Fra The Middle East Quarterly

The brutal murder of the head of Turkey’s Catholic Church, Bishop Luigi Padovese, on June 3, 2010, has rattled the country’s small, diverse, and hard-pressed Christian community. The 62-year-old bishop, who spearheaded the Vatican’s efforts to improve Muslim-Christian relations in Turkey, was stabbed repeatedly at his Iskenderun home by his driver and bodyguard Murat Altun, who concluded the slaughter by decapitating Padovese and shouting, “I killed the Great Satan. Allahu Akhbar!” He then told the police that he had acted in obedience to a “command from God.”

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[Padovese] worked in the clear knowledge that “faithfully witnessing to Christ”—as the synod’s preparatory document acknowledges—”can lead to persecution.” And so it did.

Conspiracy of Silence

Within hours of Padovese’s death, the provincial governor preempted the results of police investigations with the announcement that the murder was not politically motivated but rather committed by a lone lunatic. Moreover, in an attempt to eliminate any Islamic motive, NTV Turkey announced that the murderer was not actually a Muslim but a convert to Catholicism. Then the police leaked word—allegedly from the assassin—that he had been “forced to suffer abuse” in a homosexual relationship with the bishop and that the killing had been an act of “legitimate defense.”

It is true that Turkey’s minister for culture and tourism, Ertu?rul Günay, issued a short message of condolences on behalf of the government and that the foreign ministry expressed regret to the international media. But neither President Abdullah Gül nor Prime Minister Erdo?an expressed their own condolences or publicly addressed the murder of the head of their country’s Catholic Church, and even the foreign ministry’s statement took care to highlight the murderer’s alleged “psychological problems.”

Erdo?an’s silence in response to this national tragedy was particularly striking. Together with Spanish prime minister Jose Luis Rodrigues Zapatero, the Turkish prime minister and leader of the ruling Islamist Peace and Justice Party (AKP) has been a principal architect and cosponsor of the U.N.’s flagship program to promote a global “Alliance of Civilizations.” Diversity, cross-cultural dialogue, and opposition to isolation of “the other” were among the principles articulated by Erdo?an in his attempts to present Turkey as “the best panacea against ‘clash of civilizations’ theories.” The beheading of a senior Christian cleric by a Muslim zealot could not but send an unmistakable message that this very clash was in full swing on Erdo?an’s home turf.

Artiklen handler om den interreligiøse udvikling i Tyrkiet og er ganske interessant at læse i sin helhed.