A Murdered German Missionary Highlights Christian Insecurity in Turkey

April 23, 2007

Source: International Herald Tribune

Wire Service: AP

http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/04/23/europe/EU-GEN-Turkey-Murdered-Missionary.php

MALATYA, Turkey: The story of a quiet and deeply religious German man ended with the sound of rocky dirt being dumped over his grave in eastern Turkey, in a murder case that has drawn attention to the plight of Christians in this Muslim country.

Tilmann Geske, a shy and hardworking man, lived almost 10 of his 46 years in Turkey. He and two Turkish Christians were found dead last Wednesday, bound hand and foot and with their throats slit, at a publishing house that distributes Bibles. Five young men were detained and charged with murder; they allegedly said they killed to protect Islam.

On Friday, after Tilmann's funeral, his wife Susanne discussed her husband and her future in an interview at her apartment in Malatya, a gritty town that was home to Turkey's first Kurdish president, Turgut Ozal, and to Mehmet Ali Agca, who tried to kill Pope John Paul II in 1981.

"I feel this is my place," Susanne said, vowing to remain in Turkey with her three children.

The victims in last week's attack were members of a tiny Christian population in Malatya numbering less than 20. In Turkey, Christians and other non-Muslims make up less than 1 percent of the population, but nonetheless are objects of suspicion, main actors in many conspiracy theories and occasionally the targets of violence.