THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT RESOLUTION AND THE TERRORIST ATTACK AT CHRISTCHURCH Teoman Ertuğrul TULUN Analyst The European Parliaments (EP) Resolution regarding 2018 Report on Turkey was adopted in the Plenary of the European Parliament on 13 March 2019. Under no circumstances, the EPs stance on Turkey should be to aim developing Turkey-EU relations, interaction and dialogue.[1] However, we see instead is that the EP has put forward provocative assertions on issues that have nothing to do with its fundamental task. One example is Paragraph 14 that bizarrely mentions the physiognomy of the Hagia Sophia historical-religious monument and its conversion into a mosque. The relevant part of the said paragraph is as follows: Calls on the Turkish government to respect and fully implement the legal obligations which it has entered into concerning the protection of cultural heritage, and, in particular, to draw up in good faith an integrated inventory of Greek, Armenian, Assyrian and other cultural heritage that was destroyed or ruined in the course of the last century; opposes, in this context, any extreme view that promotes alterations to the physiognomy of the Hagia Sophia historical-religious monument and its conversion into a mosque;…[2] We do not have detailed information about why this paragraph, which is fraught with an intrusive and disingenuous mindset, was added to the EU Resolution. The Hagia Sophia had been a mosque for centuries during the Ottoman Empire era before its conversion into a museum in the Republic of Turkey era. Despite being a museum now, it is still structurally a mosque. In this context, the Hagia Sophia is both a Greek Orthodox and a Muslim Turkish cultural heritage. As such, EPs attempt to exclude the Muslim Turkish component from the Hagia Sophia is utterly disrespectful and points toward a mentality that harkens back to the Crusades. Furthermore, starting in the 1800s to modern times, hundreds of thousands of Muslims were killed or expelled from their homes in the Balkans and in the Caucasus. In this process, countless mosques were demolished by the Christian populations of these regions. We have yet to see an EP resolution calling on, for example, prospective EU member Balkan countries to to draw up in good faith an integrated inventory of Muslim cultural heritage that was destroyed or ruined in the course of the last century. The territory of present day Armenia was in previous centuries the center of the Turkish Revan Khanate. We have yet to see the EP make a resolution targeting Armenia (which the EU is very keen on cultivating ties that are one step removed from full EU 1 AVİM Commentary • No: 2019 / 22 • March 2019