emigration of non-muslim minorities from turkey

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The politics of population in a nation-building process:emigration of non-Muslims from TurkeyAhmet Içduygu; Şule Toktas; B. Ali Soner

First Published on: 22 October 2007To cite this Article: Içduygu, Ahmet, Toktas, Şule and Soner, B. Ali (2007) 'Thepolitics of population in a nation-building process: emigration of non-Muslims fromTurkey', Ethnic and Racial Studies, 31:2, 358 - 389To link to this article: DOI: 10.1080/01419870701491937URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01419870701491937

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8 The politics of population in a

nation-building process: emigration

of non-Muslims from Turkey

Ahmet Icduygu, Sule Toktas and B. Ali Soner

Abstract

Within the politics of nationalism and nation-building, the emigration ofethnic and religious minorities, whether voluntary or involuntary, appearsto be a commonly occurring practice. After the collapse of the OttomanEmpire in the early twentieth century, modern Turkey still carried thelegacy of a multi-ethnic, multi-religious diversity in which its Armenian,Greek and Jewish communities had official minority status based uponthe 1923 Treaty of Lausanne. However, throughout the twentieth century,Turkey’s non-Muslim minority populations have undergone a massemigration experience in which thousands of their numbers have migratedto various countries around the globe. While in the 1920s the populationof non-Muslims in the country was close to 3 per cent of the total, todayit has dropped to less than two per thousand. This article analyses theemigration of non-Muslim people from Turkey and relates this movementto the wider context of nation-building in the country.

Keywords: nation-building; emigration; minorities; non-Muslims; population;

Turkey.

Introduction

A major problem in the modern state concerns the relationshipbetween nation-building and minority rights, which are, at theirorigins, closely related to each other. The main issue in this contextis what might be called the politics of population in a nation-buildingprocess, an issue that also makes the distinction between majority andminority communities in the modern state. It was this nation-buildingprocess which gradually transformed ‘a society from the form of aGesellschaft, or functional existence, to a Gemeinschaft organization,or a homogeneous community’ (Bloom 1990, p. 55). In other words,

Ethnic and Racial Studies Vol. 31 No. 2 February 2008 pp. 358�389

# 2008 Taylor & FrancisISSN 0141-9870 print/1466-4356 onlineDOI: 10.1080/01419870701491937

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creating a true reconciliation between the nation and the state, betweenpolitical and ethno-cultural borders, came to be regarded as the idealsocial formation of our modern times (Oommen 1997). Not surpris-ingly, therefore, the nation-building process in various parts of theworld went hand in hand with the elimination of ‘undesirable’ otherswho remained outside the mainstream identification category (Connor1972, p. 336). Put differently, the Westphalia principles of nation-stateformation meant the delegitimization of sub-national identities andloyalties.

One tool that has become a dimension of eliminating the ‘others’ ismigration, an instrument with an integral role in nation-stateformation (Preece 1998). The Turkish nation-state formation is noexception to this general framework. In the Turkish context, sinceIslam has been a constitutive element of the Turkish identity andnation, and being Turkish has often been equated with being Muslim1

(Yumul 1998), the nation-building process has fostered a kind ofhomogenization which, in practice, pointed to the demographicIslamization of the population. Non-Muslim minorities,2 despite theirformal citizenship status, were not accepted as natural members of theTurkish nation but have remained as ‘others’ in the Turkish-Muslimnation (Bora 1995, p. 34; Keyman and Icduygu 1998). Thus, althoughone of the objectives of the nation-building project was to Turkify thenon-Muslim minorities (Bali 2001, p. 170), such a project has beenlimited by a mainstream perception of non-Muslim minorities’permanent otherness. The emigration of non-Muslim minorities hastaken a central place in creating a Turkish nation united in ethno-cultural terms.

Despite the use of the category of ‘Turk’ as a building block of thenation-state, what this word referred to was initially ambiguous andthis ambiguity was to persist, with the definition and content of ‘Turk’undergoing changes in different eras, subject to the influence of eventsand developments (Kadıoglu 1998). ‘Turk’ was used to refer some-times to an ethnic group originating in Central Asia, sometimes to alegal status of citizenship on the basis of identity cards and passportsand sometimes to individuals sharing a common culture, i.e. Turkishculture (Deringil 2000).3 As to the religion of the ‘Turk’, Islam wasfrequently used to define Turks, the Turkish nation and Turkishculture. In other words, Islam provided a reference point in thedefinition of the ordinary Turk (Ozdogan 1996; Ozbudun 1998; Kirisci2000; Meeker 2002). As a result, the inclusion of non-Muslims hasbeen problematic in the normative definition of ‘Turk’ (Keyman andIcduygu 1998).

While the ‘top-down’ character of the nation-building process inTurkey has been noticeable, it appears that there has also been aconsiderable degree of ‘bottom-up’ societal participation within the

The politics of population in a nation-building process 359

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political project. It was this ‘populist’ feature that also contributed tothe gradual demise of non-Muslim populations at many levels ofsociety. For instance, as deftly elaborated by Meeker (2002), the localelites in the eastern Black Sea coastal region of Anatolia, whoappropriated the Republican tactic of nation-building, had an interestin aligning themselves with the nationalist feelings combined with the‘official Islam’. This unique argument not only explains the questionof how the nation-building process in itself led to an ipso factoexclusion of non-Muslims, but it also tends to solve ‘the paradox of asecular Republic that became increasingly, and uniformly, religious’(Shankland 2003a).

Although Turkey today is generally considered to be a Muslimcountry owing to its more than 99 per cent Muslim population,historically Turkey was geographically not a predominantly Muslimcountry but rather contained multi-ethnic, multi-religious and multi-lingual groupings.4 The overwhelmingly lopsided Muslim/non-Muslimratio is a relatively recent phenomenon. Starting from the earlycenturies of the last millennium, Anatolia, the mainland of Turkey,has witnessed a gradual transformation from a fully non-Muslimpopulation to a Muslim one (Courbage and Fargues 1998). From thebattle of Mantzikert in 1071, where the Seljuk Turks defeatedthe Byzantines, until the First World War when the Ottoman Empirecollapsed, Anatolia had become a home for people of various ethnicand religious origins. When, between 1914 and 1923, a secular nation-state emerged from the debris of the Ottoman Empire, this multi-national and multi-faith demographic picture had already started tofade away.

Today, Turkey’s population exhibits a strong religious uniformitywhich has resulted mainly from the flows of incoming and outgoingmigratory movements. Despite the fact that the main source of thisdemographic change lies in the emigration of non-Muslims fromTurkey, there has also been an inflow of Muslim populations. In otherwords, as non-Muslim minorities opted to move out, Turkey receivedmillions of Muslim immigrants, particularly from the Balkans and theCaucasus (Kirisci 2000). In light of these migratory movements, onecould argue that Turkey has traditionally become an immigrant-sending country with respect to non-Muslims5 and a receiving countrywith respect to Muslims.6

In this article, we will argue that emigratory movements of non-Muslim minorities have operated as part of the nation-state formationin Turkey, movements that deeply and progressively dominated thesocial, political and economic history of the country. In doing so, thisstudy tackles the question of what happened to the non-Muslimpopulation of Turkey in the 1900s. It elaborates the causes andconsequences of changes in Turkey’s non-Muslim population from the

360 Ahmet Icduygu et al.

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late Ottoman era to the present. By examining the changes in thepopulation of non-Muslims in Turkey over the period, and relatingthese changes to the country’s social and political history, this essayaims to place the dynamics and mechanisms of these changes into theirproper historical context.

There are two methodological concerns which should be noted here.First, although this study itself largely benefits from the analysis ofsecondary data and literature, this should not be seen as a deficiencyfor several reasons: (a) there is no single comprehensive studyconducted on the linkage between the Turkish nation-building andthe emigration of non-Muslims from the country; (b) existing studieson the emigration of non-Muslims from Turkey are very sketchy andlimited; and (c) a study that is broad enough to cover the issuethematically and historically is lacking. In other words, this analysisgoes far beyond what has been said before. Second, as this articleattempts to clarify the dynamics of the emigratory flows of non-Muslims from Turkey as they have become deeply embedded in thenation-building project in the country, it naturally does not refer to theposition of minority non-orthodox Muslim groups such as Alevis7 orthat of some ethnic minorities such as Kurds. There is no doubt thatthe nation-building process in itself has also led in practice to a sort ofexclusion of these sociologically present but legally absent minorities atmany levels of society. But, as this study focuses only on the case ofofficially accepted minorities, namely non-Muslims, the case of Alevisor Kurds remains beyond the scope of the study.

