Since late February, locals from the predominantly-Alevi populated villages in the province of Kahramanmaras, or Maras, have been protesting government plans to build a “container city” (housing made from used shipping containers) in their villages supposedly for the Syrian “refugees.”

There are 16 Alevi villages in the region where the container city for “27,000 refugees” is being built by the Prime Ministry’s Disaster and Emergency Management Authority (AFAD).

The villagers are deeply concerned that militants might infiltrate, and that the container city “could be turned into a human resources department of jihadists such as ISIS and al-Nusra.”

The Alevis in Turkey are a persecuted religious minority who have been exposed to several massacres and deadly attacks — in both the Ottoman Empire and the Republic of Turkey.

The Alevis in Maras say that they are afraid of being exposed to yet another massacre or forced displacement — this time at the hands of foreign jihadists.

When the plans for building a container city for Syrians first came up, the Alevis sought help from the governor. When their complaints were mostly met with silence or indifference, the villagers started peaceful protests in which they set up tents and read statements to the press to express their opposition to the camp being built.

On April 3, however, the gendarmerie forces attacked the villagers with water cannons and tear gas, and detained six people.

Affected by the police’s tear gas, Mor Ali Kabayel, 82, was taken to hospital, where he died.

Turkish gendarmerie forces attack Alevi villagers with tear gas near Maras, April 3, 2016.

According to the journalist Gulsen Iseri, the villagers are “scared of being exposed to a new 1915 [genocide] in which Armenians were deported.”

Hasan Huseyin Degirmenci, an Alevi from Maras, said:

“The real project here is to carry out another 1915. Just like Armenians were deported from here, they want to deport us in the same way. I lived through 1978 Maras [massacre]. I was 24 years old back then. I had to go abroad afterwards.”

As for the container camp and the 27,000 potential newcomers, Degirmenci said:

“The camp that is being built is 360 square meters. They say it will be all-inclusive. But it will not be able to take 27,000 people. Those people will disperse to villages and cities. The local people here will then have to leave behind their homes and become refugees elsewhere. We are scared of living through another 1915. Of course, we are uneasy.”

In protest, Alevis have staged demonstrations across Turkey and Europe.

On April 10, when hundreds of Alevis in Ankara wanted to march protesting the container city in Maras, the police attacked them with plastic bullets, tear gas and water cannons, and detained 10 people. [1]

“We are not against refugees,” said Salman Akdeniz, the head of the Maras branch of the Pir Sultan Abdal Alevi Cultural Association. “We have no problem with the oppressed peoples that have been persecuted in the war and forcibly displaced from their lands. Alevi Kurds in these lands know very well what it means to be a refugee. We have become refugees in other countries for years. We just think this choice of a place is wrong.”

A researcher, Turan Eser, told the newspaper Birgun that,

“there will be some dire consequences for the establishment of the camps in Maras. The demographic character of the region will be changed. The publicly-owned, fertile lands will be destroyed. Damage to the co-existence of Alevis could pave the way to forced emigration [of Alevis]. There are also assessments that industrial enterprises will use those in refugee camps as cheap labor.

“The reports about what is going on inside refugee camps in Turkey have also jogged people’s memories. That there are Salafis or families of ISIS members as well as the cadres of the [Syrian] Train and Equip Program in those camps and that the ID cards of AFAD [the Prime Ministry’s Disaster and Emergency Management Authority] have been given to ISIS members steer people’s perceptions of the camps to different directions. Naturally, people get uneasy when AFAD camps are mentioned.”

Syrian refugees will also be settled in Alevi villages in the province of Sivas. The district governors in the city have reportedly asked the local authorities in those villages to provide them with the list of the empty houses in the villages as well as with the winter and summer populations there.

“This is a policy of forcing Alevis to immigration and dissolving the Alevi population,” Gani Kaplan, the head of the Pir Sultan Abdal Alevi Cultural Association, told the Dicle News Agency (DIHA). “We are not against immigrants, but it is impossible for us to live alongside jihadists in the same village.”

Kaplan added that in the 1980s, Afghans were settled in the Alevi villages in the province of Tokat. “Today there is not an Alevi population there. The state policy towards Alevis does not change.”

