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Despite their strong transnational links and support in the second half of the 1990s, Turkish NGOs have not yet had a “tremendous” impact on domestic political and social change. But new points of contact have been established in the public sphere between governmental agencies and the IHV and IHD, with both sides engaged in an argumentative process, which may, in the long run, lead to the subscriptive phase of “human rights talk” and deed. The general tenor of this essay may (...) lend itself to suggesting two prerequisites for establishing such a sustainable human rights regime in this geography: the first is “capacity building”, the other is grounding this regime in an accurate perception of the structures of power, domestic and international, so as to “integrate” the human rights bundle into all aspects of life, at all levels, within all traditions and institutions by empowering the community into the language of human rights. Most of all, integration of human rights into a liberal democratic order requires coming to terms with the past.Capacity building can be defined in different terms: in the words of Mary Robinson, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, it is “facing-up to the bullies.” It is a cliché that the legalistic entrenchment of human rights is sufficient guarantee against their violation. It is almost unrealistic to expect a system to volunteer to set up a human rights regime that will limit and cripple the power it wields. So, what to do? Mary Robinson suggests a “national plan,” as, opposed to fragmented political notions, building a sustainable model with strong bricks and mortar. As Robinson notes, “even where there are plans, plans without effective strategies for implementation are empty vessels.” We could add more: in contexts like Turkey where “special circumstances” provide the pretext for legitimating an anti-human rights discourse, Mary Robinson's national plan's chances of success depend on building a strong survival capacity for any civilian government that works to bring, itself, the urban middle classes, civil society and the military into the realities embedded in human rights. (shrink)

The relationship between Christians and Muslims underwent drastic fluctuations in the former Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century and the modern Republic of Turkey in the twentieth century generally. The dynamic can be described as having been one of sanctioned political communion under the Ottoman regime, outright violence and antagonism in the shadows of WWI, and today reflected in a type of social equilibrium, albeit precarious. Specifically, the paper focuses on adumbrating the modus vivendi that facilitated coexistence between Christians and (...) Muslims over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and how the Christian communities have subsequently remained to this day. For this purpose the three following regions of East Anatolia are examined: Hakkari, Bohtan, and Turabdin. The history of the Christians, once a legally protected and acknowledged minority under the status of dhimma, is first demonstrated in a historical outline of the confederations of Syriac-Nestorian Christians and Muslim Kurds in the Hakkari region. These socio-political compacts – in Kurdish bazikê çepê and bazikê rastê – provided the bulwark for regional stability and security in the nineteenth century. The dawn of colonialism and the coming of American and British Christian missionaries tolled the knell for this positive mechanism for practical coexistence. Second, the Bohtan region is observed. Here, the history of Anatolia’s Christians reflects a similar negative development. For example, during WWI the Aghas protected the Christians from extermination, whereafter the Christians found themselves to have become the personal property of their Muslim protectors. As chances for emigration from Anatolia to Istanbul and Europe opened up, Christians fled their servitude thereby emptying entire towns of Christians. Lastly, in the Turabdin region, parallels can be made with the Hakkari region: Christians and Muslim Kurds also coexisted through confederations. Yet, like Hakkari and throughout East Anatolia, the massacre of Christians by the Kurdish Emir of Cizre in the mid-nineteenth century and mass murders in 1914–1915 precipitated the decline in Christian population in the twentieth century. The paper concludes that the current relationship between Christians and Muslims is one of living next – yet not equal – to one another. (shrink)