The article has four parts defined by historical periods differentiatedon the basis of contextual factors that have shaped minorityemigration from Turkey. The first part presents a historical back-ground of Turkey’s non-Muslim population and highlights populationfigures in terms of the religious affiliations that Turkey inherited fromthe Ottoman Empire. The second part deals mainly with the earlyRepublican period, covering the years 1923�45, which were marked byintensive Turkification policies. The third part extends the discussionto the mid-Republican Period (1945�80), when the external contextdisplaced internal concerns over nation-building with respect to theposition of non-Muslims. The fourth part focuses on the contempor-ary period after 1980, particularly since the 1990s, during whichmulticulturalism became increasingly discussed as an asset of Tur-kish society. Since the European Union integration process alsocontributed to the emergence and consolidation of this late pluralistframework, this part touches upon the current status of Turkey’s non-Muslims and relates it to the ongoing integration negotiations betweenthe European Union and Ankara, in which minority issues often cometo the fore as hot agenda items. The article ends with a short overviewof essential points of the historical account.


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Background to Turkey’s non-Muslim minorities: the Ottoman legacy

The key to the stability of the Ottoman order, from the fifteenth to thenineteenth centuries, was the millet system (religious community ornation in Turkish), a practice for managing the internal affairs of itsmulti-religious and poly-ethnic imperial setting. Under this system, theprominent non-Muslim subjects of the Ottoman Empire, its Greek-Orthodox, Armenian-Gregorian and Jewish communities, weregranted communal autonomy in spiritual as well as secular areas,including their religious, educational, juridical and fiscal affairs. In theOttoman imperial system, even though there existed an absolutepractice of hegemonic power of Muslim-centred control over theempire’s non-Muslim populations, and the unequal and subordinateposition of non-Muslim communities was quite clear, these commu-nities had been granted state recognition and protection in the Islamictradition. Consequently, the millet system, which was based upon theuniversal brotherhood of the ‘peoples of the book’ (followers ofAbrahamic faiths) and was independent from the borders of ethnicitiesand geographies, had enabled non-Muslim communities to besuccessfully integrated into the central imperial structure of theOttoman state (Braude and Lewis 1982). However, as the impact ofnationalism was increasingly felt in the Ottoman Empire in thenineteenth century, both the religious universalism and geographicaldisregard of the millet system gradually disappeared. Religiouscommunities of non-Muslim millets, prominently the Christian group-ings, underwent a national transformation bounded by geographicaland ethno-linguistic borders (Lewis 1965). It was in that age ofnationalist awakening that the empire began to lose its cosmopolitannature as many non-Muslim communities seceded from the empire,often with the political and military support of Western powers(Sonyel 1993).

In particular, in the early nineteenth century, eastern Armenia andindependent Greece had become two main sources of nationalism inthe empire. As noted by Courbage and Fargues, non-Muslims ‘weretorn between loyalty to the empire and the new aspirations forindependence which became more intense around the First World Warwhen the Ottomanist doctrine disappeared’ (1997, p. 109). Indeed,while the nationalist mobilization of non-Muslims was rising, therewere three main projects of political engineering proposed for savingthe Empire: Ottomanism, the purpose of which was to build anOttoman nation; Islamism, aiming at a state based on Islam; andTurkism, aiming to create a Turkish nation based on race or ethnicity.8

As the modern Turkish Republic emerged from the collapse of theOttoman Empire, what was really carried over was the project ofTurkism, or, in other words, Turkish nationalism. However, this


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element was not the only one carried from the Ottoman past. Contraryto the view that the modern Republic was a clean break with the past,there was a remarkable level of continuity within various parts ofsocial, political and economic spheres in the modern Turkey.9 Forinstance, as we discuss in the latter part of this essay, the new minorityrights regime in Turkey formulated in the Treaty of Lausanne hadmanifestly carried the legacy of the millet system of the empire.

In the late ninetieth and early twentieth centuries, the non-Muslimpopulation of the empire began to fall considerably, not only due tosecession, but also because of migratory movements out of the empirethat increasingly consolidated the Muslim nature of the population.As a result, while the proportion of Muslims amounted to 60 per centof the Ottoman population in the 1820s, it gradually increased first to69 per cent in the 1870s and then to 76 per cent in the 1890s (Akarlı1972, p. 21). The results of the 1906/7 Census confirmed the patterninto which the empire’s population had fallen in a process ofhomogenization vis-a-vis religious affiliation. The Census indicatedthat, out of a total population of 14,321,000, there were 1,542,000Greeks, 1,020,000 Armenians and 146,000 Jews as compared to11,405,000 Muslims living in Ottoman lands. These figures indicatedthat the imperial population of the early twentieth century contained11 per cent Greeks, 7 per cent Armenians, 1 per cent Jews and 80 percent Muslims within the total (Karpat 1985, pp. 168�9).10

This composition was also reflected by the 1914 Census results(see Table 1).

The Balkan Wars of 1911�12 accelerated the demise of the empire’snon-Muslim presence as its predominantly non-Muslim-populatedlands were lost to newly established states including Bulgaria, Serbia,Montenegro and Romania, as well as to Greece. In the wars’

Table 1. Muslim and non-Muslim population in Turkey, 1914�2005 (inthousands)

Year 1914 1927 1945 1965 1990 2005

Muslims 12,941 13,290 18,511 31,139 56,860 71,997Greeks 1,549 110 104 76 8 3Armenians 1,204 77 60 64 67 50Jews 128 82 77 38 29 27Others 176 71 38 74 50 45Total 15,997 13,630 18,790 31,391 57,005 72,120Percentage of

non-Muslims19.1 2.5 1.5 0.8 0.3 0.2

Sources: from 1914 to 1965, Ottoman and Turkish censuses and statistical abstracts; from

1990 to 2005, personal communication of the (opinion) leaders of non-Muslim communities

to the authors


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aftermath, non-Muslims who remained in the Ottoman Balkanscontinued to flock to their kin-states. It was at this stage that a 1913population exchange agreement was concluded with Bulgaria underwhich 47,000 Bulgarians in Ottoman Thrace left their homes in returnfor 49,000 Turks being accepted into Turkey from Bulgaria (Psomiades1968, p. 60). In the same period, more than 100,000 Anatolian Greeksmigrated to Greece at the outset of the First World War (McCarthy1995, p. 287).

Concurrent with the demographic transformation in the westernregions of the empire, in the eastern regions the pivotal factor in theshrinking non-Muslim population was the Armenian deportation of1915�16. As some Anatolian Armenians were involved in ‘fifth-column activities’11 in eastern Turkey during the First World War,security concerns led to thousands of Armenians living in the regionbeing forced brutally to move to southern provinces of the empire(Bayur 1991, pp. 6�40). In addition to this, clashes between Armenianrebels and Muslims in Anatolia caused a hostile environment in whichthousands of Armenians were killed12 or forced to leave. Thedeportation dramatically altered the population composition ofAnatolia. By 1919, official sources confirmed that there remained543,000 Armenians, 1,015,000 Greeks and 93,000 Jews in Anatolia(Selek 1987, p. 64). In the same year, the Muslim population ofAnatolia was 9,291,000 (Selek 1987, p. 64).13 These figures indicatethat, on the eve of the Turkish War of Independence (1919�22),Armenians, Greeks and Jews in Anatolia altogether still constituted 15per cent of the total population, despite the influx of ethnic Turks andMuslims from the Balkans and the Caucasus into Anatolia.14

However, non-Muslim minorities’ secessionist activities and theircollaboration with the post-First World War occupying forcesprovoked disappointment and hostility among the national elite aswell as society at large (Alexandris 1992, pp. 52�76). Because of this,the Turkish War of Independence was a war directed against non-Muslim minorities as well as the occupying forces (Oran 1997, pp. 125�8). Owing to this fact, fearing possible revenge attacks, a large numberof non-Muslims left the country following the withdrawal of Westernand Greek forces (Pallis 1995). In particular, towards the end of theWar of Independence, Anatolian Greeks moved to Greece andIstanbul en masse. Although the size of Greek population in Istanbulswelled to around 500,000 in 1922 (Alexandris 1992, p. 80),15 thenumber retreated to 250,000 after the city was returned to Turkishauthorities in 1923 (Alexandris 1992, p. 104).

The period during and after the War of Independence was animportant time for the transition from a multinational empire to arelatively homogeneous national setting, at least in terms of religiousmake-up. The war had left a demographic environment compatible with


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a nation-building process. However, the transition to nation-buildingwas not free of problems. The leaders of the new regime in Anatolia hadnot forgotten the destructive roles played by non-Muslims during theWar of Independence, and so they looked upon these groups withsuspicion. The same view went on to affect both the treatment of non-Muslims and the national concerns of the nascent state.

