Turkish Christians back AKP

Ethnic Armenians support Turkey’s Islamist-rooted government as secular parties join nationalist tide

Ethnic Armenian men play cards in a teahouse in Vakifli village, in Turkey’s Hatay province, last week.

By Gareth Jones - Reuters

VAKIFLI, Turkey - Its foes like to accuse Turkey's ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) of plotting to create an Iranian-style Islamic state, but many among the country's Christian minority seem to prefer the alleged Islamists to more secular parties.

In sleepy Vakifli, Turkey's last surviving ethnic Armenian village, perched high among orange groves overlooking the east Mediterranean, elderly farmers say they will probably vote for the Islamist-rooted AKP in July 22 elections.

«This government has done a lot for us. We want them to get back in. They show us and our religion respect. Every religion is holy,» said Hanna Bebek, 76, enjoying a game of cards with his neighbors in the village teahouse.

«The AK Party has tried to help the minorities, while other parties just talk,» said village headman Berc Kartun, 45.

Turkey is overwhelmingly Muslim but hosts several ancient Christian communities - dwindling remnants of sizable populations that prospered for centuries in the Muslim-led but multiethnic, multifaith Ottoman Empire.

Modern Turkey was founded on the empire's ashes in 1923.

Those communities include some 70,000 Armenians and 20,000 Greek Orthodox - mostly based in Istanbul - and 20,000 Syriac Christians, who speak a form of Aramaic, the language of Jesus.

Turkey's Christians have often voted in the past for secular parties such as the center-left Republican People's Party (CHP), analysts say. But the CHP has joined a rising tide of Turkish nationalism, making Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's AKP a more attractive option.

Vakifli is located in Hatay province, which once belonged to nearby Syria and boasts a long tradition of religious tolerance.

Its provincial capital Antakya is the ancient Antioch, where Saints Peter and Paul preached shortly after Jesus' death.

Vakifli itself, with a population of 100 mostly elderly people living off organic farming, is virtually all that remains of eastern Turkey's once-large prosperous Armenian community.

Patriarch Mesrob II, the Istanbul-based spiritual leader of Turkey's Armenians, recently endorsed Erdogan's party.

«The AK Party is more moderate and less nationalistic in its dealings with minorities. The Erdogan government listens to us - we will vote for the AK Party in the next elections,» Mesrob told the German magazine Der Spiegel in an interview.

Though a pious Muslim whose wife wears the Islamic headscarf, Erdogan strongly rejects the Islamist label. In power since 2002, his AK Party has pursued liberal economic and political reforms, including more rights for religious minorities, as required by the European Union which Turkey hopes to join. Ankara began EU entry talks in 2005. But Erdogan's record is far from perfect, analysts say.

«The AK Party is 100 times more liberal than the other parties... They deserve a bit of credit, but not too much,» said Baskin Oran, a political analyst and human rights campaigner.

Oran is the author of a 2004 report on Turkey's minorities, commissioned by Erdogan's office, which was quietly binned after a furious nationalist reaction that highlighted the continued sensitivity of the minorities issue in Turkey.

«The nationalist pressure scared the hell out of the government and they caved in,» said Oran.

Oran himself could draw religious minority votes away from the AKP in Istanbul, where he is standing as an independent candidate on a liberal platform.

Turkish nationalists, who are expected to perform well in July's elections, are especially sensitive to claims - pressed by many in the EU and beyond - that as many as 1.5 million Armenians in Turkey suffered genocide at Ottoman hands in 1915. Ankara's official line is that large numbers of both Muslim Turks and Christian Armenians died in ethnic conflict.

Nationalists are also highly suspicious of Turkey's ethnic Greeks and their spiritual leader, Ecumenical Patriarch Vartholomaios, whom they accuse of wanting to set up a Vatican-style ministate in Istanbul. Vartholomaios rejects their accusation as absurd.

As elections loom, the AKP does not want to be branded by the nationalists as kowtowing to powerful Armenian or Greek diaspora lobbies in Europe and America. Many Turks believe these lobbies are bent on avenging past wrongs suffered by their kin.

Oran said Ankara's reform zeal had long since cooled. For example, it shelved a law intended to ease property restrictions on Christian minorities. It has also failed to reopen an Orthodox seminary near Istanbul deemed vital for the long-term survival of Greek Orthodoxy in Turkey.

More tragically, the authorities failed to stem a virulent form of nationalism that claimed the life in January of Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink. Dink was shot dead by an ultra-nationalist outside his office in Istanbul, triggering a huge outpouring of grief and solidarity from ordinary Turks.

The Dink murder still hangs heavy on Turkey's Armenians. «Many Armenians wanted to leave this country (after the murder)... but it is not easy to leave the place where you and your parents were born,» said Aris Nalci, news editor of Agos, Dink's weekly Armenian newspaper.

The Vakifli farmers said many Turks came from towns hundreds of miles away to pay their respects at their newly restored village church after Dink was murdered. «All forms of extreme nationalism are bad,» said Kartun.

«But here in Hatay province, at least, we still live together in peace - Turks, Arabs and Armenians, Muslims and Christians.»