Minorities in Turkey form a substantial part of the country's population, representing an estimated 25 to 28 percent of the population.[2] Historically, in the Ottoman Empire, Islam was the official and dominant religion, with Muslims having more rights than non-Muslims, whose rights were restricted.[3] Non-Muslim (dhimmi) ethno-religious[4] groups were legally identified by different millet ("nations").[3]
Following the end of World War I and the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, all Ottoman Muslims were made part of the modern citizenry or the Turkish nation as the newly founded Republic of Turkey was constituted as a Muslim nation state. While Turkish nationalist policy viewed all Muslims in Turkey as Turks without exception, non-Muslim minority groups, such as Jews and Christians, were designated as "foreign nations" (dhimmi).[4][5] Conversely, Turk (term for Muslims) was used to denote all groups in the region who had been Islamized under Ottoman rule, especially Muslim Albanians and Slavic Muslims.[3]
The 1923 Treaty of Lausanne specified Armenians, Greeks and Jews and Christians in general as ethnic minorities (dhimmi). This legal status was not granted to Muslim minorities, such as the Kurds, which constituted the largest minority by a wide margin, nor any of the other minorities in the country. In modern Turkey, data on the ethnic makeup of the country is not officially collected, although various estimates exist. All Muslim citizens are still regarded as Turks by law, regardless of their ethnicity or language, in contrast to non-Muslim minorities, who are still grouped as "non-Turks"; the largest ethnic minority, the Kurds, who are predominantly Muslim, are therefore still classified as simply "Turks".[4][5][6][7][8][9] Bulgarians are also an officially recognized minority by the Turkey-Bulgaria Friendship Treaty (Türkiye ve Bulgaristan Arasındaki Dostluk Antlaşması) of 18 October 1925 but there are no more Bulgarians in Turkey.[8][10][11] On 18 June 2013, the Ankara 13th Circuit Administrative Court unanimously ruled that the Assyrians were included as beneficiaries of the Lausanne Treaty,[12][a] so that Assyrians were allowed to open the first school teaching in their mother tongue.[13][14]
The amount of ethnic minorities is considered to be underestimated by the Turkish government. Therefore, the exact number of members of ethnic groups who are Muslim is unknown; these include Arabs, Albanians, Bosniaks, Circassians, Chechens, Abkhazians, Crimean Tatars, Laz, Hemshin Armenians, Kurds, Pomaks, Turkish Roma, and Pontic Greeks, among other smaller groups like Dom, Lom, Vallahades, Greek Muslims, Cretan Muslims, Nantinets, Imerkhevians. Many of the Non turkish Muslims minorities are descendants of Muslims (muhajirs) who were expelled from the lands lost by the shrinking Ottoman Empire, like the Balkans and Caucasus Mountains.[15][16][17] The majority have assimilated into and intermarried with the majority Turkish population and have adopted the Turkish language and way of life, though do not necessarily identify as Turks, especially the Pomaks. Turkification and often aggressive Turkish nationalist policies strengthen these trends.[citation needed]
CIA World Factbook: Turkey was invoked but never defined (see the help page).Turkey is a nation–state built on remnants of the Ottoman Empire where non-Muslim minorities were guaranteed the right to set up educational institutions; however, since its establishment, it has officially recognised only Armenians, Greeks and Jews as minorities and guaranteed them the right to manage educational institutions as enshrined in the Treaty of Lausanne. [...] Private language teaching courses teach 'traditionally used languages', elective language courses have been introduced in public schools and universities are allowed to teach minority languages.
Turkey signed the Covenant on 15 August 2000 and ratified it on 23 September 2003. However, Turkey put a reservation on Article 27 of the Covenant which limited the scope of the right of ethnic, religious or linguistic minorities to enjoy their own culture, to profess and practice their own religion or to use their own language. This reservation provides that this right will be implemented and applied in accordance with the relevant provisions of the Turkish Constitution and the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne. This implies that Turkey grants educational right in minority languages only to the recognized minorities covered by the Lausanne who are the Armenians, Greeks and the Jews.
The fact that Turkish constitutional law takes an even more restrictive approach to minority rights than required under the Treaty of Lausanne was recognised by the UN Committee on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (CERD) in its concluding observations on the combined fourth to sixth periodic reports of Turkey. The CERD noted that "the treaty of Lausanne does not explicitly prohibit the recognition of other groups as minorities" and that Turkey should consider recognising the minority status of other groups, such as Kurds. 50 In practice, this means that Turkey grants minority rights to "Greek, Armenian and Jewish minority communities while denying their possible impact for unrecognized minority groups (e.g. Kurds, Alevis, Arabs, Syriacs, Protestants, Roma etc.)".
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