The early nation-building process (1923�45): Turkification policies andpurification of ‘aliens’

Turkey’s Grand National Assembly was founded in 1920, and theRepublic was proclaimed in 1923. In the same year, with the Treaty ofLausanne, the three minority groups � Armenians, Greeks and Jews �were granted official recognition and accorded educational, social andreligious rights. Nevertheless, after the foundation of the new state, therecent separatist and collaborative history of Greeks and Armenianscame to dominate the general perception of all non-Muslim groups. Ina sense, the public refused to forget the collaboration of non-Muslimswith Allied forces in invading and trying to carve up Anatolia duringthe War of Independence, and this betrayal was burned into thepublic’s collective memory. In general, society regarded non-Muslimsas foreign elements in its midst and so repeatedly questioned theirloyalty and reliability (Bali 1998a, p. 171).

An immediate impact of this perception was seen in the legal andpolitical definition of the category of Turkish nationals. Notwith-standing the fact that the 1924 Constitution brought a clear civicdefinition of nation � one free of discrimination due to religion orracial background, under which every Turkish citizen is considered aTurk (Kili 1982, p. 62) � the political definition of nationality was notmade comprehensively enough to cover the country’s non-Muslims.From the political point of view, the concept of the Turkish nationinherently indicated the compact unity of Turkish-Muslim citizens,whereas non-Muslims remained at the periphery of this politicaldefinition. Parallel to the inclusion/exclusion practices of the newstate, the notion of ‘us’ included the Muslim population, whereas non-Muslim groups constituted the category of the ‘them’ (Aktar 2000, p.102). Moreover, on the basis of this legal-political ground, the fullscope of citizenship status was reserved for the ‘national’ sections ofthe Turkish population, as this created a close linkage betweencitizenship and national identity. Thus, the non-Muslim residents ofthe country were excluded from the ethno-cultural definitions of theTurkish nation. Non-Muslim peoples were rarely seen as an integralelement of the Turkish nation; rather, their presence was oftenconsidered a potentially destabilizing threat to idyllic social cohesion.


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Having based a definition of the national category on the Turkish-Muslim citizens of the country, the fundamental objective of Turkishnation-building was to create a society united in a common language,culture and religion. The Turkification policies and practices of thenew state, therefore, proceeded at the expense of distinctions whichideally were thought outside the mainstream identity category ofnation. The essentially pluralist content of the Lausanne frameworklost effect as the linguistic, religious, cultural and economic presence ofthe non-Muslim peoples in the country began to be subjected topolicies and practices of nationalist mistreatment (Toktas 2005).

One early example of this nationalist treatment arose in the area ofnon-Muslim minorities’ linguistic rights. As part of linguistic Turki-fication policies, a campaign called ‘Citizen, Speak Turkish!’ (VatandasTurkce Konus!) was launched during the late 1920s in order toeliminate the linguistic distinctions of non-Turkish-speaking citizens(Galanti 2000). Contrary to both the ethno-cultural neutrality of thenew Constitution and the commitments of the Treaty of Lausanne,speaking Turkish began to be considered a condition of Turkishnesseven for the country’s non-Muslim peoples, who were forced toabandon their mother tongues in favour of Turkish in public as well asin minority educational institutions (Bali 2000, pp. 131�49). Althoughthe campaign was renounced in the middle of the 1940s, it had a far-reaching impact on the attitudes of non-Muslims, who over time cameto prefer Turkish as their mother tongue.

Another government practice which deviated from civic nationalismby linking Turkishness to Turkish-Islamic culture was Law No. 2510,known as the Law on Settlement. The 1934 law set forth the basicprinciples of immigration and settlement policy at a time when eventsin Europe were moving towards yet another world war (Cagatay 2002).Taking into consideration security and political concerns, the lawclosed strategic regions of the country to non-Muslim minoritysettlement. Thus, although the Law on Settlement was expected tooperate as an instrument for Turkifying the mass of non-Turkishspeaking citizens,16 it emerged as a piece of legislation whichfundamentally shook the life of non-Muslims, as evidenced in the1934 Thrace Incidents in the immediate aftermath of the law’s passage.

Indeed, Law No. 2510 was issued on 14 June 1934, and the ThraceIncidents began just over a fortnight later, on 3 July. The incidentsseeking to force out the region’s non-Muslim residents first began inCanakkale, where Jews received unsigned letters telling them to leavethe city, and then escalated into a kind of anti-Semitic campaigninvolving economic boycotts and verbal assaults as well as physicalviolence against the Jews living in the various provinces of Thrace(Levi 1998, p. 128). It is estimated that out of a total 15,000�20,000Jews living in the region, more than half fled to Istanbul during


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and after the incidents (Karabatak 1996, p. 7). However, although theLaw on Settlement may well have actually provoked the incidents’outbreak, the national authorities did not side with the attackers butswiftly intervened in the incidents. After order was restored, thegovernors and mayors of the provinces involved were removed fromoffice (Toprak 1996).

During the Second World War, the policies of the Turkishgovernment on minority issues were largely dominated by theparadigm of national security and defence. As part of these militaristicmeasures, in 1941, non-Muslim men age 26�45 were recruited to themilitary as reserve forces. After these new forces were disarmed, mendrafted in this special recruitment, known as the Incident of Reserves(Yirmi Kur’a Ihtiyatlar), were assigned to civic purposes such asbuilding national parks and roads and collecting garbage. The mainconcern of both the government and the military was to maintainnational security by isolating society’s ‘untrustworthy’ elements incamps at a time when the war had already spread close to Turkey’sborders and was drawing nearer. These non-Muslim soldiers served inthe military as reserve forces for nearly a year and were dischargedfrom duty in 1942 (Bali 1998b).

This military measure was accompanied in 1942 by the promulga-tion of the Law on Capital Tax, Law No. 4305, whose impact was feltthe most on non-Muslim citizens’ economic power. In fact, the act wasa special one-time tax designed to provide additional resources forwartime expenses and in principle respected equality. However, itsimplementation created three categories of taxpayers specified asM (Muslims), N (non-Muslims) and C (Converts). The latter twocategories were levied five to ten times higher than the first. In order topay the tax, most non-Muslims were forced to sell off their property(Okte 1987, p. 24). Those who failed to pay the assessed amount weresent to labour camps in remote corners of the country where they wereexpected to pay off their taxes by working for the state.

The Capital Tax was superseded in 1944 by a new law, No. 4530,ending the levies and forgiving former tax debts. However, by the timeof its nullification, the objective of the tax had to a large extent alreadybeen realized. In conformity with the assessment criteria, Turkishcapital had been ‘nationalized’ in terms of religious affiliation.Throughout its implementation, the law effectively transferred hugeamounts of capital from non-Muslim minorities to Turkish-Muslimnationals. It is estimated that 98 per cent of the real estate belonging tonon-Muslims was either bought by Muslim individuals or confiscatedby the state (Aktar 2000, p. 204).

The cultural and economic policies of the early Republicangovernments illustrate the factors pushing minority emigration fromTurkey. The most prominent result of the Turkification policies was


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how they served to consolidate non-Muslim minorities’ position as the‘other’ in Turkish society in general. Notwithstanding the prevalenceof formal equality and rights under Lausanne, the policies in questionput the ethno-cultural as well as economic presence of non-Muslimminorities at risk. Therefore, on the part of these citizens, emigrationfrom Turkey emerged as an attractive option (Alexandris 1992, pp.326�31). Because of this, from the early years of the Republic, theproportion within Turkey’s total population of its Greeks, Armeniansand Jews gradually fell, a phenomenon clearly observable in the figuresof the period’s national censuses.

Although Turkey’s population totalled 12,000,000 in the immediateaftermath of the War of Independence, reliable data on its ethno-cultural composition are lacking. Yet, by examining the questionretrospectively, we can estimate that this population containedapproximately 250,000 Greeks, 100,000 Armenians and 100,000Jews. The first Census of the Republic was held in 1927. But beforethis census, the size of the Greek minority particularly underwent asignificant change through the implementation of the PopulationExchange Agreement of 1923�7.

