And every time the Mob puts the pressure on a good man, tries to stop him from doing his duty as a citizen, it’s a crucifixion. And anybody who sits around and lets it happen, keeps silent about something he knows that happened, shares the guilt of it just as much as the Roman soldier who pierced the flesh of our Lord to see if he was dead.”Anyone who spent the same wasted youth as myself inside a darkened cinema watching old movies, will recognize these words as belonging to the battling priest played by Karl Malden in “On the Waterfront” -- a film in which Marlon Brando’s conscience forces him to blow the whistle on the mob that controls the docks. The director, Elia Kazan, was born in Kadiköy, only a few miles from my own İstanbul neighborhood, and Kadiköy (to continue the free association) or the ancient Chalcedon was once the metropolitinate of the current ecumenical patriarchate, Bartholomew -- a man now much in the news.
The patriarch, too, used the word “crucifixion” to describe the agonizingly slow death of the Orthodox community in Turkey -- the appropriation of property and the refusal to allow the theological seminary in Halki on Heybeliada, an island off İstanbul, to resume the training of priests. His words, edited from an interview he gave last spring into a segment for the US news show, 60 Minutes, has managed to jump start the self-righteous anger of many a columnist and prompted a ticking-off from Turkey’s foreign minister, seconded by the president himself.
The most objectionable aspect of the patriarch’s critics is that they use language that only goes to reinforce his complaint that the Greek community is now treated as second-class citizens in a land where they were born. How dare the patriarch use such evocative language to criticize a country in whose military he served yet in which he is somehow still a guest. The coverage in this newspaper has been fair, but one headline “Patriarch Bartholomew talks tough against Turkey” fell into that trap. The column from the editor-in-chief of Today’s Zaman yesterday defending not just the patriarch’s right to speak out but the substance of his remarks, was, therefore, right and timely.
Indeed, the patriarch’s comments seem temperate given the horrifying set of revelations which have emerged even in the months since he gave that interview. This is that there existed within the armed forces something called the “Cage Operation Action Plan” to target Turkey’s minority community, carry out assassinations, all in the interests of prompting a military coup. Even as it is, the patriarch travels with an armed guard.
Of course 60 Minutes could have produced a more rounded report. They traveled to Saint Catherine’s Monastery, Mount Sinai, to retrieve a pledge of tolerance issued [to Christians] by the prophet Muhammad. They could have made a much shorter trip to Grecian Thrace to discover a Turkish minority which also complains of historic ill-treatment. And, of course, those so incensed by the patriarch’s comments might question why the foreign ministry attacks a Turkish citizen for speaking his mind, yet feels it must defend the president of Sudan who stands accused of committing war crimes.
It was not all that long ago that we witnessed the persecution of Hrant Dink, the editor of an Armenian newspaper who tried to call for modern Turkey’s reconciliation with its Armenian community. His words were twisted in the Turkish press to make him appear to be an enemy of the country in which he was born; he was tried in the courts for the “thought crime” of offending Turkishness and his ultimate punishment was meted out by a street tough who fired a bullet into his head. To be persecuted for doing the right thing is, pace those political leaders and all those columnists tut-tutting over the patriarch’s supposed offence -- and in the language of the Karl Malden character -- a crucifixion.
