wfn.org | Churches Are Still Maintaining Uneasy Silence About Kurds' Plight

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17-March-1999 
99112 
 
    Churches Are Still Maintaining 
    Uneasy Silence About Kurds' Plight 
 
    by Alexa Smith 
 
LOUISVILLE, Ky. - Perhaps it is only Kurds who are not surprised that North 
American churches say so little about the Kurds, an ethnic group that some 
call the largest in the world without a country to call home. 
 
    It's not much of a surprise to Mike Amatay, the director of the 
Washington Kurdish Institute, who has - like most of the world's 25 million 
Kurds - grown used to the quiet. 
 
    "The silence probably reflects the general silence," Amatay told the 
Presbyterian News Service in a telephone interview from his Washington, 
D.C., office. 
 
    Amatay said he believes the use of the word "terrorist" to describe the 
recently arrested Abdullah Ocalan's Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) has 
muzzled international criticism of the Turkish government's treatment of 
Kurds living in southeastern Turkey. 
 
    Yet, in a professed campaign to oust PKK guerillas - of which about 
8,000 remain - Turkish security forces have razed more than 3,000 Kurdish 
villages since 1992, killing more than 40,000 people and forcing thousands 
of other into exile - with almost no international outcry in response. 
 
    Silence about such atrocities, Kurdish activists argue, further weakens 
Kurds in Turkey, who are already forbidden to teach their language, form 
political parties or develop their historical lands. 
 
    "There is support from progressive church elements who support peace 
and activists," Amatay said. "Establishment [churches] remain somewhat 
silent; they don't want to rock any major political boats or leave 
themselves open for any possible reprisals in Turkey." 
 
    Mainline church officials in the United States uncomfortably 
acknowledge that they have been quiet about the repression of Kurdish 
political or cultural identity -  not just the 15 or so million Kurds 
living in Turkey, but also about the one million in northeastern Syria, the 
four million in northwestern Iran and the approximately five million in 
northern Iraq. 
 
      Kurds have lived as an unwelcome minority in those countries since 
the end of World War I, when the Allies reneged on a promise to establish 
an independent Kurdish state 
 
    The silence of U.S. churches cannot be explained merely as an 
unwillingness to rock political boats, although there's some truth to that. 
The larger question is not just whether to speak, but whom to speak to ... 
and, of course, what to say.  Church officials insist there are so few 
Kurdish coalitions doing advocacy among non-Kurds that church leaders have 
little access to such a fragmented community. 
 
     But there are ecclesiastical concerns as well -- worries that 
governments in already inhospitable countries may make life difficult for 
Christian minorities there if international churches defend human rights 
for Kurds. 
 
    "We simply have no contacts with the Kurds. ... There's nothing 
comparable to the kinds of linkages that bind U.S. churches to churches to 
the Holy Land among the Kurds," said David Weaver, the National Council of 
Churches' liaison to the Middle East.  There are small evangelical churches 
in some Kurdish towns, he added, but little entree for church officials 
into largely Muslim Kurdish communities. Some Kurdish Christians are 
members of historical Middle Eastern churches as well, such as the Assyrian 
Church of the East in northern Iraq. 
 
    "There's not a substantial Kurdish Christian minority anywhere in the 
world, and certainly not in the U.S.  The Kurds are a big issue in Europe, 
there are so many Kurds there," said Weaver, noting that many left 
impoverished agrarian towns to find jobs in Europe during the post-war 
years. 
 
    "In a general sense, we can say that we promote human rights in Turkey, 
for Kurds and all involved," Weaver said, summing up the NCC's position. 
"We would remain critical of the resort to violence on all sides." 
 
    Such a generic statement is typical of most U.S. churches, including 
the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), whose 1997 "Resolution on the Middle 
East" calls for an end to harsh treatment of Kurds by the Turkish and Iraqi 
governments, but stops short of calling for the independent Kurdistan that 
Ocalan's rebels and other Kurdish activists once sought. 
 
    That goal has been ratcheted down now to an appeal for minority rights. 
The Presbyterian paper urges an end to human-rights abuses committed by 
Kurds against Kurds, and asks for U.S. government, United Nations and 
ecumenical and interfaith intervention to help Kurdish communities develop 
economically, socially and politically.  "But we've not really talked about 
the Kurds ... as far as being a voice," PC(USA) Middle East liaison the 
Rev. Victor Makari told the Presbyterian News Service. 
 
