US report follows a trend in criticizing Turkey

When Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan reconverted the historic Chora Church, one of Istanbul’s most celebrated Byzantine buildings, and the famed Hagia Sophia into mosques exclusively for Muslim worship last summer, it raised a few eyebrows from church leaders and some Western countries. The move risked deepening religious rifts within the country as a new US State Department report released on Wednesday doubled down on a similar criticism toward Ankara for restricting the rights of non-Muslim religious groups. Religious minorities also had difficulties last year in obtaining exemptions from mandatory religion classes in schools while the Greek Orthodox Halki Seminary remained closed, the report noted. “The government continued not to recognize Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I as the leader of the world’s approximately 300 million Orthodox Christians, consistent with the government’s stance that there was no legal obligation for it to do so,” the report said.

Anna Maria Beylunioglu-Atli, a lecturer in Istanbul, said the problems that Turkey’s religious minorities have been facing are directly linked with the authoritarianism trend in the country, especially over the past five years. “What the religious minorities experienced is the inevitable continuation of the general trend of hate speech and discrimination in line with the rising Islamic rhetoric within the society,” she told Arab News.

Such international reports do not have a transformational effect on Turkish domestic politics anymore, Beylunioglu-Atli said. “What Turkey needs is an indigenous transformation by providing its religious minorities with citizenship rights,” she said.