Posted on 09/27/2002 1:21:35 PM PDT by Destro
Turkish Police close church for "offending society"
ISTANBUL, Turkey, July 9, 2002 — Turkish security police ordered a Protestant Christian congregation meeting for 40 years in the southeastern port city of Iskenderun to close its doors in mid June, declaring the church had "no legal basis" and that its activities were harmful to society.
Pastor Yusuf Yasmin, 71, was served official notice by the security police of Hatay province to close and stop all activities of the New Testament Church in Iskenderun.
The abrupt two-page order was dated and delivered on June 14 to Yasmin, who was ordered to remove the church sign and list of worship services from the building by 5:00 p.m. the same day.
According to a copy of the directive obtained by Compass, the church was ordered to close "because your activities will incite religious, sectarian and dervish-order discrimination; will harm religious and national feelings; and will create offense in the society."
Signed by District Security Director Salih Gokalp, the order declared that the church's location had not been approved in the municipal zoning plan and that no religious or other private education of any kind could be allowed on the premises without the express permission of the Ministry of Education.
The church has met in its current location for the past seven years without previous complaints from the Turkish authorities.
Yasmin and the majority of his congregation, averaging 80 to 90 worshippers at Sunday services, are Turkish citizens from a variety of ethnic Christian backgrounds. The Protestant church has met for worship in the city since 1963, although after its original place of worship was torn down in 1970, the congregation met in the church facilities of the local Armenian Orthodox Church for 25 years.
In 1995, the congregation purchased and moved into its own church facility in Iskendurun's Piri Reis district, notifying local authorities on June 26, 1995, of the location and set times of worship, Bible studies and religious seminars.
In compliance with local zoning regulations, Yasmin informed all the other owners of residences and shops in the building that his church had purchased Flat C to be used as a place of Christian worship. "None of them had any problem with this, and all of them signed the notarized forms giving their consent," Yasmin said.
In an indirect admission, the police order acknowledges that "there is no provision in our laws concerning the construction and use of "places of worship.'" But it goes on to insist that "it is not possible for places of worship to be built in random places" under the country's zoning laws.
"We are not enemies of the state," a bewildered Yasmin said today by telephone from Iskenderun. "We love our nation. So why are they doing this to us?" After pastoring and preaching for 43 years, Yasmin admitted he had found it very difficult to be forbidden to worship with his congregation for the past month.
A lawyer retained by the New Testament Church confirmed today that he is preparing to file a case later this week before the administrative courts on behalf of the Iskenderun Protestants to regain their constitutional rights to freedom of worship and religious activities.
Iskenderun is located just 25 miles from Antakya (ancient Antioch), where the New Testament says Christ's followers were first called Christians. With a population of 160,000 population, Iskenderun still bears the name of its 4th century B.C. founder, Alexander the Great.
Source: Barbara G. Baker, Compass News
Your claim is patently False!!! Father George (Methodist) has even started a Kosovo outreach program from Thessaloniki in Greece.
As for your comments about the Armenian Christians - nothing could be further from the truth! 99.9% of Armenians either died in the genocide committed by Turks or have left many years ago.
Finally, the reason that some Eastern Orthodox Christian countries are resistant to proselytizing by other Christian denominations (Roman Catholics for example) is that it is simply not needed. Why would one Christian group want to evangelize another Christian group? Why not evangelize the unchurched instead?
It wasn't Turkey then either in name or population. The first Turks appeared in Anatolia around 1,000 years after.
TURKEY According to Turkish World Outreach, the Turkish Christian fellowship of Batikent-Ankara was closed down by local police during worship services on September 25. A television broadcast a few days before made slanderous claims about the believers, even accusing the Christians of smashing car windows in the neighborhood where the church is located. Fortunately, the believers have been well liked, except perhaps by leaders of a nearby mosque. Local officials have ordered the Christians to stop meeting despite the guarantees of religious freedom in the Turkish constitution. The fellowship has asked for prayer as follows: that none of the believers will be abused and lies about them will be exposed publicly, that they will love and pray for those who persecute them, that they will know the peace of God and have wisdom in dealing with police and various officials, that Muslims will come to the defense of the rights of the believers, and the news media will see this as a matter of religious freedom and take the side of the servants of Christ.
You do not subscribe to the principle: you simply choose camps.
Hopefully this is just an isolated incident - Turkey seemed to be a enlightened nation.
Let's us see what OWB has to say about this.
Turkey's tolerance of religion is thin at best, and this was proved when the millet classes began to rise economicly and culturaly- threatening the social order and domination by Turkish Muslims. As long as Jews and Christians and ethnic minorities remained subservient to the state they were fine. But when they began to raise their heads above the fixed social standards, the blade came down. One cannot justify Turkey's treatment of its religious and ethnic minorities under the veil of maintaining the status quo- at least, such arguments should not work with those who believe in freedom.
The same ideals behind the oppression of the teens are still present and- as we can clearly see- active in Turkey. To be fair they are hardly Muslim- but what is the point of trading out from Muslim oppression to secular oppression? Both fail to recognize individual rights. I would hope that the Turkish people will embrace a system of real individual freedom, and not accept a compromise that fosters oppression.
First, when Hitler was deciding about whether to proceed with concentration camps he referenced the Turks by commenting on the fact that the world took little notice when the Muslim Turks established concentration camps as they went about genociding the Christians - Armenians, Greeks, Assyrians, etc. peoples who had lived in this region for thousands of years before the marauding Turks arrived on the scene.
Second, the Ottoman Turkish Emnpire has left a sordid mess of things from the Middle East to Africa to the Balkans. Forced migrations, colonial oppression, forced conversions, frequent mass killings, you name it they did it. We are living or rather suffering the results of hundreds of years of Turkish Muslim stagnation and oppression in that part of the world.
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