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German Turks still rooted in the east: study

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A study has found most Turkish Germans feel at home in Germany but maintain a strong connection with Turkey. It comes as Mesut Özil’s decision to quit the national football team sparks an integration debate in Germany.

A study from the Center for Turkish Studies at the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany has found that most of the 3 million people with Turkish roots living Germany feel more strongly connected to Turkey than to Germany.

The study was released one day after German footballer Mesut Özil announced he was quitting the national team, citing racism, after he was criticized for meeting with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in May.

What the study found

  • About 89 percent feel they belong “strongly” or “very strongly” to Turkey, and about 81 percent to Germany.
  • About 83 percent feel somewhat or very at home in both Germany and Turkey.
  • 38 percent would not return to Turkey, 15 percent intend to return permanently and 37 percent live between Turkey and Germany.
  • 19.6 percent were strongly interested in German politics, 47 percent had little interest.
  • 33.9 percent were strongly interested in Turkish politics, 30.7 percent weren’t very interested.

The Mesut Özil affair: German football player Mesut Özil announced he was quitting the German football team on Monday, after he came under fire for meeting with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in May. The move saw some German politicians and fans question Özil’s loyalty to Germany. Özil said he was treated as being “different,” saying “I am German when we win, but I am an immigrant when we lose.” Following Özil’s announcement, a spokeswomen for German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Monday said the majority of the about 3 million people with Turkish heritage who live in Germany are well integrated and that people with migrant backgrounds were welcome in Germany.

Turkish politics in Germany: In the June Turkish presidential election this year, nearly two-thirds of votes cast by the Turkish community in Germany went to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, which was more than the support he averaged in Turkey. Relations have been strained between Germany and Turkey since a failed coup against Erdogan in 2016 and the subsequent crackdown that followed 

Racism in the classroom: Another study released July 23 by the German University of Mannheim, found prospective teachers gave poorer grades to students with a Turkish name despite their work having the same number of errors as their German counterparts. The study saw 204 teaching students aged 23 grade two identical papers, one half of the group had a paper written by “Max” and the other a paper written by “Murat.” The teaching students derived different grades, with the supposedly Turkish students receiving poorer marks.

law/aw (AFP, AP, dpa, Reuters)

 

‘Turkey’s National Struggles Rooted in Genocide Denial,’ Says Taner Akcam

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taner_akcamBOSTON—“Modern Turkey is constructed on top of denial,” renowned Turkish scholar Taner Akcam said at a recent lecture at Boston College.

Christian Solidarity International (CSI) released a video Friday of Akcam’s Oct. 22 lecture, entitled, “The Anatomy of Religious Cleansing: Non-Muslims in the Ottoman Empire,” in which Akcam explains that the Armenian Genocide’s buried legacy helps explain “why Turkey has such so much difficulty today in its Middle East policy towards Christians, Alawites, and Kurds.”

Working from a broad range of Ottoman and other contemporary sources, Akcam argued against the usual analysis of the Armenian Genocide, the Assyrian Genocide, and the Greek Genocide as “separate events,” when they should be seen as parts of a “comprehensive policy of ethnic homogenization, implemented by one government, carried out as part of a general plan.”

Akcam spoke instead of an “Ottoman Genocide against Christians” during World War I, which was part of a broader “genocide process” in Turkey lasting from 1878 to 1924. “By end of this period, at least one-third of the population of Anatolia had either been resettled, deported or annihilated,” Akcam said.

Responding to a question about the connection between the genocide in Turkey 100 years ago and similar acts today committed by contemporary Islamist terrorists in Syria and Iraq, Akcam noted that while the leaders of the Ottoman Empire were then progressive nationalists and not religious zealots, they nevertheless “declared a jihad” and “used religion extensively” to mobilize local support for the genocide. Akcam also observed that many Armenian girls and women were “forcibly converted and married to Muslims.”Akcam added that he is in the process of going through League of Nations records of 2,000 Armenian children recovered from “Arab, Kurdish and Turkish households” after the war. “There is a story of each child with a picture – horrendous stories. You can take the stories, change the date to 2014, and it looks like ISIS enslaving Christian women and children.”

Ultimately, Akcam concluded, the genocide was driven by the unwillingness of Turkey’s rulers “to share power with the Christians,” who then constituted as much as 25% of the population. Turkey today faces “exactly the same problem” in its struggles with the Kurds and its broader Middle East policy, Akcam said.

Boston College’s School of Theology and Ministry, Departments of Slavic and Eastern Languages and Literatures and Political Science, and Islamic Civilization and Society Program, and the National Association for Armenian Studies and Research joined CSI as co-sponsors of Akcam’s lecture as a part of a series on “The Future of Religious Minorities in the Middle East.”