In fact, since nearly 900,000 of approximately 1,500,000 AnatolianGreeks had already left the country following the Greek retreat, thepopulation exchange provided legitimacy to that de facto emigration(Psomiades 1968, pp. 120�6). In addition, the same agreement stipulatedsome further emigration, excluding, however, the Greek inhabitants ofIstanbul. During the exchange’s implementation, 150,000 Greeks leftbehind in Anatolia were sent to Greece in return for 360,000 Muslimsaccepted into Turkey from Greece (Geray 1970, p. 10). Meanwhile,despite the fact that the Greeks of Istanbul had been excluded from theexchange, owing to the reciprocity principle established between theMuslim population in Greek Thrace and the Greek population inIstanbul, over 150,000 Greeks living in Istanbul were subjected to thesame exchange. This number covered 60,000 Greek citizens, 40,000Greeks who were not covered in the population exchange, 38,000 Greekswho resettled in the city after 1918 and 20,000 Greeks living in thesuburbs of the city (Alexandris 1992, p. 104).

In consequence, although Turkey had embraced a multi-nationalsociety up until the years of national independence, the figures in thefirst Republican Census showed that this traditional diversity had to alarge extent been lost. Thus, by the year 1927, Turkey had taken on amore homogeneous outlook with respect to ethno-cultural character-istics, particularly as regards the religious affiliation of its peoples. Asnoted earlier, according to official sources from 1919, the total numberof Armenians, Greeks and Jews was around 1,650,000 (Selek 1987, p.64), but by 1927 the Census showed a steep drop to just 269,000,with 110,000 Greeks, 77,000 Armenians and 82,000 Jews (General


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Directorate of Statistics 1929).17 That is to say, while non-Muslimminorities in Turkey before the War of Independence constituted 15per cent of a total population of around 11 million (Selek 1987, p. 64),by 1927 this proportion had fallen drastically to 2 per cent of a totalpopulation of around 13.5 million (see Table 1). This indicates a fall ofapproximately 1,381,000 non-Muslims between 1919 and 1927. Leav-ing aside natural demographic changes, it can be argued that most ofthe given figure resulted from emigratory movements from Turkey inthe 1920s.

Despite the decrease in the number of the ‘other’, the relativelymulti-national outlook of the 1927 Census still challenged theimagined unity of the Turkish nation in the eyes of Turkish authorities.Consequently, a number of Turkification policies or movements,including the ‘Citizen, Speak Turkish’ campaign, the Law on Settle-ment, the Thrace Incidents, the Incident of Reserves and the CapitalTax, were launched. Thus, violating the spirit of the Lausannecommitments, Turkish state policies limited conditions of free andequal existence for non-Muslim minorities. Most significantly, parallelto the rise of nationalism in Europe, anti-minority feelings both in thegeneral public and in state institutions acquired a rather strong handin Turkey by the 1930s, while pushing new sections of minority peoplestowards opting for emigration, as evidenced in the second census heldseven years later.

In that 1935 Census, the continued decline in the population of thethree specified non-Muslim communities was clear. Accordingly, theCensus indicated that by 1935 there were around 125,000 Greeks,61,000 Armenians and 79,000 Jews, altogether totalling 265,000 or 1.6per cent of the 16.1 million total population (General Directorate ofStatistics 1937). The census results showed a slight decrease in theArmenian and Jewish communities but a rise in the Greek population.The latter was due to the inclusion of Greek citizens in the new censusregardless of their date of settlement in Istanbul.18 By the 1945 Census,the total population of Turkey had climbed to 18.8 million. Incontrast, the number of Armenians fell to around 60,000, Greeks to104,000 and Jews to 77,000, making up a total of 241,000 (see Table 1).This figure corresponds to 1.3 per cent of the total population inTurkey at the time (General Directorate of Statistics 1950).

As argued above, the gradual decline of the non-Muslim populationstemmed mainly from the Turkification policies undertaken duringthis period. A good example can be observed in the aftermath of theThrace Incidents. Having faced civilian attacks, a number of TurkishJews emigrated to Palestine either directly or via Istanbul. It isestimated that 521 Jews left Turkey for Palestine in 1934, and another1,445 emigrated the following year (Bali 1999, p. 43). The 1942 CapitalTax also served as a spur for emigration (Bali 2000, p. 406; Dundar


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2000, p. 61). Between 1943 and 1944, around 4,000 Jews emigrated andanother 5,000 Turkish Jews applied to the government for emigration(Benbassa and Rodrigue 2001, p. 383). The Turkification policies hadan impact on the size of the Greek and Armenian minorities as well.However, due to the international tension and war during most of thedecade, Greek and Armenian migration slowed between the 1935 and1945 Censuses. As indicated above, over that ten years the overall sizeof the Greeks and Armenian populations declined by 21,000 and 1,000respectively.

In view of the above discussion, two points mark the non-Muslimemigratory trends of the early Republican period. First, the emigrationof the Jewish minority was limited in comparison to that of theArmenians and the Greeks. In other words, the latter two commu-nities, particularly the Greeks, moved from the country in largernumbers, whereas the scale of Jewish migration remained smaller. Onecan conclude that the discrepancy between the three communities isclosely related to the attractiveness of the receiving countries. In thecase of the Greeks, Greece, and in the case of the Armenians, Franceand the US served as destination countries. However, as Israel’sfounding still lay in the future (1948), the emigration of Jewish massesawaited the following decade.

Second, the venture of non-Muslim minority emigration from Turkeyevolved in two stages, internal and external. Distressed by theplummeting non-Muslim population of Anatolia, minority peoples firstmoved towards the cosmopolitan environment of bigger cities. There-fore, by the early years of the Republic, the non-Muslim population ofTurkey had gradually concentrated in Istanbul and Izmir. Theseminority peoples turned towards the option of a permanent departureonly after concluding that the first stage would fall well short ofprotecting and promoting their distinct identities in Turkey.

Internal reflections on an external crisis: emigration of minorities in themid-Republican period (1945�80)

In the aftermath of the Second World War, Turkey sided with theWestern world, which was promoting democratic governments andindividual human rights. Hence, the Turkish political system began totransform its autocratic structures towards a liberal-democratic modelof politics. The single-party rule of the Republican People’s Party(RPP) was replaced by a multi-party system, and by 1950 the nationsaw a former opposition party, the Democrat Party (DP), form agovernment. This liberal-democratic transformation of the politicalsystem raised hopes among members of minority groups as well. Itcame to be felt among minority citizens that, in line with the


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substantive principles of the Lausanne commitments, they wouldhenceforth be treated equally in both law and practice (Bali 1998a).

However, it became obvious by the mid-1950s that the democraticcontext would hardly wipe away the traditional ‘other’ position ofTurkey’s non-Muslim minorities. Still, unlike in previous decades, theposition of non-Muslim minorities in the new period began to beshaped not only by nationalist aspirations of internal politics but alsoby the diplomatic crises of external (international) relations. Non-Muslim minorities from time to time suffered socio-political andeconomic consequences within the country whenever Turkish govern-ments faced diplomatic crises abroad. Like eggs caught between twostones, the minorities suffered cracks or were broken whenever thestones moved. They became internal victims whenever there wasserious friction between Ankara and states where their ethnic kinresided. These minorities were seen as a kind of diplomatic tool incoping with the tension at hand.

The first example of this tendency surfaced by the mid-1950s fromstrained Turkish-Greek relations over the issue of Cyprus. As Ankaraand Athens disagreed on the final status of the island, the loyalty ofnon-Muslim minorities, and particularly Greeks, once again began tobe questioned in Turkey. Instead of being Turkish citizens with full andequal rights, members of the Greek minority began to be treated as‘foreign’, ‘unreliable’ residents of the country who were to be expelleden masse (Benlisoy 2000). In 1955, in consequence of the burning inSalonika on 6�7 September of the house where Ataturk was born, anti-Greek violence over the Cyprus dispute erupted in Istanbul and Izmir,and then spilled over to Jewish-owned businesses. Angry crowds inIstanbul and Izmir, inflamed by the Cyprus crisis, attacked thecultural, religious and economic presence of minorities.19 Thesemobs were reined in only after the government declared martial law.A number of Turkish nationalists were arrested and taken into custodyin the incident’s aftermath.

In contrast to widely shared expectations that minorities wouldbenefit from democratic transformation, the affair highlighted thetraditional and continued vulnerability of minorities in Turkey.Because of this, the civilian attacks provoked emotional upheaval,regret, resentment and fear among minorities while encouraging manyArmenian and Jewish minorities to opt to flee Turkish soil. Indeed,although definite figures are unfortunately lacking, estimates indicatethat an increasing number of minorities with Turkish nationality soldtheir property and moved abroad in the aftermath of the violence(Alexandris 1992, pp. 42�4; Celik 2000).

