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Will Non-Muslims Return to Turkey?

Although Turkey's Minister of Culture Omer Celik of the AKP is inviting Turkey's non-Muslims to return to their country, many do not feel welcome because of a complicted history, writes Orhan Kemal Cengiz.
Members of Armenian community in Romania hold banners during a rally marking the anniversary of mass killings of Armenians in Ottoman Empire in 1915, in downtown Bucharest April 24, 2012. Armenia, backed by many historians and parliaments, says that about 1.5 million Christian Armenians were killed in what is now eastern Turkey during World War One in a deliberate policy of genocide ordered by the Ottoman government. Successive Turkish governments and the vast majority of Turks feel that the charge of genoc

Omer Celik, minister of culture of Turkey's Justice and Development Party (AKP) government, has made repeated calls recently in which he invited non-Muslims to come back to Turkey. In his most recent TV interview on March 29, Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan himself repeated this call and he said their government is calling non-Muslims back to Turkey. Do these calls have any potential to create a mass return of non-Muslims to Turkey? Has Turkey made profound changes in the way it handles its non-Muslim citizens?

I do not think that these questions have simple yes-or-no answers. Before I try to give my own answers, I have to give little bit background to illustrate to what extent Turkey’s non-Muslim policies have changed.

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