Assyrian Christmas message stirs Turkish parliament
A deputy’s celebration of Christmas in Assyrian in the Turkish parliament triggered a row on the use of the mother tongue in Turkey. Here’s what to know.
Dilay Yalcin | Dec. 23, 2023
DIYARBAKIR — When the Turkish parliament’s sole Assyrian member, George Aslan, took to the podium on Dec. 18 to criticize the increasing cost of the government’s “mega” construction projects, there was respectful silence among members of the Turkish parliament.
But a few minutes later, when Aslan began to mark the Christmas holidays in his mother tongue, protest would break out within the chamber — a momentary gesture laying bare the country’s long-standing nationalistic sensitivities around the issues of language, minorities and identity.
What happened?
Aslan is a member, or deputy, of Turkey’s parliament representing Mardin, a district in Turkey’s southeastern region, once home to a dense Assyrian population. At a regular parliamentary session Monday, Aslan, a member of the left-libertarian Peoples’ Democracy and Equality Party (DEM) concluded his speech with holiday greetings.
“Because this is going to be my last speech [in the parliament before the new year], I would like to celebrate in advance the Christmas Holidays of our Christian citizens living in Turkey, particularly the Greek, Armenian, and Assyrian Syriac,” Aslan, the only Christian member of Turkey’s parliament, said in Turkish before ending his speech. “I hope the new year brings peace and love to our country and the whole world.”
All this was fine. But Aslan comes from a minority of about 18,000 Assyrians — a distinct ethnic group native to parts of modern day Iran, Iraq, Turkey and Syria — now living in the country, some of whom he said speak only their native language. So, he asked the parliament speaker’s permission to address his community in Assyrian and proceeded with his message.
Only nine seconds into his speech, a deputy from the nationalist Good Party started to shout in protest, with others quickly joining him.
What the deputies said was not clear, but it could be understood that they were calling on the parliament speaker to stop Aslan from speaking in a language other than Turkish in the parliament. Pro-opposition Halk TV later reported that one of the MPs had told Aslan to “go and speak his language at home, not in the parliament”.
When he finished his speech, Aslan received permission from the parliament speaker to comment on the protests.
“We did not come here from another planet. We are the inhabitants here,” he said, adding that Assyrians had been living in what is now Turkey for thousands of years. “This language did not come from another planet… This is wealth for Turkey.”
Response “does not reflect Turkey”
“To be honest, I was not expecting this,” Aslan told The Word over the phone. “I’ve saluted the people in Assyrian before, too, and no one said anything then.”
“In recent months, there has been an earthquake within the Good Party; many people have been resigning from the party,” he said. “Maybe they were trying to give the message to their electorate that they are still here, that they are protecting the country - as if they are the only ones who own the country.”
The right wing Good Party, established in 2017 on a foundation of nationalist ideals, has faced internal skirmishes that have resulted in its loss of several members over the course of the past year. This week, another parliamentarian resigned after reported opposition to its leader, Meral Akşener, marking the Good Party’s sixth seat loss since Turkey’s parliamentary elections in May.
After the session in the general assembly was over, Aslan approached the Good Party’s deputy group chair, to ask him why they were “so disturbed by us uttering a few words in our language”.
Aslan told The Word the reaction from the Good Party “does not reflect in the public at all”.
“On television channels, social media, or in newspapers, all the responses we received were positive,” he said. “This made me very happy. This means that the Turkish people are sensitive about these issues, and they do not approve of this reaction by a few people.”
Turkey and language
Turkey’s current constitution, adopted in 1982 and revised in 2017, bans “teaching any language other than Turkish as the mother tongue in schools”, which has prompted claims of discrimination from the country’s minorities.
Speaking in a language other than Turkish on the parliament’s podium is not banned and cannot be penalized. But because the Constitution was written in Turkish, the parliament’s official language is also recognized as Turkish, according to experts.
Parliamentary speeches, including oaths, made in other languages have triggered great debates in the past.
Parliament Speaker Sirri Sureyya Onder, a fellow DEM member, promptly came to Aslan’s defense while parliament was still in session:
“I prayed [in Arabic], for someone who was deceased, here. The Baccarat verse [from the Quran] was read here. Did one of you ask for the Turkish translation?”
Aslan is “saluting his people in his language, Onder said, calling on the deputies to “show some tolerance”.
Onder said he “would not intervene in someone speaking the language with which they dream their dreams and in which they grew up listening to lullabies”.
Assyrians and minorities in Turkey
Modern-day Turkey was founded on the ruins of the massive Ottoman Empire in 1923. Minorities constitute at least 25% of Turkey’s population of 84 million despite mass slaughters and population exchanges. Among the country’s diverse population of minorities, an estimated 18,000 Assyrians live in Turkey today.
The towns of Diyarbakır, Urfa, Harput and Adıyaman were historically home to sizable Assyrian populations that have dwindled over time, although some communities remain in smaller numbers. Experts say the largest pushes from Turkey came during what the Assyrian community recognizes as the Assyrian genocide of 1915 and during fighting between the Kurdistan Worker’s Party (PKK) and the Turkish government.
Aslan was born in 1958 in an Assyrian village in Mardin, and the first elementary school in his village opened in 1966. Before that year, no one in his village spoke a word of Turkish, he said.
When he was imprisoned after the 1980 military coup, he was not allowed to speak a language other than Turkish with his visitors. So all his mother could say to him during those 15-minute visits was “Nasilsin?”, or “How are you?” — the only word she knew in Turkish.
If a Muslim Turk were attacked by a Christian in Cyprus, hundreds of miles away, he said, the Assyrians in his village in Mardin would pay the price. According to Aslan, Assyrians have begun to return to Turkey under the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) in the last 20 years, but the pace of return is slow and not enough, he said.
More than half of the approximately 500,000 Assyrians in Turkey are said to have been massacred in campaigns starting from 1895.
Currently, just over 3,000 Assyrians live in the southeastern Mardin province and the areas that surround it, according to Aslan, with some 15,000 in Istanbul. Many have emigrated from Turkey due to discrimination, he said, citing a lack of legal protection for the Assyrian community from Kurdish feudal lords “under whose mercy they lived”.
On public support of his speech, Aslan said: “This gives us hope. It means there is a possibility that all the people in Turkey can live together in peace.”
Editor's note: A previous version of this article said 10,000 Assyrians live in Istanbul. The correct estimate is 15,000.
Dilay Yalcin is a New York-based journalist with a focus on Turkey and the region. She frequently reports about minority rights and women’s issues and is a Turkish media and social media analyst. She is currently a student at Columbia University’s Politics and Government Journalism M.A. program and a journalist at BBC Monitoring.