This incident operated, in practice, as an instrument for endingparticularly the Greek presence in Turkey. The last blow to the Greekminority fell in 1964, when the Turkish government cancelled the


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Ankara Agreement (1930), pact which had granted legal status tomore than 17,000 Greek citizens living in Istanbul, the so-called etablisGreeks (Gonlubol and Sar 1974, pp. 68�9).20 Although they legallyheld Greek citizenship and, in principle, were subject to the populationexchange, in fact they had been permitted to stay in Istanbul as theresult of commercial and family connections. While remaining, manyof them had engaged in intermarriages, joint investments and socialand religious activities with other Turkish citizens of Greek descent.By the 1960s, their parents and children, and grandparents andgrandchildren, had come to retain different citizenships (Demir andAkar 1999, p. 90).

The terms of the Ankara Agreement were generally observed untilthe middle of the 1960s. The 1960 London-Zurich accords, whichestablished a partnership government in Cyprus, seemed to furtherconsolidate the status of Turkey’s Greek citizens. However, when in1960 the Greek Cypriots became involved in enosis policies (i.e.seeking political union with Greece) in violation of the Zurich-Londonaccords, diplomatic relations between the two Cypriot communities’motherlands were also exacerbated (Bahcheli 1990, pp. 51�94). Theimmediate effects of this were felt in the shaky position of Turkey’sGreek minority, particularly that of the etablis Greeks (Demir andAkar 1999, pp. 64�7).21

The government cancelled the Ankara Agreement on 16 March1964 and began to deport etablis Greeks from Turkey on the groundsthat they threatened the internal and external security of the country.In a few months, approximately 9,000 Greek citizens were obliged toleave Turkey for Greece (Bahcheli 1990, p. 174). As of September 1964,after the government refused to renew the residence permits of Greekcitizens, this number exceeded 11,000 (Human Rights Watch 1992,p. 9). Nor were these expulsion measures confined to Greek citizens.Due to the family and economic ties that many deportees hadestablished with Turkish citizens of Greek origin, deportation of oneGreek citizen often resulted, in practice, in the uprooting of the wholefamily. This is why the impact of the government’s decision farexceeded its original aim. Implementation of the expulsions meantthat, apart from Greek citizens, 30,000 Turkish nationals of Greekdescent permanently left Turkey (Human Rights Watch 1992, p. 9).Thus, despite the fact that most of them fell under the scope of theLausanne regime, the abrogation of the Ankara Agreement resulted inthe expulsion of more than 40,000 Greeks.

The impetus of that official action was a diplomatic push to forcethe Greek government to come to terms with the Cyprus question(Demir and Akar 1999, p. 201�2). Thus, the fate of the Greek residentsof Istanbul took shape under the shadow of Turkish-Greek diplomatictensions. After the population exchange, the expulsion became the


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second great wave in the emigration of Greek minorities. Although nodirect link was officially expressed between the distinct issues ofminority rights and external relations, the persistence of diplomatictension between Athens and Ankara affected the educational facilitiesof non-Muslim minorities as well. The most obvious example of thisgovernment attitude, with far-reaching implications for the Turkishminority rights regime, was the closure of the Theological Seminary ofKhalki (Heybeliada Ruhban Okulu) in 1971. The seminary, located onHeybeli Island in the Istanbul Straits, had been the centre of Orthodoxecclesiastical training for centuries. In consequence, the decisionaffected the educational capacity of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate.It is for this reason that since the early 1990s, the restoration of theinstitution to its original position has occupied a prominent place inminority rights issues in Turkey (Oran 2001, p. 451).22

Furthermore, during the 1970s and 1980s, attacks on Turkishinstitutions and diplomats by the Armenian Secret Army for theLiberation of Armenia (ASALA) served particularly to degrade thesocial position of Turkey’s Armenian minority.23 Under the influenceof ASALA terrorism and mounting Turkish-Greek tension, thecorporate power of foundations came to be seen as dangerous toTurkey’s national interests. The Council of State issued a legal rulingtwo months before Turkey’s July 1974 intervention in Cyprus that,‘since corporate bodies are likely to be stronger than privateindividuals, no corporate body constituted by non-Turkish citizenscan obtain real estate. Otherwise, it would be impossible to prevent theemergence of untoward and dangerous conditions for the security ofthe state’ (Cumhuriyet Dergi 1999). It was in this context thatgovernment authorities began to liquidate real estate belonging tothe corporate entities of minorities’ religious foundations. The legalgrounds of the official action were based on property lists that bothMuslim and non-Muslim foundations had been required to submit in1936.24 The government recognized the list of the 1936 declaration asthe genuine property of a given foundation. Thus, although over theyears between 1936 and 1974 religious foundations of non-Muslimminorities had obtained new properties, whether donated or pur-chased, all of these properties acquired in the intervening decades wereconsidered illegal. The properties, therefore, were either confiscated orreturned to the heirs of those who had donated them to the foundation(Oran 2001, p. 229).25

As for conditions needed for the protection and promotion of non-Muslim minority distinctions, the consequences of the confiscationwent well beyond mere economics. Without a doubt, the liquidationcaused severe financial stress or the collapse of foundations that hadhitherto relied heavily on revenues earned from renting out theproperties. Moreover, as the religious foundations lost these properties,


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their ability to perform communal services in the areas of religion,education and charity was also crippled. Bearing this fact in mind, ithas been rightly argued that the post-1974 acts on the communalproperties indicated, in practice, not only the violation of propertyrights but also educational rights. Indeed, having lost their financialresources, in addition to several community hospitals, many minorityschools were gradually closed down (Sık 2002).

Independent of the acts of Turkish authorities, another externaldevelopment that affected minority emigration was the 1948 foundingof a Jewish state in Palestine.26 Although the establishment of Israeldid not take the form of a crisis vis-a-vis Turkey, the new state didbecome a destination country for Turkey’s Jewish minority. Thus, theimmediate post-1948 mass emigration wave to Israel was due more toIsrael’s own immense attractive power than anything in Turkey itself(Weiker 1988, p. 23).27 In the great wave of 1948�51, a total of 34,500Jews � making up nearly 40 per cent of the Jewish community inTurkey at the time � emigrated to Israel (Benbassa and Rodrigue 2001,p. 386; Central Bureau of Statistics 2003). In response to objectionsfrom Arab countries, in November 1948, Ankara suspended emigra-tion permits, however that decision was reversed after Turkey officiallyrecognized Israel in March 1949. It was in the aftermath of that datethat a breakneck rush ensued, with around 26,000 going that yearalone. This wave continued in 1950 with 2,500 emigrants, and in 1951with 1,300. By early 1951, the massive wave of Jewish emigration wascompleted (Weiker 1988, pp. 21�2).28

Although slowed down in the post-1951 period, the emigration ofJews to Israel continued, but the subsequent emigrations were smallerand show fluctuations by period (Tekeli 1990, p. 63). From 1951 to1980 another 24,000 made their way to the Jewish state, for a total of58,609 (Central Bureau of Statistics 2003). The number of emigrantsswelled during and just after the Turkish political and economicturmoil, but the kin-state attraction on the side of Israel remainedstable (Franz 1994, p. 333). For instance, following the 6�7 September1955 Incidents, the number of emigrants climbed to over 1,700 in 1956and to more than 1,900 in 1957, as compared to just 339 in 1955(Weiker 1988, p. 22). Similarly, after Turkey’s 1960 military interven-tion, the number of emigrants shot up from 387 that year to 1,829 in1961 and 968 in 1962. The 1964 conflict in Cyprus between Turks andGreeks also led to a spike in the number of Jewish emigrants, whichrose above 1,000 in both 1964 and 1965. The number of Jewishemigrants also rose above 2,000 for the four years from 1969 to 1972 asa result of both the 1971 military intervention and economic woes.29

Also, when street violence among Turkish leftist and rightist groupsreached its worst level in 1979�80, leading to the military intervention


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of 12 September 1980, the number of Jewish emigrants rose to nearly1,000 per year (Weiker 1988, p. 22).

Thus, apart from minority-specific policies and practices, the samegroups were also affected by the internal socio-political circumstancesof the period. When external tensions were aggravated by internalcrises, including military interventions, left-right cleavages, civilviolence and economic problems, the contextual outcome, in additionto the founding of Israel, served as a spur to minority emigration,which can be traced through the diminishing population of minoritiesin census figures.

By 1955, the National Census counted 87,000 Greeks, 60,000Armenians and 46,000 Jews, making up a total of 193,000. This figurecorrelated to 0.8 per cent of the 24 million total population (GeneralDirectorate of Statistics 1961). Compared to the 1945 Census, thenumbers point to a decline of 17,000 in the Greek population and31,000 in the Jewish population. The size of the Armenian populationremained stable. As we have discussed, the main reason for the declinein Jewish population was the establishment of Israel. The Greeksemigrated mainly due to the impact of the Cyprus crisis.

