Month: June 2018

The re-election of Turkey’s President, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, yesterday was a defeat for freedom in general and raises ongoing questions about religious freedom in particular in Turkey.

The Republic of Turkey’s unfreedom dates back to its founding in 1923 under Kemal Atatürk, whose authoritarian rule was designed to eliminate Islam’s influence on society and to replace it with a secularism of “laïcité” modeled on the French Revolution. He succeeded only in part. Turkey’s heartland remains religious to this day. The country’s subsequent history has oscillated between democratic openings that have returned Islam-friendly governments to power followed by coups and crackdowns led by the country’s Kemalist military and judiciary.

When Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (whose Turkish initials are AKP) was elected in 2002, many saw in it a hope for an Islamic version of a European Christian Democratic Party that would advance liberal democracy, allow increased religious freedom for Muslims, and maybe, just maybe, allow Turkey to gain entry into the European Union.

This dream is dead. For awhile it looked hopeful – and many in the AKP’s rank and file remain committed to a religion-friendly democracy – but since 2011, Erdoğan has turned into an authoritarian thug. He has cracked down on popular protests, curtailed judicial independence, restricted the press and social media, committed electoral fraud, overseen a rise in corruption, and accrued the power to oust and even imprison legislators. In suppressing a coup attempt in July 2016, Erdoğan arrested one-third of his generals and admirals, detained some 10,000 officers and soldiers, imprisoned about 50,000 people affiliated with the movement of Gülen, his chief rival, and had some 70,000 professionals – professors, journalists, businesspeople – and 150,000 public employees fired or suspended from their jobs. Erdoğan has not resisted the trappings of a sultan, building himself a presidential palace of 1,150 rooms, costing $615 million and built with stone pillars and sheet glass. A referendum last year fortified presidential power, and allowed him a second, and possibly third, term as president, creating the possibility that he will be in power until 2032.

Erdoğan is authoritarian, but is he an Islamist authoritarian? Is he rolling back Kemalist secularism for the first time, turning Turkey into a repressive Islamist state? It is not clear. Some observers believe that he intends a traditional sharia state, others that he is more a thug than a puritan. Since 2011, he has issued calls for Turkish children to become a “pious generation,” vastly increased funding for “Imam Hatip” reliigous schools, introduced Islamist textbooks in these schools, made religious education compulsory in all primary schools (with exceptions only for Christians and Jews), required new schools to include prayer rooms, successively lifted rules banning women from wearing headscarves in state institutions (including schools, universities, the police and the military), sponsored the building of mosques, and cracked down on Alevis.

To be sure, these policies move Turkey in a religious direction but they do not make it Islamist. Funding religious schools is little different from what many western democracies do, and Imam Hatip schools contain only 10% of Turkish students. The lifting of restrictions on headscarves is in fact a liberalizing move. Religious freedom means that women can don a headscarf in Turkey or France and doff one in Iran. Still other measures – like the issuance of religious textbooks – admittedly look more Islamist. All in all, though, Erdoğan is not creating another Iran or Saudi Arabia.

More troubling is the Turkish government’s treatment of religious minorities (meaning both non-Muslims as well as groups like Alevis, which Sunni Muslims consider heretical). These policies have been around since Atatürk and are unlikely to change under Erdoğan. The 1923 Lausanne Treaty defined citizenship according to Islam and gave official recognition to some minorities will denying it to others. In the case of recognized minorities – which today include Armenian Orthodox Christians, Greek Orthodox Christians, and Jews – the state, acting in the spirit of Kemalist religious management, created a General Directorate for Foundations that governs their charitable foundations; regulates their religious practice; has at times expropriated their property and grossly overtaxed them; and has kept the seminary of the Greek Orthodox Church in Istanbul closed for over four decades now, thus preventing the training of clergy and contributing to the decimation of this community in Turkey. Alevis, a syncretic offshoot of Islam who amount to about 15% of the total population, have suffered sharp restrictions, including obligatory education into Sunni Islam, curtailments on the construction of meeting places, and lack of representation at the state level. Discrimination against them dates back at least to the 16^th century Ottoman Empire. Sufis, practitioners of an Islamic mysticism, saw their orders dissolved and their practices banned in 1925 and continue to exist underground. Christians experienced repressive violence continually during the first twelve years of the republic, pograms directed against the Greek Orthodox Church in 1955, incidents of violence in 1963 and 1974, and several assassinations in the past decade-and-a-half. American Protestant pastor Andrew Brunson was imprisoned in the aftermath of Erdoğan’s 2016 coup, is still imprisoned, and faces up to 35 years in prison for the “crime” of being a member of the Gülen opposition “terrorist” movement, charges that outside humanitarian groups widely regard as bogus.

Erdoğan is likely to remain in power for quite some time. May religious freedom and democracy advocates make loud and clear the repression that takes place under his regime for an equally long period of time.

These reflections are drawn from the manuscript of my forthcoming book, Religious Freedom in Islam: The Fate of a Universal Human Right in the Muslim World Today, due to be published by Oxford University Press this coming February.