    Advocacy -- usually through statements by coalitions of Christians -- 
has fallen along general lines: including the Kurds in human-rights 
statements, pushing for an end to U.S. weapons sales in the Middle East, 
where some may be turned against Kurdish populations.  The World Council of 
Churches in Geneva did put out a statement on Feb. 19 after Swiss Kurds 
appealed to the general secretary to intercede with Turkish authorities for 
fair treatment of Ocalan, the PKK leader who was captured in Kenya last 
month. 
 
    Most observers cite Turkey's abysmal human-rights record - including 
its jailing and torturing of dissidents - as the reason preventing its 
admission into the European Union.  Of course, historic animosities with 
EU-member Greece don't help.  Nor does 10 years of political instability. 
 
    The WCC has called upon its member churches in Europe to urge their 
respective governments to "seek a peaceful political solution to the plight 
of the Kurdish people." 
 
    "This is one of the great tragedies of contemporary history - a people 
shoved from pillar to post, who've never been able to live comfortably with 
the regimes under which they've lived," said the Rev. Dwain Epps, a WCC 
spokesman.  "Strangely enough, they've come closer in Iraq than anywhere 
else.  The Kurdish population is badly split in violent ways, one from 
another.  There's not always a consistent, coherent Kurdish voice to which 
to respond." 
 
    And the political and ecclesiastical barriers are just as confusing. 
 
    For example, the U.S. Air Force protects sectors of the Kurdish zone in 
northern Iraq, where more than 70 percent of Iraq's oil is pumped.  A 
United Nations force is maintained there to ensure that Saddam Hussein's 
plan to "ethnically cleanse" the province of Kirkuk never gets under way 
again. 
 
    Further, the U.S. has defended part of  its isolation of both Iraq and 
Iran at least partially on the poor treatment of Kurds in those countries. 
Yet, paradoxically, according to the Jan. 4 issue of "The Nation," the U.S. 
supplies more than 80 percent of Turkey's military arsenal and tends to 
treat its "military-dominated regime with kid gloves." 
 
    There is a similar paradox in ecclesiastical circles. In Turkey, for 
instance, both the government forces and the Kurdish opposition make life 
intolerable for other citizens. 
 
    Syrian Orthodox communities and monasteries in the beleaguered 
southeast find themselves caught between two armed camps - the military, 
which has a track record for closely watching those thought to be 
sympathetic to Kurdish nationalism, and the PKK, which, although it 
represents a small faction of Kurds, is capable of inflicting terrible 
pain.  The pressure has become so intense that huge numbers of Turkey's 
Christian population have fled the country - with only an estimated 150,000 
to 160,000 remaining. 
 
    "In the conflict between the Kurds - some of whom are separatists - and 
the Turkish army a lot of Christians have been asked to make their 
allegiance one way or another.  They can't, and they often have to leave," 
said Thomas Abraham, one of the United Church of Christ's (UCC) two 
liaisons to the Middle East in its New York City offices. 
 
    Such pressure worries international church organizations and western 
churches with ties to historic Middle Eastern churches.  Longtime UCC 
Turkish missionary Mel Wittler told the Presbyterian News Service: "If 
there was an international statement of support ... the anxiety on the part 
of churches there is that those churches might be associated [with it] and 
might be considered unfaithful to their country. ... 
 
    "There's the possibility of being misunderstood." 
 
    The UCCs - who first evangelized Turkey as part of the "comity" 
agreement between U.S. Protestants that divvied up the Middle East for 
mission work early in this century - know how much damage such 
misunderstandings can do.  Two bombs have exploded in the denomination's 
Istanbul office, one in 1979 and another in the 1990s, though the motives 
of the bombers have never been identified except as anti-American. 
 
    "The Kurds," Weaver said, "have been used and abused by Israel, the 
U.S., the British, the Turks for the past half-century.  It is a story of 
shifting alliances and sudden betrayals.  They've been pawns more than 
once." 
 
    That is Amatay's argument - that the Turkish government is able to duck 
international criticism by avoiding conversations about more autonomy for 
Kurds and talking instead about dealing with the PKK militarily.  So once 
again the Kurds are singled out for ostracism to serve another nation's 
ends. 
 
    "It stems from the misconceptions that come with the `terrorist' 
label," said Amatay, who believes  the term "terrorist" applies more 
broadly in this conflict.  "I'd consider elements of the Turkish security 
forces a terrorist organization ... burning villages, killing civilians." 
 
    Because Kurdish populations are invisible to most U.S. citizens, 
churches ought to be more vocal on their behalf, said Abraham.  But he 
acknowledged that even his own denomination tends to identify most easily 
with the Turkish Christians, with whom they've been in ministry for a 
century.  "We have the longer history," he said.  "But saying something ... 
That has been muted on our part, too." 

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