The 1965 Census results confirm a similar declining tendency inminority populations. Altogether, there were 178,000 minorities,constituting nearly 0.6 per cent of the total 31.4 million population.Owing to natural increases by birth, the Armenian population by andlarge maintained its size with 64,000. Jewish migration, on the otherhand, had continued steadily since 1955 and by the 1965 Census, therewere 38,000 Jews left in the country (see Table 1). Many Greeks movedto Greece after the 6�7 September Incidents, leaving behind apopulation of 76,000 (General Directorate of Statistics 1969).

After 1965, the Turkish Census questionnaire was changed, and thefirst question on religion was eliminated five years later. Since the 1985Census no questions related to mother tongue or the language spokenat home have been asked. Interestingly, after 1965 the census data onlanguage categories were not published, even though questions on thiswere included in the questionnaire. This was mainly due to increasingnational sensitivity about the Kurdish issue. Consequently, dataregarding the post-1965 size and changes in the Muslim and non-Muslim make-up of the Turkish population are lacking. Despite theabsence of official statistics, sociological and anthropological observa-tions of non-Muslim communities provide a basis for the assumptionthat the 1970s witnessed the most significant declines in Greek andArmenian populations due to emigration. In this decade, Greekemigration speeded up with the 1964 abrogation of the AnkaraAgreement and continued throughout the 1970s, as discussed above.On the other hand, the disruption of the natural Armenian populationsize awaited the crisis of the ASALA attacks, when many Turkish


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Armenians, who increasingly found themselves in an anxious state, leftTurkey. Jewish migration to Israel continued in the 1970s, but this wasmainly due to the violent cleavage between leftists and rightists at thetime. The military intervention of 1980 not only ended a phase inTurkish politics but also ushered in a new era that inherited a verysmall minority population.

Emergence of multicultural politics: non-Muslim minorities as a signifierof the new social vision (1980�2005)

Political violence between ‘leftist’ and ‘rightist’ groups, stemming fromthe ideological fragmentation and societal polarization of the 1970s,culminated in 1980 with a military intervention. In 1982, the militaryregime replaced the 1961 Constitution with a new one. The newConstitution aimed at a major restructuring of Turkish democracy toprevent any recurrence of the recent domestic crises (Heper 1990). Tothis end, individual rights were for the most part restrained while itlimited the rights of labour and other interest groups and barred tradeunions, associations and cooperatives from engaging in politicalactivities.

In the early 1980s, the emigration status of non-Muslim minoritiesin Turkey was indirectly affected by 1981 changes to the TurkishCitizenship Law. As noted by Soyarık (2000, p. 189), there was a large-scale loss of citizenship by non-Muslim Turkish citizens for thereasons set out in Article 25 of the 1981 Citizenship Law. Under thisarticle, the Council of Ministers may rule that the following personshave lost their Turkish citizenship: (1) those who have acquired foreigncitizenship without obtaining permission, (2) males living abroad whoare called by the authorities to do their military service but fail to doso within three months without excuse. These provisions wereapparently often used as a kind of policy to make permanent theemigration of non-Muslim citizens living abroad.

The spirit of the 1982 Constitution sought to put an end to thepolitical fragmentation of Turkish society which had dominated theprevious decade. In place of ideological extremism, the militaryinitially introduced Islam as the remedy for promoting social andpolitical stability as well as national unity (Bora and Can 1991). Astronger emphasis began to be put upon the concept of a Turkish-Islamic synthesis, which presumed that Turkishness and Islamism werecomplementary aspects in the fabric of Turkish nationalism (Bora1998). The policy change took place in the arena of education, wheremandatory courses with a content based upon Islamic ethics and theSunni sect were introduced into the curriculum of primary schools.30 Awidespread increase appeared in religious sentiment, publications andeducation alike (Salt 1995).


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The unitary function of the Turkish-Islamic synthesis, however, fellshort of securing national unity even among the Turkish-Muslimcitizens of the country. Quite the contrary, the imagined unity of theTurkish nation entered a process of disintegration along the lines ofethno-cultural cleavages. It was in this context that particularisticclaims of ethnic-Kurdish, Alevi-sectarian and fundamental-Islamistgroups came to occupy Turkey’s political agenda. While seeking toliberate the religious sphere from state interference, Islamist groups,for example, projected an Islamic version of a ‘social contract’modelled upon practices of the ‘golden age’ of religion (Bulac 1992).Turkish citizens of Kurdish origin, on the other hand, came to showgreater interest in the issues of official recognition, legal-politicalaccommodation and the free expression of ethno-linguistic traits,particularly in the fields of education, radio/TV broadcasting andcultural activities (Ekinci 1997). Additionally, non-Muslim minoritiesbegan to introduce retrospective criticisms against non-egalitarianpractices of the Republican regime, and sought ways to accomplishsubstantive reforms that would relieve their ‘second-class’ position inthe country (Levi 1998; Saul 1999; Bali 2000).

Thus, with the ideological bases of social confrontation fading away,ethno-cultural differentiation began to dominate Turkish minds.Parallel to these internal developments, the end of the Cold Warunleashed minority problems all over Europe in the 1990s, problemsthat had lain dormant within the bipolar atmosphere of the previousdecades. The issue of equal accommodation of minority distinctionswithin a pluralistic configuration of legal-political settings came topreoccupy national and international circles for both security andhumanitarian reasons (Liebich 1996). The 1993 Copenhagen Summitof the EU Council affirmed that EU candidate countries must haveachieved, before accession, among other criteria, the stability ofinstitutions guaranteeing democracy, the rule of law, human rightsand respect for and protection of minorities (Verheugen 2000).

With the intensification of Turkish-EU relations, Turkish govern-ments became more prone to increasing international pressures on theissues of democratization and minority protection (Toktas 2005).Starting from 1998, for example, the EU Commission’s annual reportshave included comprehensive assessment of the prevailing condition ofminority treatment and the legal-political status of sub-nationaldifferences in Turkey. Generally speaking, drawing attention to thetraditional shortcomings of minority protection in Turkey, the reportshave insisted on the extension of official recognition from three alreadycovered non-Muslim communities (Armenians, Greeks and Jews) tothe Kurdish, Alevi and Assyrian groups. To this end, it was insistedthat both Muslim and non-Muslim sections of minority groups were to


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be provided with legal-political instruments through which they couldpromote and protect their distinct identities.31

Notwithstanding the driving impacts of the 1990s’ internal andexternal developments that created socio-political and diplomaticpressures on the Turkish governments to review traditional practiceswith regard to minority issues, officials in Turkey have long tended toassociate the question of minority rights with its external dimension inthose traditional categories of external interference, disloyal acts andsecessionist aspirations. At first instance, the EU standards ofminority rights, therefore, were largely received in official circles withgreat suspicion as if they would open a Pandora’s Box in the country,paving the way for national and territorial disintegration of theRepublican state (Mete 1998, p. 18). More specifically, the act ofgranting public recognition to group-specific distinctions of bothMuslim and non-Muslim groupings was generally considered anattempt destined to restore the highly destructive provisions of theTreaty of Sevres that were defeated at Lausanne (Demirel 1998).

However, the standards of the EU integration process strengthenedthe leverage of ethno-cultural claims within the country. Under thepressures of EU integration and increasing internal claims to culturalidentity, the issue of minority rights has, over time, taken a centralplace in Turkish politics with a focus on what the fundamentals ofTurkish citizenship should be. In this context, the concept ofconstitutional citizenship was viewed as a solution which wouldensure internal peace as well as respect foreign policy considerationsof the state (Soyarık 2000, p. 202). The concept has represented a kindof social contract safeguarding the recognition of different ethnic andreligious groups whose loyalty to the state would supersede theprinciple of loyalty to the nation (Icduygu 1996; Keyder 1997). Thisindicates that legal-political ramifications of the constitutional bondwould be fashioned as a value-neutral ground of identification for theTurkish population without prejudicing any one section of Turkish-Muslim or non-Muslim citizens. In this view, the constitution wasexpected to operate as an integrative mechanism through whichnationals of the country would be subsumed into a common politywithout divorcing themselves from their ethno-linguistic, sectarian andreligious particularities (Icduygu, Colak and Soyarık 1999, p. 192).Thereby, the state would cease to be the representative institution of asingle ethno-linguistic and religious community of citizens but wouldmake room for the free expression of particular differences inprotecting and promoting minorities’ cultural and linguistic features.

