Slain German Highlights Christian Plight
Pastor Dale Morgan
Slain German Highlights Christian Plight*
Apr 23, 3:03 PM (ET)
By BENJAMIN HARVEY
MALATYA, Turkey (AP) - The story of a quiet and deeply religious
German missionary ended with the sound of dirt being scattered over
his coffin in eastern Turkey, his violent death a sign of the plight
of Christians in this Muslim country.
Tilmann Geske lived 10 of his 46 years in Turkey, a member of the
country's small Christian community. He and two Turkish Christians
were killed last week, their hands and feet bound and their throats
slit, at a Christian publishing house that distributes Bibles. Five
young men were detained and charged with murder; they allegedly said
they killed to protect Islam.
Speaking after her husband's funeral Friday, his wife Susanne
described a shy hardworking man who had invited people into his home
for Bible study, taught English and German, and helped send Turkish
children to school overseas. The couple lived with their three young
children in the gritty town of Malatya, members of a tiny Christian
community numbering less than 20.
In Turkey, Christians and other non-Muslims make up less than 1
percent of the population and are often viewed with suspicion. Susan
Geske said her husband was sensitive to his Muslim neighbors and was
not one to push his faith on others.
"He didn't have the idea of tossing out Bibles," she said. "If you
knew Tilmann, he was never like that. He was very shy, he would never
do that."
"This was his dream - not to be just a Christian worker, but to be a
part of the world," Susanne Geske said. "He wanted to work like the
Turks, not just to be a foreigner who gets money from abroad. He
wanted to show that you can be both a Christian and a normal worker."
Susanne and Tilmann Geske met at a church in Lindau, Germany, when he
was working mornings as a pastor at a Protestant church and afternoons
as a forklift operator, and she was looking for a job. They first came
to Turkey in 1992 on their honeymoon.
The next year they returned, spending three weeks in Turkey's
undeveloped east, the setting for fighting between Kurdish guerrillas
and Turkish government forces. The Geskes were undeterred, and a few
years later decided to settle permanently in Adana, near the
Mediterranean coast. They learned to speak Turkish and raised their
two girls and a boy there: Michal Janina, 13, Lukas, 10 and Miriam, 8.
Susanne Geske said she planned to stay in Turkey with her children
despite her husband's murder: "I feel this is my place."
The deep-seated suspicion of Christian influence was evident at the
morgue Friday, where a separate family drama played out.
In a cold drizzle, a man leaned on a cane fingering Islamic prayer
beads. Hatem Aydin, 56, was the older brother of one of the two slain
Turkish Christians, and he had come 22 hours by bus to pick up his
brother's body.
Aydin wanted to get his brother Necati's body before the man's wife
did, and quickly bury it in an Islamic ceremony, but the morgue
wouldn't let him. Hatem Aydin said his family hadn't spoken to Necati
in years, the split driven by the younger brother's decision to
convert to Christianity after marrying a Turkish Christian.
"First he told us, 'I'm reading the Bible,' and we were OK with that,"
Hatem Aydin said. "But after he got married, he starting bringing
Christian books, then CDs, and after that we didn't talk to him
anymore."
Hatem Aydin, a tailor, said he would not go to his brother's Christian
funeral and turned back for the long ride home.
At Tilmann Geske's funeral in an overgrown Armenian cemetery, the
Turkish pastor said the slain man's family had forgiven the suspected
killers.
Throughout most of the ceremony, only the smallest girl, Miriam, broke
down in tears. But as the coffin was lowered with ropes into the
grave, the family collapsed into a tight little circle, their sobs
drowning out the sound of the dirt and rocks being shoveled onto the
grave.
Source: AP