Education Minister Yusuf Tekin expressed his opinion that he would like to see the Theological School of Halki open again but said also that the final decision would be taken by the Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the Turkish Minister of Foreign Affairs.
HDN Newsroom
Turkey's Minister of Education, Yusuf Tekin, commented on the reopening of the Theological School of Halki in an interview with the Turkish television station NTV today.
The Turkish Minister of Education clarified that work is being done on the possibility of reopening the Theological School and actions will be taken based on the decision taken by those who manage Turkish foreign policy and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. His statements follow today's relevant front page article in the newspaper Karar and his visit to the School last week.
The Turkish minister stressed that "first of all, let's say this, that there are two dimensions of the event. One of them concerns the political dimension. The dimension was determined jointly by the President and the Minister of the Ministry that manages our foreign policy. The decisions that will be taken in this part of foreign policy will be the decisions that they will make and we will implement them."
The minister himself, he said, would like to see "the Theological School of Halki open both in terms of reflecting the democratic background that Turkey possesses and in terms of our position on the implementation of secularism."
Yusuf Tekin continued: "What is our part is what our president asked us to do, when we make our decision on this issue, he asked us to conduct research on the methods we can work on or what kind of procedure we can follow. I would therefore like to speak with this reservation. In the end, it is not I, as Minister of National Education, who will decide whether to open or not, but the Minister of Foreign Affairs, our president and the competent committees are the ones who will make this decision and we are obliged to implement it."
Referring to the historical background cited by Turkey in relation to the closure of the Theological Faculty, the Education Minister said: "We are talking about an institution that trained priests for minorities of certain religions who lived in Ottoman geography after 1844. Undoubtedly, the issue has different political dimensions in Christendom, especially after the process of Perestroika, Glasnost, we understand this. There is a procedure being followed in Turkey, we have Article 40 of Lausanne before us and according to our Constitution, international conventions are above legal regulations. When we look at all this, there is a decision taken by the Constitutional Court after the coup d'état - pronunciamento - of 12 March. And in the decision of the Constitutional Court, there is no text directly related to the closure of the Theological School of Halki, there are only some interpretations referring to the Higher Education Institutions that existed at that time, so that part was closed based on an interpretation or based on the political conjuncture of the time."
Yusuf Tekin also referred to his visit last week, on May 29: "We, on the orders of our president, went to analyze what can be done on a legal basis and had a very productive meeting with the relevant people there."
Concluding, the Turkish Minister of Education clarified that work is being done on the possibility of the Theological School operating and that actions will be taken on the basis of the decision to be taken by those who manage foreign policy and President Erdogan. He said: "At the moment, anyway there is an open high school, that is, a secondary school, operating legally there. There are no students, however it is open. As we said, we are doing our homework on its ability to function as a Theological Faculty, but ultimately the decision will be made by those who manage our foreign policy and Mr. President. We have determined the steps that need to be taken depending on the decision that will be taken there. Now we will act in accordance with the decision that will be made."
