Racism in Turkey
 Video of the TRT news station stopping the broadcast of a speech made in Kurdish by politician Ahmet Türk. Following the interruption, the newscaster said, "since no language other than Turkish can be used in the parliament meetings according to the constitution of the Turkish Republic and the Political Parties Law, we had to stop our broadcast. We apologize to our viewers for this and continue our broadcast with the next news item scheduled." |
In Turkey, racism and ethnic discrimination are prevalent in its society and throughout its history, and this racism and ethnic discrimination is also institutional against the non-Muslim and non-Sunni minorities. This appears mainly in the form of negative attitudes and actions by Turks towards people who are not considered ethnically Turkish. Such discrimination is predominantly towards non-Turkish ethnic minorities such as Armenians, Assyrians, Greeks, Jews, Kurds, and Zazas as well as hostility towards minority forms of Islam such as Alevis, Sufis, and Shiites.
Racism and discrimination in Turkey can be traced back to the Ottoman Empire. Such Ottoman Turkish intellectuals such as Ali Suavi have stated in the 1860s that:
With the establishment of the Republic of Turkey, non-Muslim citizens of the country have been subject to numerous instances of state-sponsored discrimination. For instance, many non-Muslims were fired from their jobs and were denied employment by the bureaucracy. The State Employee Law enacted in 1926 aimed at the Turkification of work life in Turkey. This law defined Turkishness as a necessary condition to become a state employee.
The Ministry of Education in Turkey adopted an educational curriculum with respect to the Armenians in 2002 which was widely condemned as racist and chauvinist. The curriculum contained textbooks that included phrases such as "we crushed the Greeks" and "traitor to the nation." Thereafter, civic organizations, including the Turkish Academy of Sciences, published a study deploring all racism and sexism in textbooks. However, a report by the Minority Rights Group International (MRG) done in 2015 states that the curriculum of schools continue to depict "Armenians and Greeks as the enemies of the country." Nurcan Kaya, one of the authors of the report, concluded: "The entire education system is based on Turkishness. Non-Turkish groups are either not referred to or referred in a negative way."
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