Turkish consul's alleged anti-German comments spark tempest (Feature)

By Dorothea Huelsmeier May 8, 2009, 2:56 GMT

   Dusseldorf - It all began with a private lunch on February 22 attended by Hakan Kivanc, Turkey's consul general in Dusseldorf.

   The envoy is alleged to have made some very undiplomatic comments about Germans at the time, and the ensuing brouhaha keeps growing.

   The parliamentary group of Germany's co-governing conservatives has demanded that Kivanc be recalled. The German Foreign Ministry has decided to intervene.

   Turkish immigrant groups in Germany are dividing into pro- and anti-Kivanc camps. Turkish newspapers say he is being smeared.

   Kivanc himself denies the accusations.

   At the centre of the controversy is the ongoing campaign to save one of the world's oldest Christian monasteries, Mor Gabriel, in south-eastern Anatolia, where the Orthodox institution is enmeshed in a land dispute with local villagers. Supporters of the monastery invited Kivanc to the lunch.

   Despite a request that the meeting be kept confidential, participants made a record from memory, in which Kivanc is quoted as saying that if Germans had their way, they would tattoo a 'T' on everyone from Turkey and do to them what the Nazis did to the Jews. If you cut open a German, Kivanc is alleged to have said, the spilled blood would be brown - the colour associated with Germany's Nazis.

   Kivanc is said to have concluded that Germans should not be trusted, and that Turkey was the only country that would protect all the Turkish people living in Germany.

   The comments became public in late April through Action Mor Gabriel, an association of six Germany-based activist groups from Turkey aimed at mobilizing and coordinating support for the monastery. The group demanded that Kivanc be removed from his post immediately.

   Two participants in the February meeting recently filed affidavits with a lawyer's office in Frankfurt affirming Kivanc's alleged comments.

   German conservatives then seized on the issue.

   Hans-Peter Uhl, a member of the Christian Social Union (CSU) and domestic policy spokesman for the conservatives' in Parliament, and Kristina Koehler, a member of Parliament from Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democratic Union (CDU) with responsibility for issues involving extremism, urged the German Foreign Ministry to ask Turkey to recall the consul general.

   A spokesman said the ministry would approach Turkey 'immediately' to decide what to do about Kivanc.

   The spokesman for Action Mor Gabriel, Kubilay Demirkaya, a local CDU politician in Cologne, defended publication of Kivanc's alleged comments.

   'It was our civic duty to publish them,' he told the German Press Agency dpa.

   Demirkaya, who was not present at the meeting with Kivanc, said he had later asked some of the participants for a record of the proceedings and merely polished several quotes.

   The controversy touches the delicate relations between Christians and Muslims in Turkey.

   Christian minorities from Turkey living in Germany, such as Assyrians and Armenians, as well as minority Alevi and Kurds, by no means see Turkey as a protecting power.

   One participant in the meeting, Turkish-born artist Ismail Coban, on Thursday condemned Demirkaya's release of the alleged comments.

   'It harms the action committee, it harms the consulate, it harms us all,' Coban told dpa.

   He said in an open letter that Demirkaya had 'made a statement with invented falsifications for the sake of personal advantage.' To attain his goals, Coban charged, Demirkaya was conducting a smear campaign against the Turkish state and its diplomats.

   Other Turkish immigrant groups have been taken aback by the accusations, which make Kivanc look like a nationalist. The consul general is described as Western-oriented and having good contacts in German society.

   Some Turks suspect the controversy was stirred up to harm Turkey's efforts to join the European Union.