The Dersim massacre, [2] [3] also known as Dersim genocide, [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] was carried out by the Turkish military over the course of three operations in the Dersim Province (renamed Tunceli) against Kurdish Alevi rebels and civilians in 1937 and 1938. Although most Kurds in Dersim remained in their home villages, [9] thousands were killed and many others were expelled to other parts of Turkey. [10] Twenty tons of “Chloracetophenon, Iperit and so on” were ordered and used in the massacre. [11] [12] [13]
On 23 November 2011, Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan apologized for the massacre, describing it as "one of the most tragic events of our near history" adding that, whilst some sought to justify it as a legitimate response to events on the ground, it was in reality "an operation which was planned step by step". However, this is viewed with suspicion by some, "who see it as an opportunistic move against the main opposition party, the secular CHP." [14]
Kurdish tribes, which were feudal (manorial) communities led by chieftains ( agha ) during the Ottoman period, enjoyed a certain degree of freedom within the boundaries of the manors owned by the aghas . Local authority in these small manorial communities was in the hands of feudal lords, tribal chieftains and other dignitaries, who owned the land and ruled over the serfs who lived and worked on their estates. [17] However, the general political authority in the provinces, such as Dersim, was in the hands of the Ottoman government.
Following the establishment of the Republic of Turkey in 1923, some Kurdish tribes became unhappy about certain aspects of Atatürk's "Kemalist policies", described as "the ideology of the new political élite tied to the single-party régime", imposing a policy of Turkification, including the removal of functionaries of "Kurdish race" in Turkish Kurdistan [18] [19] [20] [21] and land reform, [22] and staged armed revolts that were put down by the Turkish military.
Dersim had been a particularly difficult province for the Ottoman government to control, with 11 different armed rebellions between 1876 and 1923. [23] : 207–208 [24] The rebellious stance of the aghas in Dersim continued during the early years of the Republic of Turkey. Aghas in Dersim objected to losing authority in their manorial affairs and refused to pay taxes; and complaints from the provincial governors in Dersim were sent to the central government in Ankara, [25] which favoured land reform and direct control over the country's farmlands, as well as state planning for agricultural production. [22] In an Interior Ministry report in 1926, it was considered necessary to use force against the aghas of Dersim. [26] On November 1, 1936, during a speech in parliament, Atatürk described Dersim as Turkey's most important interior problem. [27]
The Turkification process began with the 1934 Turkish Resettlement Law. [28] Its measures included the forced relocation of people within Turkey, with the aim of promoting cultural homogeneity. In 1935, the Tunceli Law was passed to apply the Resettlement Law to the newly-named region of Tunceli, previously known as Dersim and populated by Kurdish Alevis. [29] This area had a reputation for being rebellious, having been the scene of eleven separate periods of armed conflict over the previous 40 years. [23] [24]
The Dersim region included the Tunceli Province whose name was changed from Dersim to Tunceli with the "Law on Administration of the Tunceli Province" (Tunceli Vilayetinin İdaresi Hakkında Kanun), no. 2884 of 25 December 1935 [30] on January 4, 1936. [31]
In order to consolidate its authority in the process of Turkification of religious and ethnic minorities, [32] [33] the Turkish Grand National Assembly passed Law No. 1164 on 25 June 1927 [34] which allowed the state to establish Inspectorates-General. [35] Following the First Inspectorate-General (1 January 1928, Diyarbakır Province), [36] the Second Inspectorate-General (19 February 1934, Edirne Province) [37] and the Third Inspectorate-General (25 August 1935, Erzurum Province), [38] [39] the Fourth Inspectorate-General (Dördüncü Umumi Müfettişlik) was established in January 1936, in the traditional Dersim region, which includes Tunceli Province, Elazığ Province and Bingöl Province. [40] The Fourth Inspectorate-General was governed by a "Governor Commander" within a military authority. He was given wide-ranging authority in juridical, military and civilian matters. He also had the power to resettle or exile people who lived in the region. [35] To quell the rebellion, the Turkish Interior Minister Sükrü Kaya ordered that boys and girls of the Dersim region were to be educated in boarding schools outside of the Dersim region. [41] In those schools, they were to be Turkified and following their graduation, married off to each other. [41] Women were to be Turkified at an earlier stage than men as women lacked contact with the outside world and if not Turkified, were unable to pass the Turkishness on to their children. [41] In September 1937, the Elazig Girls' Institute in which the aim was to raise Turkish women out of Kurdish girls was established in Elazıg. [41]
On 1 November 1936, during a speech in the Grand National Assembly of Turkey, Atatürk described the situation in Dersim as Turkey's most important internal problem. [42]
After the "Tunceli" Law, the Turkish military built observation posts in certain districts. Following public meetings in January 1937, a letter of protest against the law was written to be sent to the local governor. According to Kurdish sources, the emissaries of the letter were arrested and executed. In May, a group of local people ambushed a police convoy in response. [43]