The province of Sivas is also a terrible choice by the government to build another container city for “refugees”: Alevis in Sivas were already exposed to a deadly attack there at the hands of Islamists in 1993.[2]

Zeynep Altiok, an MP from the Republican People’s Party (CHP), whose father lost his life in the Sivas massacre in 1993, asked in a parliamentary motion to Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu:

“After the attempt to build a refugee camp in the middle of the Alevi villages… — where the [1978] massacre happened — is it a coincidence that you are building yet another refugee camp in the predominantly Alevi town of Divrigi in Sivas — where the [1993] massacre… took place? What is the objective of all of that?”

“The immigration of Syrian refugees whose population is almost 10 times higher than the Alevi community in those villages,” Altiok noted, “especially after the reports about the camps and about what is going on in those camps came out — is extremely disturbing for the Alevis.”

Unfortunately, the government has not taken any steps to relieve the tension in the region or eliminate the fears of Alevis. So the protests continue, as well as establishing the camps.

Alevis are the second largest religious community in Turkey, although no official statistics are available.

Though systematically denied by the Turkish regime, the Alevi faith is a genuine and distinct religious faith. The state tries to portray the Alevi faith as just an Islamic sect or an interpretation of Islam, but objective scholars, as well as Alevis who have the courage to challenge the state official ideology, contradict that:

“Islam has a dynamic based on conquest and booty,” wrote the sociologist Ismail Besikci.

“A country is conquered; its people are invited to Islam; if they do not accept Islam, their women, children, and properties all become booty. The properties of those who accept Islam are also seized. They are only able to escape death. Are these things existent in Alevism? Does Alevism require conquering here and there, inviting people to the Alevi faith, murdering those who do not accept the faith, and plundering their properties, women and children?”

Alevism places love for the whole of humanity, peaceful coexistence and reason in its center, so such crimes in Alevism do not exist. Alevis also reject ethnic and religious discrimination.

“Salah [Islamic prayer], fasting [during the month of Ramadan], hajj [Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca], zakat [Islamic religious tax], and shadada [Islamic declaration of faith] are the basic forms of worship in Islam. There are no such rules in Alevi worship,” Besikci noted as well.

Kemal Bulbul, the former President of the Pir Sultan Abdal Alevi Cultural Association, also emphasizes that Alevism is a faith in its own right:

“Alevi faith has been influenced by Islam but Alevism is Alevism. And Alevism respects all other faiths.

“The religious centre of Sunnism is the mosque. They carry out the requirements of the Sunni faith and do salat (Islamic prayer, five times a day) at mosques. The centre of Alevism is the cem house. They carry out [the religious ritual called] cem. This is where the difference between the two begins. Their religious rituals are completely different.

“Alevism is not ‘Anatolian Islam’. To call Alevism as such is the Turkish-Islamic view of the state.” ‘Anatolian Islam’ is a perspective that the official ideology of the state tries to promote.

“If Alevis were ‘Anatolian Muslims’, why have Alevis been denied in this country? If Alevism is ‘Anatolian Islam’, why have those who call themselves Muslims opposed this faith, its practice of cem and its cem houses? That is a heavy contradiction.”

Apparently, carrying out massacres is just one way the Turkish state uses to exterminate the Alevis. For when you deny Alevism, there is no need officially to recognize Alevis in your constitution, build cem houses for them or prepare school courses where Alevism is also taught extensively. The denial of the faith seems to be an effective way of assimilating Alevis into the Islamic culture or making them “invisible.”

There are also other methods — such as trying to change the demographic character of the predominantly Alevi places by building container cities in the middle of Alevi villages, especially where the locals have already been exposed to appalling mass killings and social pressures.

Alevis have justifiable reasons for opposing these container cities. They, as everyone else, already see the growing jihadist presence in Turkey. And they have seen as well that forced displacements and deportations of non-Muslim communities have always been common practices in Turkey: If you can’t kill them all off outright, terrorize them to the point that they will eventually have to flee for their lives.

Uzay Bulut is a Turkish journalist born and raised as a Muslim in Turkey. She is presently based in Washington D.C.

