Turkish parties nominate only handful of minority candidates

Tuesday, April 12, 2011

VERCİHAN ZİFLİOĞLU

ISTANBUL - Hürriyet Daily News

Four members of Turkey’s minorities will run for Parliament in upcoming general polls, yet with only one candidate standing any legitimate chance at election, many in the communities are unhappy.

Two Syriacs and two Jews will run for the legislature, yet no party chose to nominate an Armenian candidate, proving earlier predictions wrong.

“This is clear evidence of [Armenians] being second-class citizens,” Melkon Karaköse, who failed to make the Justice and Development Party, or AKP’s, list for Istanbul, told the Hürriyet Daily News & Economic Review on Tuesday. “Even the Turks who migrated to Europe in the 1960s became ministers or deputies in the countries they reside in. We have been living on these lands for 3,000 years and we cannot enter the Parliament.”

Syriac Ferit Özcan will run for the People’s Voice Party, or HSP, while Erol Dora will run from the southeastern province of Mardin for the Freedom and Democracy Bloc, the bulk of whose candidates come from the pro-Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party, or BDP.

The Jewish candidates include Lina Gahun for the HSP and Mari Gormezano for the main opposition Republican People’s Party, or CHP.

However, with the HSP unlikely to surpass the 10 percent electoral threshold and Gormezano featuring 22nd on the CHP’s list, only Dora appears to have any particular chance of entering Parliament.

There were four Armenian candidate nominees for the AKP, two for the CHP and one from the Freedom and Democracy Bloc, but none of them made the final cut.

Arev Cebeci, one of the failed Armenian candidate nominees for the CHP, reminded the Daily News about party leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu’s previous comments that he would “embrace both Hagop and Rojin” – suggesting that he would run both Armenian and Kurdish candidates.

“I wanted to say that if ‘Hagop’ was going to be embraced, here I am,’ but it seems that Kılıçdaroğlu embraced only Rojin,” Cebeci said.

Although Dora refused comment, Şabo Boyacı, a leading figure from the Syriac community, told the Daily News that they were experiencing a first since 1908.

“We have many problems and there is nobody in Parliament to voice them. The developments are extremely cheerful,” Boyacı said.

Son of Atatürk’s hatter runs for CHP

Despite being placed far down the list, Gormezano said she was happy to run in Istanbul 2nd Region.

“I announced my candidacy in a spirit of total Kemalism in addition to my Jewish identity, which I will not deny,” she said.

Gormezano said the people of Turkey and Israel were friends and added that if she entered Parliament, she would have an important mission.

The candidate said her father, Adolph Loker, migrated to Turkey during the Ottoman Era and added that Turkey’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, used to buy caps from him.

The last Jewish citizen in Parliament was Cefi Josef Kamhi in 1999 from the True Path Party, DYP.

Armenian Community reacts

Many in Istanbul’s Armenian community have been sympathetic toward the AKP after benefiting from a 2008 law regarding foundations and the return of confiscated property.

As such, many from the community sought candidacy in the party for the June 12 elections, as they did previously for the 2009 municipal elections.

Karaköse said he was disappointed not to be chosen by the governing party.

“[But] it would not have mattered which party we would have been elected from,” he said.

Hayko Bağdat, who was a candidate nominee for the Freedom and Democracy Bloc, said he was reacting against the developments, adding that the AKP was looking for “puppets” ahead of the 100th anniversary of the events of 1915 but had failed in its quest.

Bağdat also said his failure to make the bloc’s final list was not simply related to the BDP.