Seyid Riza, the chieftain of Yukarı Abbas Uşağı, sent his followers to the Haydaran, Demenan, Yusufan, and Kureyşan tribes to make an alliance. [44]
According to Turkish authorities, on March 20–21, 1937, at 23:00 hrs, the Demenan and Haydaran tribes broke a bridge connecting Pah and Kahmut in the Harçik Valley. The Inspector General gave the order to prepare for action to the 2nd Mobile Gendarmerie Battalion at Pülümür, the 3rd Mobile Gendarmerie Battalion at Pülür, the 9th Gendarmier Battalion at Mazkirt, and the Mobile Gendarmerie Regiment at Hozat, and sent one infantry company of the 9th Mobile Gendarmier Battalion to Pah. [44]
Around 25,000 troops were deployed to quell the rebellion. This task was substantially completed by the summer and the leaders of the rebellion, including tribal leader Seyid Riza, were hanged. However, remnants of the rebel forces continued to resist and the number of troops in the region was doubled. The area was also bombed from the air. [23] The rebels continued to resist until they ran out of ammunition, in late 1938, by which time the region was devastated. [45]
According to Osman Pamukoğlu, a general in Turkish Army in the 1990s, Atatürk had given the operational order himself. [46]
On September 10–12, 1937, Seyid Riza came to the government building of the Erzincan Province for peace talks and was arrested. [47] On the next day, he was transferred to the headquarters of the General Inspectorate at Elazığ and hanged with 6 (or 10) of his fellows on November 15–18, 1937 [48] Ihsan Sabri Çağlayangil, who would later become foreign minister, [49] arranged the trials and hanging of the leaders of the rebellion and some of their sons. [50]
They were:
On November 17, 1937, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk came to Pertek to take part in the opening ceremony for the Singeç Bridge. [51] [52] In his journey to Elazığ the same month, he was accompanied by the Minister of the Interior Şükrü Kaya and Sabiha Gökçen. [53]
The prime minister, Celal Bayar (in office: October 25, 1937 – January 25, 1939) had agreed to an attack on the Dersim rebels. [54] The operation started on January 2, 1938 and finished on August 7, 1938.
This section needs expansion. You can help by adding to it. (March 2011) |
The Third Tunceli Operation was carried out between August 10–17, 1938.
Sweep Massacre Carryouts that started on September 6, were continued for 17 days. [55]
Turkish planes flew numerous sorties against the rebels during the rebellion. Among the pilots was Kemal Atatürk's adopted daughter, Sabiha Gökçen, the first female fighter pilot. A report of the General Staff mentioned the "serious damage" that had been caused by her 50 kg bomb, upon a group of fleeing civilians. [56]
Muhsin Batur, engaged in massacres for about two months over Dersim, stated in his memoirs that he wanted to avoid talking about this part of his life. [57] [ better source needed ] Kurdish leader Nuri Dersimi claimed that the Turkish air force bombed the district with poisonous gas in 1938. [58]
According to an official report of the Fourth General Inspectorate, 13,160 civilians were killed by the Turkish Army and 11,818 people were taken into exile, depopulating the province. [59] According to a claim by Nuri Dersimi, many tribesmen were shot dead after surrendering, and women and children were locked into haysheds which were then set on fire. [60] Christian Gerlach reports that 30,000 Kurds were massacred by the Turkish Army after the rebellion. [61]
Hüseyin Aygün, a jurist author, wrote in his book Dersim 1938 and Obligatory Settlement: "The rebellion was clearly caused by provocation. It caused the most violent tortures that were ever seen in a rebellion in the Republican years. Those who didn't take part in the rebellion, and the families of the rebels, were also tortured." [62]
Around 3,000 people were forcibly deported from Dersim. [29] On the 4th of May 1938 a Turkish Cabinet decision resolved that Turkish military forces which had previously been massed in the area would attack Nazimiye, Keçigezek Sin and Karaoglan. "This time all the people in the area will be collected and deported out of the area and this collection operation will attack the villages without warning and collect the people. To do this, we will collect the people as well as the arms they have. At the moment, we are ready to deport 2,000 people." In the same decision ordering to respond to any resistance by rendering those "incapable of movement on the spot and until the end", İsmail Beşikçi concludes this meant to kill them, along with orders to destroy their homes and deporting those remaining. [63]
The contemporary British estimate of the number of deaths was 40,000, although McDowall writes that this could be exaggerated. [23] It has been suggested that the total number of deaths may be 7,594, [29] over 10,000. [64] In 2011, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan acknowledged that 13,806 citizens had been murdered and 11,683 individuals displaced—these figures were based on contemporary Turkish documents. [65]
Turkish Kurdish anthropologist Dilşa Deniz estimates the number of deaths to be between 46.000 to 63.000. [66] [67] [68] [69] [70] [71] [72] [73] Historian Hans-Lukas Kieser writes that 40,000 is implausibly high. [74] Historian Annika Törne estimates 32,000 to 70,000 dead as a result of massacres, [75] citing as sources among others Nicole Watts (Relocating Dersim: Turkish State-Building and Kurdish Resistance, 1931–1938, in: New Perspectives on Turkey 23 (2000), S. 5–30.)