The following post is contributed by Nnadozie Onyekuru, who is a graduate student of global affairs at the University of Notre Dame. He previously studied at the University of Maiduguri in Nigeria and Thomas Aquinas College in California.

The recent posthumous conferment of Nigeria’s highest honors on Moshood Abiola and Gani Fawehinmi is a cheerful break for followers of events in Africa’s most populous country. Last week, President Buhari stunned Nigerians by announcing his decision to honor the late Abiola with the Grand Commander of the Order of the Federal Republic (GCFR) title typically reserved for the country’s heads of state. Abiola was the presumed winner of what is widely regarded as Nigeria’s best conducted elections about a score and five years ago. There is a noteworthy reference to his travails in Kofi Annan’s memoir, ‘Interventions: A Life in War and Peace.’ June 12, the anniversary of the eventually annulled elections, will now replace May 29 as Nigeria’s Democracy Day, according to the press statement announcing the president’s decision.

There is already a debate over the motive and constitutionality of the president’s act but few Nigerians dispute its merits. Even more uncontested is the president’s simultaneous award of the nation’s second highest honor, Grand Commander of the Order of the Niger (GCON), to the late human rights defender, Gani Fawehinmi. Gani was a tireless and fearless advocate for truth and justice in the Nigerian polity. The mention of his name elicited one of the loudest ovations during President Clinton’s address to Nigerian legislators in 2000. Such unequivocal appreciation by the nation’s political class speaks a thousand words as does the jubilation surrounding the events of the past week. President Buhari’s decision to honor these late countrymen is a nod to the part of the Nigerian anthem that speaks of our heroes not laboring in vain and a fitting validation of the saying that inspires the name of this blog. The arc which bends towards justice also runs through Nigeria.

A headline the other day struck me, “China’s Persecution of Christians at Highest Level Since Mao.” I was struck back at Easter when I read news stories describing how government officials actually removed people from church worship services in enforcement of new regulations against people under 18 attending church. This is as clear and direct as religious freedom violations get – physically restraining people from worshipping with their communities. Now, this recent piece recounts that:

Watchdog groups say the persecution of Christians and other religious minorities in China is at its most intense since the Cultural Revolution, as churches are shuttered, Bibles confiscated and believers arrested at rates not seen in decades.

That’s saying a lot. The Cultural Revolution, lasting from roughly 1966 to 1979, was an especially intense period of religious persecution in the history of Communist China, which began in 1949.

The story quotes pastor Bob Fu, one of the leading advocates of religious freedom in China, as saying that the levels of persecution have increased markedly even since last year:

Pastor Bob Fu, founder and president of ChinaAid, said the number of people arrested in China for exercising their religious freedom “has reached the highest level since the end of the Cultural Revolution.” He cited internal figures showing a nearly fivefold increase in the number of Christians who were persecuted by the government last year.

“For Christians alone, last year we documented persecution against 1,265 churches, with the number of people persecuted over 223,000. And that is just the tip of the iceberg,” Mr. Fu said. “In 2016, there were 762 cases of persecution, according to our documentation, with the number of people persecuted 48,000. It really is almost five times [as much].”

He said ChinaAid knows of 3,700 Christians who were arrested in 2017, up from 3,500 the previous year. Some religious dissenters and human rights activists have been detained for years, Mr. Fu said, with their families left to wonder if they are still alive.

May this not be forgotten as trade and North Korea dominate the headlines regarding China.

Last week, the U.S. State Department issued its annual International Religious Freedom Report, covering religious freedom around the world during 2017, as mandated by the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998. Two factors accompanying the issuance of the report serve as encouraging signs for a strong religious freedom policy under the current president.

First, the report was announced through a press conference involving the Secretary of State himself, Mike Pompeo, along with the Ambassador at Large for International Religious Freedom, Sam Brownback. Second, Pompeo announced the first ministerial meeting on religious freedom, in which the U.S. will host ministers from other countries who promote religious freedom in order to develop cooperation and solidarity. This is a proactive, forward step that indicates real interest in a religious freedom policy, which, without support from the top, is liable to become marginalized in the corners of the State Department bureaucracy.

An article in Crux summarizes some of the report’s key findings:

– The plight of the Rohingya and the Kachin people in Myanmar. Brownback noted that he visited several of the refugee camps in Bangladesh about a month ago. “The situation is dire. We must do more to help them, as they continue to be targeted for their faith.”

– In North Korea, up to 120,000 political prisoners in “horrific conditions” in camps across the country, some have been imprisoned for religious reasons. The report said there were 1,304 cases of alleged religious freedom violations in the country last year.

– In Eritrea, the government “reportedly killed, arrested, and tortured religious adherents and coerced individuals into renouncing their faith.”

– Tajikistan continues to prohibit minors from even participating in any religious activities.

– Saudi Arabia does not recognize the right of non-Muslims to practice their religion in public and imprisons, lashes, and fines individuals for apostasy, blasphemy, and insulting the state’s interpretation of Islam.

– In Turkmenistan, individuals who gather for worship without registering with the government face arrest, detention, and harassment.

-In China Falun Gong adherents, Uighur Muslims and members of other religious minorities continue to be imprisoned; with many of them dying in custody.

Many of these trends only became worse during 2017.