[1] Maras, where the “refugee camps” are being built, was the scene of a massacre by radical Muslims and Turkish nationalists in 1978. In a series of attacks in December, 1978 in Maras that lasted a week, 111 people were killed and hundreds more wounded. The victims were mostly Alevi Kurds.

The author Aziz Tunc who wrote a book on the massacre said that on the day of the attack, members of the Turkish Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) incited people to violence by making it a religious war.

“They shouted slogans like ‘today is the day of jihad’, ‘if you kill an Alevi, you will go to heaven’, ‘today is the last day of Alevis’ and ‘there is a Kurdish wedding today’. By ‘Kurdish wedding’, they meant a Kurdish massacre,” Tunc said.

“After those announcements, the fascists started a massacre that is too hard to verbalize,” said Kemal Bulbul, the former President of the Pir Sultan Abdal Alevi Cultural Association. “They burned people to death, cut them to pieces and slaughtered even children, elderly people and pregnant women.”

The massacre scared many people who packed up and left their homes forever and settled elsewhere in Turkey or Europe.

(More about the 1978 Maras massacre, please read: “Deadly 1978 Maras Attack Still Fresh in Minds of Survivors“, By Uzay Bulut, Rudaw, December 29, 2013.)

[2] On July 2, 1993, a group of Islamic fundamentalists surrounded the Madimak Hotel in which many intellectuals were staying for the Pir Sultan Abdal Festival.

The novelist Aziz Nesin, who had got Salman Rushdie’s book The Satanic Verses translated and published and who criticized Islam, was one of the participants of the event. The demonstrations to protest his appearance turned violent; the fundamentalist crowd set fire to the Madimak Hotel.

Nesin was able to escape, but 33 others, mostly intellectuals and Alevis, who stayed inside the hotel, were murdered. Security forces and state officials did not stop the massacre on time.

(More about the massacre: “2 July 1993: How Turkish Islamists Publicly Massacred Alevi Intellectuals“, by Uzay Bulut, Jerusalem Online, July 30, 2015)

The Speaker of the Parliament is no ordinary office in Turkey. The speaker comes second in the state protocol only after the president (and even before the prime minister). Such is the seat occupied since November by Ismail Kahraman, an MP from the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Along with Erdogan, former president Abdullah Gul and eight AKP heavyweights (mostly cabinet ministers) Kahraman comes from the ranks of the National Turkish Student Union (MTTB in its Turkish acronym). Another MTTB bigwig, Huseyin Velioglu, later formed what became the militant Islamist group, “Turkish Hizbullah.” Especially between 1965 and 1980 when a military coup administration dissolved it, the MTTB operated as the youth organization of Turkish political Islam. Kahraman, in late 1960s and early 1970s, was MTTB’s president.

In 1969 Kahraman publicly campaigned against funeral services to be held for Imran Oktem, then president of the Court of Appeals and a well-known anti-Islamist judge. When, finally, a mufti agreed to have the service, MTTB militants attacked the funeral.

Also in 1969, MTTB members attacked a left-wing protest rally and stabbed two students to death.

When, in the late 1990s, Necmettin Erbakan, the founder of political Islam in Turkey, became the country’s first Islamist prime minister (in a coalition government with a center-right party), Kahraman was appointed as Minister of Culture. He immediately curbed the budget appropriations for the state opera and ballet house and rechanneled the funding toward a mosque, and banned alcohol consumption at his ministry’s recreational premises.

His oath as parliamentary speaker requires his full loyalty to the “supremacy of law and to the democratic and secular republic…” But his public speech on Apr. 26 was totally against both his own oath of office and the constitution of the country where he serves — presumably — as an unbiased parliamentary speaker.

“We are a Muslim country,” he said. “That is why we need a religious constitution.” And not just that. Kahraman lamented that, unlike in other Middle Eastern countries, the word Allah did not appear in the current version of the Turkey’s constitution even once. So, he asked: “Why should we, as a Muslim country, distance ourselves from religion?”

His words caused a small political explosion in Ankara, with politicians from the opposition rushing to condemn him and secular Turks to protest him — and to get tear gas and water cannons from the police. The main opposition leader, Kemal Kilicdaroglu of the Republican People’s Party, put it plainly: “The chaos in the Middle East is the result of politics instrumentalizing religion.”