Turkish state's reaction to the uprising was publicly justified as "disciplining and punishment" (tedip ve tenkil). It contributed to a Kemalist perception of Dersim and its populace, which characterises the province as unruly and defends violent state intervention. This narrative is encountered in Naşit Hakkı Uluğ's book The Feudal Lord and Dersim (Derebeyi ve Dersim), which depicts Dersim as a security threat to the Turkish Republic. [76] It was not until 2009 that the massacre was publicly acknowledged, and in recent years, oral history has been used as a method to study anti-civilian violence excluded from the official history of the event. [77]
On November 23, 2011, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan apologized "on behalf of the state" over the killing of over 13,000 people during the rebellion. [78] His remarks were widely commented on both inside and outside Turkey. [79] His comments were pointedly directed at opposition leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu (who in fact is from Tunceli). Erdogan reminded his audience that Kılıçdaroğlu's party, the CHP, had been in power at the time of the massacre, then the only political party in Turkey. [14] He described the massacre as "one of the most tragic events of our near history" saying that, whilst some sought to justify it as a legitimate response to events on the ground, it was in reality "an operation which was planned step by step". [80]
The policy of population resettlement under the 1934 Law on Resettlement was a key component of the Turkification process that began to be implemented first with the Armenian genocide in 1915 as Turkey transitioned from a pluralistic, multi-ethnic society to a "unidimensional Turkish nation-state". İsmail Beşikçi has argued that the Turkish government actions in Dersim was genocide. [81] Martin van Bruinessen has argued that the actions of the government were not genocide, under international law, because they were not aimed at the extermination of a people, but at resettlement and suppression. [82] Van Bruinessen has instead talked of an ethnocide directed against the local language and identity. [83] According to Van Bruinessen, the 1934 law created "the legal framework for a policy of ethnocide." Dersim was one of the first territories where this policy was applied. [84]
Historian Annika Thörne, in her study of historical memory in Dersim, concludes that the 1938 massacres and forced assimilation amounts to genocide. [85] According to Dilsa Deniz, convincing evidence points towards a genocide. [86]
In March 2011, a Turkish court ruled that the actions of the Turkish government in Dersim could not be considered genocide according to the law because they were not directed systematically against an ethnic group. [87]
Tunceli is a municipality (belde) in Tunceli District and capital of Tunceli Province, Turkey. The city has a Kurdish majority. It had a population of 35,161 in 2021.
The Zazas are a people in eastern Turkey who traditionally speak the Zaza language, a western Iranian language written in the Latin script. Their heartland consists of Tunceli and Bingöl provinces and parts of Elazığ, Erzincan and Diyarbakır provinces. Zazas generally consider themselves Kurds, and are often described as Zaza Kurds by scholars.
The one-party period of the Republic of Turkey began with the formal establishment of the country in 1923. The Republican People's Party (CHP) was the only party between 1923 and 1945, when the National Development Party was established. After winning the first multiparty elections in 1946 by a landslide, the Republican People's Party lost the majority to the Democratic Party in the 1950 elections. During the one-party period, President Mustafa Kemal Atatürk repeatedly requested that opposition parties be established to stand against the Republican People's Party in order to transition into multi-party democracy. Kâzım Karabekir established the Progressive Republican Party in 1924 but it was banned after its members' involvement in the 1925 Sheikh Said rebellion. In 1930 the Liberal Republican Party was established but then dissolved again by its founder. Despite Atatürk's efforts to establish a self-propagating multi-party system, this was only established after his death in 1938.
The Kurds are the largest ethnic minority in Turkey. According to various estimates, they compose between 15% and 20% of the population of Turkey. There are Kurds living in various provinces of Turkey, but they are primarily concentrated in the east and southeast of the country within the region viewed by Kurds as Turkish Kurdistan.
