Andrew Brunson: So much for Turkish delight

The detention of the quiet-spoken US pastor has set Washington and Ankara apart and precipitated a collapse in Turkey’s economy

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4 MIN READ
Ramachandra Babu/©Gulf News
Ramachandra Babu/©Gulf News
Ramachandra Babu/©Gulf News

Is it just me, but I was wondering why do so many pastors seem to end up behind bars? And why is that so many of them are Americans? It seems as if these men of the cloth have a habit of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and then become the centre of an international campaign to have them released.

Such is the case with Pastor Andrew Brunson. Right now, the 50-year-old native of North Carolina is under house arrest in Izmir, Turkey, and is at the centre of a testy and deepening dispute between the Ankara administration of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and American President Donald Trump. And when those two individuals are mentioned in the same sentence and are at loggerheads, you just know there’s going to be widespread fallout whatever the cost.

Let’s put it this way, since President Trump has taken up the cause of Brunson, all hell has been let loose on the Turkish economy and, specifically, its currency. And both the lira and the wider Turkish economy are seemingly in a far weaker position, now that few — if any — Turkish observers had been willing to openly admit. As the events following the attempted coup against Erdogan on July 15, 2016, have shown, it’s not a wise thing to comment publicly or criticise his administration lest, like some 70,000 others who are accused of supporting the overthrow attempt or being supporters of Fethullah Gulen, you’d end up being a recipient of hospitality from the Turkish judicial and security system.

Gulen, a preacher who lives in Pennsylvania, is being held responsible for all things coup-like by President Erdogan, a man who has centred the political and administrative powers of his nation about his persona — and family.

Erdogan wants nothing more than to see Gulen stand trial in a Turkish court for what he perceives is a long list of crimes against Ankara. Gulen, for the record, lives freely in the Pennsylvania countryside — with tight security as a matter of prudence — and hasn’t been charged with any offence there. Ankara, however, has filed an extradition warrant for him with the US State Department.

For years, Turkey had been singled out as a shining example of how an emerging economy could bring prosperity, trading on close ties with the European Union (EU) and using a cheap supply of money and low interest rates, to fuel its growth. But that very policy has proven to be its rapid undoing, with the lira losing 45 per cent of its value against the US dollar in just two days once Trump imposed tariffs on Turkish steel and aluminium, setting off a very public row over Brunson.

Since 1993, the Presbyterian preacher had been living in Izmir with his wife Norine and together, as well as tending to a very small congregation of some 25 people, they also raised three children. He built up the congregation of the small Resurrection church, taught his children how to scuba dive, organised movie nights and picnics on the Aegean coast and took pride in coming from a long line of pastors. The church has also tried to help where it can with the waves of Syrian refugees fleeing their homeland and heading to the EU.

As evangelical Christians go, the church represented by Pastor Brunson sits in the Goldilocks zone — not too conservative, and not too liberal. In the wider Turkish sense, the Christians denominations are small, with most of those aligned with the Orthodox church of the East, rather than Rome. Overall, there are estimated to be just 8,000 evangelical Presbyterians there — less than 0.1 per cent of the overall population.

Last October 7, the Brunsons were summoned to the local police headquarters in Izmir for what the couple hoped would be a renewal of their permanent residency papers, an application that had been in the works since April. Nope. Instead, they were questioned and imprisoned. Norine was released 13 days later, while her husband spent the next eight months in prison.

Reports say security forces found telephone records of calls to known Gulenists — enough to warrant their detention, but the evidence and witness statements are secret.

If the church represented by Brunson is small in Turkey, it’s the exact opposite in the US — and it has the ear of President Trump.

Other conservative religious forces are also at play. On writing this, for example, 594,035 people had signed an online petition to ‘Free Pastor Brunson from a Turkish Jail’, hosted by the conservative lobby group, American Centre of Law and Justice. The pastor had been initially charged with membership of a terrorist organisation and, more recently, with gathering state secrets and attempting to overthrow the Turkish state. What’s adding to US anger is that no credible evidence or details of any nature have been presented against him — and Washington wonders how indeed Ankara does spell “set up”.

Right now, Brunson has been released from incarceration, but remains under house arrest and unable to leave Turkey.

For his part, Erdogan has suggested openly that Brunson could be part of a strategic swap, with Gulen heading East and the American returning West — a play that seems straight from the Cold War days rather than one between members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation.

Indeed, when Nato met last month, there were hopes that the pastor might be released. That wasn’t the case, though, and now, if convicted, he faces a sentence of 35 years behind bars.

For his part, Trump is playing hardball, demanding the release in a series of tweets and has imposed the tariffs.

And for his part, Erdogan is also playing hardball. But he has also miscalculated by believing that his own considerable presidential powers are similar to the ones at Trump’s disposal in Washington, with Erdogan offering recently: “You have a pastor, and we also have one. I told [the US] give us the pastor, and we’ll give you the pastor. They told us, ‘Don’t go there’.”

For now, Pastor Brunson is not going anywhere for sure.

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