Ismail Kahraman, Speaker of Turkey’s Parliament, last week stated: “We are a Muslim country. That is why we need a religious constitution.”

Although both President Erdogan and Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu denied any AKP plan to remove secularism from the new constitution that their specialists are now drafting, Kahraman’s abrupt call for a religious constitution once again revealed Turkey’s old political fault-line, now giving signs of shaking. This is a decades-old political war between the Turks who see the future of their country in the Western civilization, including a secular constitution, and those who insist that Muslim Turkey belongs to the Middle East — including, as Kahraman pointed out, a religious charter that contains the name Allah.

According to Abdulkadir Selvi, a prominent pro-government columnist, the new constitution “will emphasize Islam and faith in Allah.”

In reality, Erdogan and Davutoglu are right to be cautious. Turkey does not need to remove the principle of secularism from its constitution. In Turkey’s poor democratic culture, a constitution is one thing and adherence to constitutional principles is another. Despite its articles strongly defending secularism and banning religion in political life, Turkey, under the AKP’s 14-year-long rule, has largely deviated from secular administration toward an authoritarian, pro-Islamist system with the ruling elite visibly breaching the constitution, including the parliamentary speaker himself.

Erdogan often defines his understanding of secularism as the state standing at an equal distance to all or no faith. In principle, he is right. He expressed that view after Kahraman’s controversial lines. But just saying this does not make him a secular politician. A recent ruling from the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) was the best proof that Erdogan’s Turkey failed in fulfilling even his own definition of secularism (that the state is at an equal distance to all religious faith).

The ECtHR condemned Turkey for discriminating against members of the Alevi (Muslim) religious minority, by failing to grant their places of worship the same status and advantages as those of other faiths (Sunni Muslim). Alevis, who draw from Shiite, Sufi and Anatolian folk traditions, account for about 15-20% of Turkey’s 79 million people. Most Sunni Muslims view Alevis as heretics.

A panel of seven judges at the Strasbourg-based court ruled against Turkish courts, which had said that the Alevi prayer places (cemevis) were not religious sites. The Turkish ruling was based on an opinion from the Turkish religious authority stating that the Alevi faith was not a religion. A summary of the ECtHR’s ruling read: “The court rules that the plaintiff foundation was subjected to differing treatment, without objective or reasonable cause, and the method of exemption from payment of electricity bills for religious sites in Turkish law was enacting discrimination on the basis of religion.”

In a speech some years before he came to power Erdogan said: “One cannot be secular and Muslim at the same time.” Back then, at least he was talking more honestly.

Burak Bekdil, based in Ankara, is a Turkish columnist for the Hürriyet Daily and a Fellow at the Middle East Forum.

Can there be democracies and democracies with religious prefixes? Is the United States a democracy or a Christian democracy? Is Israel a democracy or a Jewish democracy? Is Japan a democracy or a Shinto democracy?

In a 2010 interview with the Italian daily, Corriere della Sera, U.S. President Barack Obama referred to Turkey as a “great Muslim democracy.” In the same interview, he said that: “The U.S. always expressed the opinion that it would be wise to accept Turkey into the European Union.” All that was music to Turkish ears. But in reality, the president of the United States was suggesting to Europe’s rich club of nations that it must admit as full member not a democracy but a “Muslim democracy.” Obama did not understand that Turkey could never join the EU before it has fully transformed from being a Muslim democracy into a democracy.

In later years, though, Obama would painfully understand the difference between a democracy and a Muslim democracy. Now, in the words of James Jeffrey, a former Obama administration ambassador to Ankara, “You have to deal with the Turkey you have, rather than the one you’d like to have.”

Obama’s reference to Turkey aimed to please the political elite in Ankara. Soon after his 2008 election, Obama began to cultivate a private relationship with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan (who was then Prime Minister). In a 2012 Time interview, Obama named Erdogan as one of the five world leaders with whom he had the strongest bonds. In 2011, Tom Donilon, the president’s former national security advisor, said that Obama regarded Erdogan as “a man of principle, and also a man of action.”

