NSU CASE COVERED UP AND LEGALLY CLOSED: IS IT POSSIBLE TO AVOID SOCIAL AND POLITICAL REPERCUSSIONS?

The neo-Nazi Nationalist Socialist Underground (NSU) terrorist group killed ten people in Germany between 2000-2007. Eight of the victims were members of the Turkish community of more than three million people living in Germany. Beate Zschäpe, Uwe Mundlos, and Uwe Böhnhardt were the nucleus of the National Socialist Underground NSU . Two of them, Uwe Mundlos and Uwe Böhnhardt, had killed themselves in the operations. Beate Zschäpe was the only core member of the NSU stayed alive when NSU trial began. Along with Beate Zschäpe, the four suspected accomplices deemed to be in the close periphery of the NSU trio, including Ralf Wohlleben and André Eminger were tried and received varying degrees of imprisonment. Germany’s highest court of appeals, which is Federal Court of Justice, had rejected appeals by Beate Zschäpe and other two convicted accomplices on 19 August 2021. The Federal Court has recently upheld the exceptionally light prison sentence of two and a half years that Andre Eminger received in 2018. Thus, the Munich court's verdict has become fully legally binding through this decision. It is reported that the high court did not find any legal errors or gaps in the arguments of the Munich court for the verdict and rejected appeals. Ten years after the NSU Neo-Nazi terror cell was exposed, with this decision of the German Federal Court of Justice, the NSU case was legally concluded and closed in its entirety. We have already explained in our previous analyses that racism and xenophobia, Islamophobia is on the rise in Germany and that we, as AVİM, consider this fact a worrying development. We should underline that the totality of court decisions regarding the NSU murders reinforced the perception that racism, xenophobia, and Islamophobia did not receive the punishment they deserved in Germany and that the true dimensions of the NSU organization wilfully be left unclarified.

Keeping race at bay: familial DNA research, the ‘Turkish Community,’ and the pragmatics of multiple collectives in investigative practice

In this contribution, we analyze the recently adjudicated Milica van Doorn rape and murder case. In this case, committed in 1992, no suspect could be identified until investigatory actors employed familial DNA searching in 2017. Crucially, familial DNA typing raised the possibility of ethnic and racial stereotyping and profiling, particularly against the background of the first case in which familial DNA typing was used in the Netherlands: the Marianne Vaatstra case, which from the start had been marred by controversy about the ethnicity of the unknown perpetrator. In our analysis, we show how criminal justice actors managed this potential for racialization through strategically mobilizing and carefully managing multiple collectives. Drawing on the notions of multiplicity and non-coherence, we show we do not only empirically trace the situated ethics and pragmatics of familial DNA research in this specific case, but we also develop a theoretical argument on the multiple and non-coherent character of race itself and its attendant ethical, political, and methodological possibilities and obligations.

Turks and Other Muslims in the US: An Analysis of Perceptions

Surveys show that, in the United States, Americans have a less favorable view of Muslims due to various reasons as opposed to American Muslims who conversely favor the American state and population. In line with this fact, this study tries to understand whether the Turkish community living in the US has different views about Americans than American Muslims do. This study makes a comparison because not all ethnic groups in the American Muslim community have the same views about Americans. While analyzing the Turkish community’s perceptions, this study also analyzes the views Americans and Muslim Americans have towards each other. The study compares previous surveys with the survey conducted among Turks living in the US and concludes that Muslims generally have the same perceptions regarding Americans. It also reveals that aside from the basic reasons which result in a negative view towards Muslims, being a small community and fragmented are two significant factors that damage the image of Muslims. In addition, it reveals that a lack of knowledge about each other increases negative perceptions.

Political and Scientific Persecutions – the Case of Hayrie Memova-Suleymanova

The research is focussed on the scientific carrier and life destiny of Hayriye Süleymanoğlu Yenisoy, lecturer of Turkish language at Sofia University, interpreted in the wider frame of the policies of the communist regime to Turks in Bulgaria. We followed how the political events in the second half of the 20th century in communist Bulgaria played a decisive role for the professional carriers of Turkish scientists and lecturers in the country. Their destinies were not exceptions on the background of the persecutions of ideologically unhandy persons by the regime. Our research is related to the entirety of scientific life in the totalitarian Bulgaria, but is focussed on the mechanisms of repressions of Turkish intelligentsia in the context of the policy of the communist power to Turks and other Muslims in Bulgaria. The paper considers the means of destruction of the educated Turkish elite after 1944 and the efforts of the communist regime to create politically loyal new elite among the Turks. But the short flirt of the communist power with the Muslim minorities finished up with the persecution of the elite of the Turkish community who suffered mostly of the increasing assimilation efforts. The regime did away with many representatives of this elite requiring impossible loyalty from them – refusal of their ethnic identity, changing their Muslim names, falsification of scientific facts. The Bulgarian – Turkish thematic dictionary created by Hayriye Memova was convicted of being espionage order from Turkey. She was dismissed from the academic institutions and compelled to survive by working as cleaner in a factory for 4 years. Against her an investigation was initiated by the State Security which lasted for 7 years and included 19 secret agents most of them her colleagues, students and random acquaintances. Nevertheless she defended her PhD and habilitated in Bulgaria, in Turkey where she emigrated in 1989 with thousands of Turks who were expelled from the country, her scientific degrees were not acknowledged and she had to habilitate again in Baku. Following the scientific and personal trajectory of Hayriye Memova who is a representative example of the resistance we followed the policies of the regime to scientific community focussing on the control of the repressive apparat of the regime over the Sofia University.