By Alyssa A. Lappen
FrontPageMagazine.com | May 24, 2005

Modern Turkey also inherited the religious discrimination against non-Muslims from the Ottoman empire. Thus in 1942, Saracoglu's government established the varlik vergesi, a capital tax so onerous as to impose financial ruin on the community.

The tax was set at confiscatory rates—Greek Orthodox at 156 percent of annual income, Jewish at 179 percent, and Armenian at 232 percent—compared to the 4.96 percent annual income tax suffered by Muslim Turks, according to a Times editorial, and applied to everyone, including minority bell hopes and taxi drivers. At least one Turkish newspaper spoke of “liquidation” of the minority mentality and their populations, by inducing them to leave Turkey.

Since these taxes were temporary, Vryonis sees no parallel with the punitive jizya (poll) and karaj (land) taxes on legions of earlier generations of non-Muslim dhimmis. To this observer, however, the laws, their intent and result strongly resemble the ruinous jizya and karaj taxes. Like them, the varlik vergesi effectively deprived the community of its wealth, imposing severe penalties if Greek and other non-Muslim citizens did not pay within fifteen days of its promulgation. In the end, massive numbers of minority property and businesses were transferred to Muslim hands, much as khalifs in earlier eras had expropriated them, forcing non-Muslims often to convert to Islam to survive.