Things look different today. “We basically have turned a blind eye to Erdogan’s drive towards an authoritarian, one-man system of rule in Turkey,” said Eric Edelman, who was U.S. ambassador to Ankara from 2003 to 2005. Obama persistently lived in this make-believe world until very recently. Jeffrey Goldberg wrote in The Atlantic‘s April 2016 issue:

“Early on, Obama saw Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the president of Turkey, as the sort of moderate Muslim leader who would bridge the divide between East and West … But Obama now considers him a failure and an authoritarian…”

Recently Erdogan, his ministers, intelligence chief, senior military officers and top diplomats were in New York for the 71st Session of the United Nations General Assembly. There were bilateral talks between the Turks and Americans, too. Once staunch allies, Turkey and the U.S. now have more divergences than convergences.

According to Jeffrey Goldberg, writing in The Atlantic in April 2016: “Early on, Obama saw Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the president of Turkey, as the sort of moderate Muslim leader who would bridge the divide between East and West … But Obama now considers him a failure and an authoritarian…” (Image source: RT video screenshot)

The Turks vehemently demand the extradition of Fethullah Gulen, a Muslim preacher in self-exile in Pennsylvania since 1999 and the prime suspect in the July 15 coup attempt against Erdogan’s government. U.S. officials tell the Turks that it is the independent U.S. courts that will decide, based on the evidence provided by Ankara. The Turks do not understand that a court can decide something independently of the country’s elected president.

“We want a terrorist from you … And you still resist … What court? What court for a terrorist [Gulen]? Is it too difficult to cancel a Green Card?” Erdogan said. Apparently, Erdogan thinks that the U.S. is ruled as Turkey is ruled. He does not understand that the president of the United States cannot phone a judge and order an arrest warrant for a foreign national. He does not understand that in the U.S., the administration cannot decide who is a terrorist and who is not without a court verdict. In Turkey, the government does.

Gulen has become a hot potato in the hands of the U.S. administration officials. But he is not the only headache for Washington. Turkey keeps warning Washington that it should not ally with Syrian Kurds whom Ankara views as terrorists — Washington views them as militias fighting the Islamic State (ISIS).

On August 24, Turkish troops began a military incursion into northern Syria to support the “moderates” it backs, and to push ISIS strongholds farther south. Meanwhile, as part of a broader land operation further south into Raqqa (ISIS’s main stronghold), the U.S. is arming Kurds, angering the Turks. “We cannot say anything at the moment as we have not clearly seen the attitude of the U.S. But Turkey will not be part of an operation if the U.S. wants to conduct it with the PYD and YPG [Syrian Kurdish groups],” Erdogan said.

Not enough trouble? Erdogan also asked Vice President Joe Biden about the arrest of the Iranian-Turkish businessman, Reza Zarrab, who has been in a U.S. jail since March on charges of money laundering and sanctions evasion. Erdogan wants the U.S. judiciary to release the shady businessman, who was one of the key interlocutors in a December 2013 corruption scandal in Turkey involving Erdogan and four of his cabinet ministers.

Erdogan said after his visit to New York:

“In my talks with Biden, I also brought up the Reza Zarrab issue when the judiciary subject was raised. The court which the U.S. Department of Justice referred this case to is also interesting. Both the prosecutor [Preet] Bharara and judge Richard Berman are names who had previously been hosted by FETÖ [the Turkish acronym for the alleged terrorist organization operated by Gulen] in Turkey. In other words, the U.S. Department of Justice handed Zarrab over to names which FETÖ had wined and dined.”

Erdogan claimed that Zarrab had not committed any crime, according to the findings of multiple Turkish ministries. He added that Turkey would not remain insensitive to the arrest of any of its citizens in another country. He added: “That person [Zarrab] is a citizen of the Turkish Republic … According to what rule had that arrest been made?” Once again, Erdogan wants to take up the powers of U.S. judges and announce verdicts on their behalf, as he can always do in Turkey. But he does not understand that things work differently in the U.S.

As prominent columnist Tolga Tanis wrote in Hurriyet: “There is no doubt that the Turkish-U.S. relations, just before presidential election in the U.S. in November, are passing through a critical junction. There are no traffic lights at the junction. And both sides are running fast without slowing down.”

Burak Bekdil, based in Ankara, is a Turkish columnist for the Hürriyet Daily and a Fellow at the Middle East Forum.