When Secretary of State Rex Tillerson meets with Turkish officials tomorrow, he’ll have plenty of unpleasant topics to discuss. At the top of Turkey’s list of grievances is American support for the YPG, or the People’s Protection Units, a Kurdish-Syrian militia that has wreaked devastation on ISIS in Syria but which the Turks claim is aiding a Kurdish independence movement inside Turkey. Solving that impasse won’t be easy.
We hope, though, that the secretary will raise an American grievance: the plight of Andrew Brunson.
Brunson, 48, is a Christian missionary who’s lived in Turkey for more than 20 years. He and his wife, Norine, had long sought permanent residency for their family—the Brunsons have three children—and on October 7, 2016, they were summoned to the country’s ministry of interior. They assumed the summons was an update on their request for residency. Instead, Andrew Brunson was spirited away to a detention facility for terrorism suspects.
The government claimed he had abetted the failed 2016 coup. Nobody familiar with Brunson or the tiny congregation he pastors, the Church of the Resurrection in Izmir, has the foggiest notion why the Turkish regime would associate this peaceable pastor with a plot to overthrow the government. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has grown deeply paranoid of the Islamic movement led by the imam Fethullah Gülen—now living in exile in Pennsylvania. But there is no evidence that Brunson ever had even passing relations with Gülenists.
Paranoia aside, it seems remarkable, indeed bizarre, that the Turkish government would arrest and imprison an American citizen and so risk souring relations with the United States without at least some hint of evidence.
But maybe it’s not such a mystery. A year after Brunson’s arrest, in September 2017, Erdoğan remarked in a speech that he was frustrated with the Americans’ refusal to extradite Gülen. “You have a pastor, too,” he said. “You give us that one, and we’ll work with our judiciary and give you back yours.” Of course, the United States hasn’t met Turkey’s demand for Gülen because federal authorities aren’t in the habit of arresting and extraditing resident aliens without evidence.
Which raises the possibility that Brunson was arrested on what the Turks knew were trumped-up charges precisely in order to make a prisoner exchange at some later date. Arrest an American preacher, and later offer to release him if the Americans will hand over the Turkish one. If that was the Turks’ aim, it’s a base and cynical way to treat a NATO ally.
Vice President Mike Pence is keenly interested in the Brunson case, and in March of last year Tillerson met with Norine Brunson in Ankara. We’re confident the secretary will raise the Brunson case during his visit, and we hope the administration takes a more aggressive approach than it has so far. If Ankara can arrest American citizens on obviously bogus charges and hold them as bargaining chips without paying a price, then governments nastier than Turkey’s will soon do the same.