Although constitutional citizenship was suggested primarily as apossible solution to the Kurdish problem or the Islamic question, italso had implications for non-Muslim minorities. Turkish practiceshad hitherto established a close link between two notions of citizen-


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ship, namely equality and nationality. The full and complete scope ofTurkish citizenship has been reserved to the privilege of ‘nationalcitizens’, which has involved Turkish-Muslim citizens irrespective ofethno-linguistic distinctions. Although non-Muslim minorities havebeen considered within the formal scope of Turkish citizenship,because of the nationality-citizenship connection they have, at times,been subjected to unequal treatment through legal-political andeconomic policies, while the same understanding had inhibited thelegal-political expression and accommodation of Muslim distinctions.

Partly under the impact of EU integration and partly in response tointernal claims centred on the rise of ethno-cultural concerns anddebates on constitutional citizenship, significant steps have been taken inthe direction of creating a legal-political basis for a pluralistic setting inthe country (Toktas 2006a). In the 1990s, although Turkey continued toresist enlarging the existing framework of minority rights, the standardsrequired by EU integration came to be recognized within the context ofindividual rights and freedoms. In 2002, major constitutional amend-ments were introduced. Under them, it became legal to broadcast inminority languages and dialects used traditionally by many Turkishcitizens in their daily lives. Although the official language of education inthe schools remained Turkish, special courses for different languagesand dialects were thenceforth allowed. The Law on Religious Founda-tions was also amended. Foundations run by non-Muslim minoritieswere allowed to acquire and dispose of property.32 The year after, theestablishment of new synagogues and churches was also allowed afterthe wording of the Law on Public Works was altered by replacing theword ‘mosques’ with the ecumenical ‘places of worship’.

Notwithstanding their shortcomings, the reforms have improved thelegal-political standing of minority distinctions in Turkey. Yet, non-Muslim minorities continue to face problems, particularly due to theabsence of legal recognition of religious foundations as well asrestrictions on the training of clergy. Since it has not been consideredwithin the scope of the Lausanne regime, the Assyrian community, forexample, has not yet been permitted to have its own educationalestablishments and, consequently, has no legal ability to teach itsliturgical language to its youth. Similarly, although they havetraditionally been considered within the terms of the minority statusand treated accordingly, the Greek-Orthodox and Armenian commu-nities have not yet been permitted to establish theological schools toeducate clergy. For example, government authorities have not yetpermitted the re-opening of the Orthodox Seminary of Khalki, whichhas been closed since 1971.

However, the latest government measures signify that the Turkishnation-building process no longer proceeds in an exclusionist mannerin terms of minority distinctions but has come to cover ethno-cultural


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differences within a pluralistic framework of a political formula ofnationhood. The traditional connection, which had hitherto existedbetween nationality and citizenship and which had constituted a primeimpetus in drawing a national portrait of the cultural unity of theTurkish-Muslim citizens of the country, underwent a comprehensivetransformation. This transformation not only opened the doors widefor granting official recognition to intra-Muslim diversity but alsofostered equal accommodation of non-Muslim minorities.

Without a doubt, as they credited the grounds of ethno-culturaldiversity in Turkey, the post-1980 developments removed many of thefactors promoting the emigration of non-Muslim minorities. However,attempts towards creating a Turkish nation of Turkish-Muslim citizenshad already resulted in the gradual homogenization of the populationin terms of religious affiliation as many of the non-Muslim minoritiesmoved out. Coming into the 1990s, the proportion of the latter groupof citizens in the general population had declined to 0.2 per cent.According to estimates from the early 1990s, apart from earliermigrations, during the last three decades, over 20,000 Armenians,23,000 Jews and more than 55,000 Greeks had emigrated from Turkey(Franz 1994, p. 331). Today, community sources count no more than50,000 Armenian, 27,000 Jewish and 3,000 Greek minorities leftbehind (Dundar 2000, p. 138) (see Table 1). Interestingly enough, it isestimated that under normal demographic conditions, non-Muslimminorities in Turkey would have numbered today around 1.2 millionhad they not emigrated (Courbage and Fargues 1998, p. 115).

Concluding remarks

As far as the status of non-Muslims is concerned, today the mainimpediment to the modern Turkish nation-state restructuring itself asan entity that accommodates religious and ethnic diversities is thepersistence of the ideas of ‘political integrity’ and ‘organic society’ asthe central political ethos and the purpose of the state. However, thepolitics of state-society relationship of the past decade has beenmoulded by events challenging the current idea of a minority rightsregime in the country. Among several factors, the revival of ethnic andreligious identities and Turkey’s EU membership prospect have been ofparticular significance. Both of these developments have been issuesquestioning and challenging the current status of non-Muslims inTurkey. In accordance with these challenges, new modalities ofminority rights regime have been suggested along with the likelihoodof a new understating of the notions of nation-state and citizenship inour globalized world.

The process and transformation of nation-building in Turkey entailtwo major characteristics concerning the status of non-Muslim mino-


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rities. First, the dual formulation of Turkish citizenship has operated inan assimilationist manner with respect to Turkish-Muslim elements.Since they have historically represented ethno-cultural others of theTurkish-Muslim population, the same formula has shown an exclusivistattitude towards members of the non-Muslim minorities. The demo-graphic, linguistic, cultural and economic policies of nation-buildinghave, therefore, advanced at the expense of non-Muslim minorities’ethno-cultural, demographic and economic presence in the country.

Second, the inherent linkage that was constituted between nationaland religious identity has also affected the citizenship position ofTurkey’s non-Muslim minorities. The nation-building process hasusually gone hand-in-hand with the construction of modern citizen-ship. Thus, although the three non-Muslim groups � the Armenians,Greeks and Jews � were granted a secure position under the 1923Treaty of Lausanne, the policy practices of the Republican governmenthave often created two categories of citizenry: ‘national’ and ‘non-national’ citizens. It was because of this outsider position in themainstream identity category that non-Muslims minorities have oftenopted for emigration ever since the lands of Turkey felt the impact ofmodern nationalism. Putting aside the inflow of Muslims from formerOttoman lands to Turkey, particularly from the Balkans and theCaucasus, the outflow of non-Muslims out of Turkey has contributedto the emergence of a demographic, that is ‘national’ Islamization’ inmodern Turkey. It was this process that created today’s widely usedcharacterization of Turkey as ‘a Muslim country because of its 99 percent Muslim population’. This indeed, runs contrary to the demo-graphic profile presented on the eve of the Republic, as the size of thenon-Muslim population in Turkey today amounts to no more than0.14 per cent out of over 70 million in total.

As recent European Union-based reforms bring about a substantialtransformation in the traditional parameters of the Turkish minorityrights regime, it seems that a system of equality within ethno-culturaldiversity will gradually replace the dual practices of the Turkish regime(Icduygu and Soner, 2006, p. 464). Post-Cold-War Turkish politics,particularly from the outset of the twenty-first century, is paving theway for a regime which is more responsive to both Muslim and non-Muslim minority distinctions. However, it is still not overly easy toclaim that universal principles of equality and non-discrimination,embedded in the modern concept of citizenship status, are implemen-ted fully in the Turkish context with regard to the treatment of non-Muslim minorities. As a country ‘whose state-centric politics has beenfacing a strong legitimacy and governing crisis, and whose social andcultural life has been generating identity-based conflict’ (Keyman andIcduygu 2005, p. 1), today Turkey has to make a crucial decision aboutthe future of its non-Muslim minorities. These political dynamics are


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forcing Turkey to decide either to shake itself radically in such a way asto alter its minorities-related policies and practices in a democratic andliberal form or to decide once again to keep its state-centric andnationalist stand towards pluralism. Although the latter choice hasbeen the dominant tendency in the political culture of Turkey fordecades, today, in the context of EU accession process, there is a greatand realistic possibility for the reforms which may stop the diminutionof the presence of non-Muslims in the country.

Notes

1. Throughout this article, while the terms ‘Muslims’ and ‘Islam’ are sometimes used

interchangeably, we are aware of the fact that referring in blanket terms to Islam and

Muslims poses some problems. Therefore here one must note that at both theoretical and

empirical levels, while the term ‘Muslims’ is often justified as a collective self-ascriptive label,

the term ‘Islam’ in fact covers a huge variety of practices, from the secular to the

fundamentalist, and of course in Turkey from Sunnis to Alevis in terms of religious grouping.

2. In this essay, the term ‘minority’ refers to officially recognized minority groups in

Turkey. The minority rights regime in Turkey carries the legacy of the Ottoman millet system

as codified in Articles 37�45 of the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne. The Ottoman millet system had

granted recognition and protection to three major non-Muslim communities, i.e. the Greeks,

Armenians and Jews. In a similar vein, the Lausanne framework recognized the same groups

as the country’s minority populations. Thus, smaller churches of the East, including

Assyrians, were neither taken into the context of the traditional millet system nor granted

official recognition in modern Turkey.

