years of pretrial detention under Turkey's draconian state of emergency. For over 20 years before his sudden arrest, Pastor Brunson has preached peacefully in Turkey's third largest city, Izmir. Following the attempted coup in 2016, Turkish authorities initially charged Pastor Brunson with membership in an armed terrorist organization. Later they added charges of espionage and attempting to overthrow the government, although there is no evidence to support any of these accusations. Pastor Brunson's attorneys finally received the indictment last month, but only after it had been leaked to the media. The 62-page indictment is a muddled collection of conspiracy theories based largely on ludicrous accusations from three secret witnesses. Turkey's pro-government media has been shameless in its smear campaign against Pastor Brunson. The media claimed that the pastor would have become the next director of the CIA had he been successful in helping to coordinate the attempted coup against Erdogan. When there was a bomb attack against wardens of the maximum security prison where Pastor Brunson was being held, a story accusing the CIA of masterminding the attack ran under the headline, “The Pastor's Bomb”.
With all this in mind, the following are a number of policy recommendations for Canada to use to target Erdogan regime's human rights abuses. The travel advice and advisories of the Government of Canada could spell out more clearly the alarming rise in the targeting of foreign nationals, religious minorities, and members of the clergy that could result in long pretrial detention without due process and attorney-client privilege.
Canadian lawmakers could organize fact-finding missions to Turkey to investigate and report on the state of freedom of religion or belief in Turkey, as well as engage Turkish lawmakers to encourage the strengthening of minority rights and freedom of religion or belief in Turkey.
Canadian officials should urge their Turkish counterparts in bilateral and multilateral platforms to lift the state of emergency as an enabler of grave human rights violations.
Canada can increase and earmark a greater portion of its international development aid to Turkey for supporting civil society organizations and projects that aim to strengthen human rights and freedom of religion or belief.
Canada can develop programs to host and/or offer refuge to Turkish minorities who are persecuted, as well as fund “scholars at risk” and “journalists at risk” programs for religious freedom advocates who have been targeted by the Turkish government for their advocacy.
The Canadian public sector can institutionalize twinning programs with their Turkish counterparts to facilitate peer-to-peer best practice sharing in the field of equal citizenship, social inclusion, anti-discrimination, and anti-hate crime policies.
Finally, the Justice for Victims of Corrupt Foreign Officials Act (Sergei Magnitsky Law) provides for implementing restrictive measures against foreign nationals responsible for gross violations of internationally recognized human rights, including freedom of conscience, religion, thought, and belief. Canada could consider using the legislation to impose asset freezes and travel bans on Turkish officials and their accomplices for unjust detention of, and incitement against, religious minorities.
On behalf of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, I thank you again for inviting me to testify before this distinguished committee.