After 12 years serving a church in Diyarbakir voluntarily and peacefully, Jerry Mattix suddenly appears to be on the coun-try’s blacklist, it was reported in late July.
In the past two years, the Mattix family and at least six other foreign-born families have either been deported from Turkey or denied renewals of their residency permits.
Diyarbakir is near the epicentre of ongoing clashes between Turkish military and Kurdish rebels, and not far from Turkey’s border with Syria, over which thousands of Syrian refugees have fled, overwhelming local authorities. These issues have made the region politically sensitive for Turkey’s ruling AK Party, which is trying to marry democratic principles with modern Islam. For their part, churches in south-eastern Turkey say they have been deprived of their right to obtain help and support from foreigners. ‘There is a discomfort with foreign Christians here, and slowly they will clean them out’, said Ahmet Guvener, pastor of the Diyarbakir Protestant Church, where Mattix had been a volunteer. ‘In the end the churches in the east will become weak and scattered, because there are no mature Christian workers among us.’
