By Paul de Maeyer, ROME, FEB. 18, 2011 thanks to Zenit.org.
Not even the
Mongols of the 14th century, when they killed 40 monks and some 400 faithful,
succeeded in making one of the most ancient Christian convents in the world
disappear, but perhaps Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Turkey,
can.
This appears to be the case of the Syriac Orthodox monastery of Mor Gabriel or “Dayro d-Mor
Gabriel,” called “Deyrulumur” in Turkish. It is located in the
region of Turabdin in the southeast of Anatolia. The convent bears the name of
Mor Gabriel (634-668), bishop of Tur-abdin, known for his witness of holiness
and miracles.
The foundation of the monastery, which is situated southeast of the city of
Midyat, in the province of Mardin, near the border with Syria, dates back to
the year 397 A.D. and was the initiative of two monks, Mor Samuel and Mor
Simon, who died in 409 and 433, respectively. The complex, which boasts
elements built with the help of Byzantine emperors such as Arcadius (395-408)
and Theodosius II (408-450), today houses a small community of three monks and
14 sisters.
Mor Gabriel, known also as the “second Jerusalem,” is not only a
monastery. Mor Gabriel is in fact the See of the Metropolitan Mor Timotheus
Samuel Aktas and the cultural and spiritual center of the dwindling
Syro-Orthodox community of Turkey and of numerous Syriacs who’ve emigrated to
the West. Just 50 years ago, some 130,000 Syriacs lived in the region of
Tur-abdin – the name means “mountain of the servants of God” – but
today their number has decreased to just a few thousand.
The monastery is at the c enter of a harsh battle initiated in 2008 by the
leaders of three Kurdish villages dominated by a tribe supported in Parliament
by one of their leaders, Suleyman Celebi, who is a Parliamentarian with the
pro-Islamic ruling party of Erdogan (the AKP or Party of Justice and
Development).
Several accusations have been leveled against the monastic community, including
proselytism, which is based on the fact that young men study Eastern or Syrian
Aramaic at the monastery. There are also claims that the monastery was built on
a place where a mosque once stood – an unfounded and even absurd accusation,
given that Mor Gabriel well precedes the birth of Islam. The accusation that
sticks – at least in the eyes of Turkish officials – is the one upheld by the
Treasury Ministry: undue appropriation of land. Even this accusation is not
very comprehensible, given that the community of Mor Gabriel regularly pays the
taxes on the land in question.
The affair has recently met with, perhaps, its definitive conclusion. With a
decision made public on Jan. 27 (but that actually dates to Dec. 7), the
“Yargitay” or Ankara Court of Appeals – Turkey’s highest appeals court – overturned a verdict issued on June 24, 2009, by the court of Midyat.
According to the Yargitay decision reported by Forum 18 News Agency, 12 plots
of monastery land with a total area of 99 hectares (244 acres) are to be
considered “forests” and hence belong “ipso facto” to the
Turkish state.
For Mor Gabriel, the decision is a hard blow. To lose the lands means to lose
the means of sustenance necessary for survival. While sources close to the
Forum 18 agency described the decision as “highly political and
ideological,” the whole affair was described from the beginning as “a
spectacle trial” or “farce.”
“The purpose of the threats and the lawsuit se ems to be to repress this
minority and expel it from Turkey, as if it were a foreign object,” the
head of the Aramaic Federation, David Gelen, told AsiaNews back in 2009.
“Turkey must decide whether it wants to preserve a 1,600-year-old culture,
or annihilate the last remains of a non-Muslim tradition. What is at stake is
the multiculturalism that has always characterized this nation, since the time
of the Ottoman Empire.”
The decision caused little upheaval in European environments, with the
exception of Germany, where several parties, including the Social Democratic
fraction in the Bundestag (Lower Chamber) and even Die Linke (the Left),
denounced it.
“The fraction of the SPD expressly condemns the expropriation because the
surrounding land is fundamental for the life of the monastery. The Mor Gabriel
monastery deserves our protection,” stated a Feb. 1 communiqué signed by
Christoph Strasser and Angelika Graf. Strong word s were also used by Erika
Steinbach, spokeswoman of the German parliamentary group for Human Rights and
Humanitarian Aid, who called it a decision that symbolizes “the repression
of Christianity in Turkey.”
“The negative trend in religious freedom in Turkey is incompatible with
human rights,” said Steinbach, according to the Assyrian International
News Agency.
In an article published Feb. 7 by the Norwegian Forum 18 agency,
Otmar Oehring, director of the Human Rights Office of the German Catholic
organization Missio, analyzed the situation of various religious communities in
Turkey, including the Mor Gabriel affair. According to Oehring, the basic
problem is simple: no religious community exists or has ever existed for
Turkish law.
“They don’t have a legal personality, but they exist,” admitted
Turkish Vice Premier Bulent A rinc on Jan. 17, commenting on a legal battle
over the Buyukada orphanage. (In 2008 the European Court of Human Rights ruled
that Turkey had to return to the ecumenical patriarchate the Buyukada orphanage
it had confiscated.)
For now, representatives of many religions prefer to stay silent. They fear —
as the case of Mor Gabriel demonstrates — attracting the hostility of the
authorities and having to face long and above all costly legal battles, only to
lose their “de facto” liberty, Oehring surmised. For the author, the
only solution to undo this knot that is “completely incompatible”
with the European Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, is a
change in the Constitution and criminal code of Turkey.
This was also admitted last October by the then head of the “Diyanet”
(Directorate for Religious Affairs), professor Ali Bardakoglu. “The
solution is to allow a religious institution to be autonomous. Turkey is ready
for this,” he said, according to the daily Radikal. The following month,
Bardakoglu lost his post.
For the monks of Mor Gabriel, the only way not to lose their land is,
therefore, to follow the example of the ecumenical patriarchate of
Constantinople and turn to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.
Metropolitan Samuel Aktas told the Economist that is just what he’s going to
do: “I have remained silent in the face of these injustices; but no longer
so.”