Related articles and links |  1 of 3

A Protestant pastor in the Turkish industrial city of Izmit woke up one morning last month to find a huge red swastika painted on his apartment door, with a handwritten hate letter shoved underneath.

The writer threatened the safety of Wolfgang Hade and his family unless they left the country within a month. A German citizen, Hade is married to a Turkish national of Christian background. The letter questioned whether Hade was really serving Christianity or being "used" to attack Turkish values.

"Your efforts to wear us down—as the inheritors of a great race—and alienate us from our values will come to nothing," the writer declared. "Please forward this to the headquarters directing you."

Together with his wife and small daughter, Hade has lived for the past three and one-half years in Izmit, near the epicenter of western Turkey's disastrous 1999 earthquake. Their small congregation of 15 to 20 Turkish Protestants worship in a two-story building purchased through the foundation of their parent church in Istanbul.

The Izmit Protestant Church was targeted in a violent attack the night after Christmas last year, when someone started a fire next to the outside wall of the building.

"The aim was to burn the church down," Hade told Compass Direct. "There were black signs of burning and the window was partly broken, but the debris had been swept away." On three separate occasions since, church windows have been broken out.

Local police investigated all of these attacks, and the church installed iron burglar-bars to prevent damage to ground-floor windows. But after a Molotov cocktail was thrown into the upper floor on February 6, church leaders made an appointment with the local governor's assistant.

"We sent a petition to the governor, and a local newspaper published part of it," Hade recalled in a May 19 interview. "Then the attacks stopped. Until yesterday."

The string of Izmit attacks are not isolated cases. Over the past six months, vigilante groups in at least four other Turkish cities have also threatened Protestant church workers and attacked their places of worship.

Simultaneously, the Turkish media has fanned intense criticism of Christian missionary activity. Even government ministers have spoken out, claiming that foreign missionaries had political motives aimed at "damaging the social peace and unity of Turkey."

A government-approved sermon read out in Turkey's mosques at Friday prayers on March 11 specifically warned worshipers against Christian missionaries, accusing them of pursuing political agendas to "deceive and convert" people.

Despite the democratic image presented by Turkey's current government in its drive to enter the European Union, "Their comments have simply added fuel to the nationalist fire," said Ihsan Ozbek, an Ankara pastor chairing the Alliance of Protestant Churches (APC) in Turkey.

In another attack in the Turkish capital of Ankara, local police officials swiftly and promptly investigated the firebombing of the International Protestant Church in the early hours of April 21.

Inflicting $10,000 in damages, the Molotov cocktails heaved into the church could have burned the entire church down if one of the fire bombs had not run out of fuel, said officials, who described the attack as "amateurish."

"There had been many incidents of vandalism before this," one leader of the English-language congregation said. "People have thrown rocks to break the large glass windows of the church, but this was more than that."

next page... |  1 of 3

share this page

June (Web-only) 2005, Vol. 49