3. A number of studies on citizenship and nationalism in Turkey illustrate the periodic

shifts in the definition and content of ‘Turk’ (Bora 1998; Kirisci 2000; Soyarık 2000; Toktas

2006b).

4. For a comprehensive elaboration of the ethnic and religious diversity of the population

in Turkey, see Andrews (1989).

5. The emigration of Muslims from Turkey is a relatively new phenomenon. Unlike the

British, Germans, Italians, Greeks, Chinese or Indians, for example, the Muslim Turks had

no particular history of large-scale emigration in modern times until after the signing of the

bilateral 1961 Turkish-West German agreement, which initially permitted Turkish men to

enter West Germany on temporary one-year work contracts and was later expanded to

permit the entry of women and families.

6. Only over the last decade or so has Turkey been increasingly confronted with the

migration of non-Muslims coming from neighbouring countries, largely to find temporary

informal employment or to use Turkey as a transit zone to go to the countries in the West.

7. For a detailed elaboration of the Alevis in Turkey, see, for instance, Shankland (2003b).

8. As elaborated in detail by Yıldız (1998), the first articulation of these three dominant

currents of thought, ‘the three ways of policy’, was by Yusuf Akcura, a prominent figure of

pan-Turkism.

9. Some aspects of this type of argument are very clear in Kazancıgil (1981) and Meeker

(2002).

10. In the same census Bulgarians numbered 135,887, for a share of 0.9 per cent of the total

population (Karpat 1985, pp. 148�9).

11. In the related literature, the notion of ‘fifth-column activities’ refers to a group of

persons inside the battle lines of a territory engaged in a conflict, who secretly sympathize

with the enemy, and who engage in espionage or sabotage � sometimes also referred to as a

‘Trojan horse’.


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12. Here one should note that the tragic events of the forced migration and mass killings of

Armenians in Anatolia in 1915�16 caused the unresolved issue of the long-standing

‘genocide’ claims of Armenians and their rejection by Turks.

13. Some of the figures given by Selek (1987) are significantly lower than the related figures

given by other sources; for instance, various sources give the number of Greeks as over 1.2�1.5 million in the period 1914�20 and the total number of Muslims more than 11 million.

14. Between the second half of the nineteenth century and the years of the War of

Independence, around 5.5 million Muslims arrived in today’s Turkish lands from the

Balkans, the Caucasus and Crimea (Kirisci 1996, p. 385).

15. During the later stages of the War of Independence, some Greeks in the Black Sea

region, specifically the Pontiac Greeks, fled to Istanbul, thus raising the size of the city’s

Greek population.

16. The law mainly served to relocate Kurdish tribes in eastern and south-eastern Anatolia

in response to then-ongoing Kurdish rebellions (Kirisci and Winrow 1997).

17. It should be mentioned that the Turkish census did not make categorizations on the

basis of recognized minority groups. Instead it covered the religious and linguistic breakdown

of the non-Muslim population. Although the majority of Armenians in Turkey were

Gregorian, there were also Catholic and Protestant Armenians. Similarly, among the Greeks,

there were Protestants as well. Therefore, the figures here were arrived at by distributing

different sects into the three major non-Muslim groups.

18. The 1930 Ankara Agreement between the Turkish and Greek governments provided

that, regardless of their birthplace and nationality, all Greeks living in Istanbul were granted

the right of residence.

19. The damage in Istanbul included 1,004 houses, 4,348 shops, twenty-seven pharmacies

and laboratories, twenty-one factories, 110 restaurants, a number of cafes and hotels,

seventy-three churches, twenty-six schools, five sports clubs and two cemeteries (Alexandris

1992, pp. 259). In Izmir, the attacks destroyed fourteen houses, six shops, one pavilion, the

Greek Consulate and a Greek church. It was reported that fifty-seven persons were wounded

in the same city (Kılıcdere 2000).

20. The Greek citizens of Istanbul numbered 26,431 in 1927, 17,672 in 1935, 13,598 in 1945

and 11,879 in 1955 (Alexandris 1992, p. 281).

21. In July 1964, government spokesman M. Soysal, announced:

In response to the unfriendly policy of the Greek government, the Turkish government

has decided to terminate the privileged treatment that has been accorded to Greek

nationals in Turkey. . . . Unless the Greek government changes its prevailing attitude

related to the Cyprus question, all Greek nationals in Istanbul may be expelled en

masse’ (Alexandris 1992, p. 282).

22. In the context of Turkey’s European Union membership bid, the question of how

Turkey is handling the issue of reopening Heybeliada seminary has been hotly debated in

recent years, and in 2004 some argued that Ankara favoured reopening the school for

Orthodox priests. One should note that the European Union often criticizes Turkey for

failing to ensure the religious freedoms of non-Muslim minorities.

23. ASALA staged eighty-six attacks against Turkish nationals between the years of 1975

and 1985, resulting in the deaths of forty-seven Turkish citizens, thirty-two of whom were

officials, and the injuries of nineteen other officials (Franz 1994, p. 327).

24. In order to put the economic resources of religious foundations � particularly those of

non-Muslims � under state control, the Law on Religious Foundations (Vakıflar Kanunu),

dated 1936, required these foundations to declare a list of properties in their possession.

25. It was asserted that (in a secret declaration) the militarily ruled government made

assurances in 1981 that no further action would be taken against the property of non-Muslim

minorities’ religious foundations (Acan 1999). However, the law remained in force and the


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confiscation remained permanent, especially of the properties belonging to Armenian

foundations (Oran 2001, p. 229).

26. For an in-depth elaboration of Jewish immigration from Turkey to Israel, see Toktas

(2006a).

27. It must also be noted that Jews immigrated to countries other than Israel. According to

one estimate, between 1948 and 1973 around 20,000 Jews immigrated to nations such as

France and Austria, as well as countries in the Americas (Liberles 1984, p. 141).

28. Not all the Jews in this emigration wave ultimately remained in Israel. In the mid-1950s,

10 per cent of the total immigrants returned to Turkey. Some returnees later re-migrated

from Turkey to other countries in Europe and North and South America (Benbassa and

Rodrigue 2001, p. 386).

29. It should be noted that the 1967 Arab-Israeli Six-Day War that ended with Israel’s

victory also drew some of Turkey’s Jews to move to Israel. It was not only the pride felt in

winning a war in just six days that attracted many Jews worldwide, but also that Israel’s

economy moved into a period of development and prosperity after the war.

30. It was only in 1987 that Christians and Jews were excused from these lessons, and in

1990 they were completely freed from any obligation to participate in classes on religion or

ethics (Franz 1994, p. 333).

31. Such a point has been emphasized in the most recent regular report on Turkey released

by the Commission as well (EU Commission 2005).

32. Throughout the implementation of the confiscations, foundations of the Greek

minority lost 152 of their properties, Armenian minority foundations lost forty-eight and

Assyrian foundations lost six. Today, the religious foundations of non-Muslim minorities

have 165 properties (77 Greek, 52 Armenian, 10 Assyrian, 19 Jewish, 1 Bulgarian, 3

Chaldean and 2 Georgian) (Sık 2002). After the amendment was adopted, complications

arose. Religious foundations run by non-Muslim minorities were allowed to register property

that they actually used as long as they could provide proof of ownership. However, the

procedures for registration were complicated and subject to frequent bureaucratic interven-

tion. Furthermore, the amendment did not cover the authority of the General Directorate of

Foundations to dismiss the board of trustees. The amendment also failed to address the

question of the already confiscated properties of non-Muslim foundations. The problems

related to bureaucratic procedures were resolved with additional decrees in 2003.

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AHMET ICDUYGU is Professor in the Department of InternationalRelations, Koc University, Istanbul, Turkey.ADDRESS: Department of International Relations, Koc University,Rumeli Feneri Yolu, 34450, Sariyer, Istanbul, Turkey. Email: aicduygu @ku.edu.tr

SULE TOKTAS is Assistant Professor in the Department of Interna-tional Relations, Isik University, Istanbul, Turkey.


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ADDRESS: Department of International Relations, Isik University,34980, Sile, Istanbul, Turkey. Email: [email protected]

B. ALI SONER is Assistant Professor in the Department of Mediaand Communications, Izmir University of Economics, Izmir, Turkey.ADDRESS: Department of Media and Communications, lzmirUniversity of Economics, Sakarya Caddesi, No. 156, 35330, Balcova,lzmir. Email: [email protected]