The Koçgiri rebellion was a Kurdish uprising, that began in the overwhelmingly militant Koçgiri region in present-day eastern Sivas Province in February 1921. The rebellion was initially Alevi, but it succeeded in gathering support from nearby Sunni tribes. The tribal leaders had a close relationship with the Society for the Rise of Kurdistan (SAK). The rebellion was defeated in June 1921.
The Sheikh Said rebellion was a Kurdish nationalist and Islamist rebellion in Southeast Anatolia in 1925 led by Sheikh Said and with support of the Azadî movement and local religious and feudal leaders against the newly-founded secular Turkish Republic. The rebellion was mostly led by Zaza speakers, but also gained support among some of the neighboring Kurmanji-speaking Kurds in the region.
Kurdish nationalist uprisings have periodically occurred in Turkey, beginning with the Turkish War of Independence and the consequent transition from the Ottoman Empire to the modern Turkish state and continuing to the present day with the current PKK–Turkey conflict.
İhsan Sabri Çağlayangil was a Turkish politician who served as Acting President of Turkey in 1980, from the Justice Party. He also served as Minister of Foreign Affairs three times in the 1960s and 1970s.
The History of the Shī‘ah Imāmate Alevī Ṭarīqah or The History of the Alevism is that of a community of Muslims of Anatolia and neighbouring regions.
Seyid Riza was an Alevi Kurdish political leader of Dersim, a religious figure and the leader of the Dersim rebellion.
The Ararat rebellion, also known as the Ağrı rebellion, was a 1930 uprising of the Kurds of Ağrı Province, in eastern Turkey, against the Turkish government. The leader of the guerrilla forces during the rebellion was Ihsan Nuri of the Jibran tribe.
The Zilan massacre was the massacre of thousands of Kurdish civilians by the Turkish Land Forces in the Zilan Valley of Van Province on 12/13 July 1930, during the Ararat rebellion in Ağrı Province.
Inspectorates-General or General Inspectorates was a regional governorship whose authorities prevailed over civilian, military and judicial institutions under their domain but had to comply with the orders of Turkish president Mustafa Kemal. Their aim was to establish an authoritarian rule and to consolidate the authority in the process of Turkification of religious and ethnic minorities.
Tunceli Province, formerly Dersim Province, is a province in the Eastern Anatolia Region of Turkey. Its central city is Tunceli. The province is considered part of Turkish Kurdistan and has a Kurdish majority. Moreover, it is the only province in Turkey with an Alevi majority. The province has eight municipalities, 366 villages and 1,087 hamlets.
Mehmed Nuri Dersimi, also known as Baytar Nuri, was a Kurdish writer, revolutionary and intellectual.
During World War I, several Kurdish rebellions took place within the Ottoman Empire. The rebellions were preceded by the emergence of early Kurdish nationalism and Kurdish revolts in Bitlis in 1907 and early 1914. The primary Kurdish war aim was the creation of an independent Kurdish state, a goal that Britain and Russia promised to fulfil in order to incite Kurdish resistance. Other reasons for resistance include a fear that they would suffer the same fate as the Armenians, the desire for more autonomy, and according to Ottoman sources, banditry.
The deportations of Kurds by Turkey refers to the population transfer of hundreds of thousands of Kurds from Turkish Kurdistan that was perpetuated by the Ottoman Empire and its successor Turkey in order to Turkify the region. Most of the Kurds who were deported were forced to leave their autochthonous lands, but the deportations also included the forced sedentarization of Kurdish tribes. Turkish historian İsmail Beşikçi emphasized the influence of fascism on these policies, and Italian historian Giulio Sappeli argued: "The ideals of Kemal Atatürk meant that war against the Kurds was always seen as an historical mission aimed at affirming the superiority of being Turkish." Occurring just after the Armenian genocide, many Kurds believed that they would share the same fate as the Armenians. Historians Dominik J. Schaller and Jürgen Zimmerer state that this event "not only serves as a reminder of the unsettling fact that victims could become perpetrators, but also that perpetrators [as some Kurds were during the Armenian and Assyrian Genocides] could turn victims".
The Fourth Inspectorate-General refers to a regional administrative subdivision in the Dersim region.
Kurdish Alevism refers to the unique rituals, sacred place practices, mythological discourses and socio-religious organizations among Kurds who adhere to Alevism. Kurdish Alevis consider their hereditary sacred lineages as semi-deific figures, often have beliefs more rooted in nature veneration, and put more emphasis on Pir Sultan Abdal as their religious symbol, unlike Turkish Alevis who emphasize the role of Haji Bektash Veli. Some Kurdish Alevis argue that their beliefs are related to Ahl-e Haqq and Yazidism.
Alişer or Alişir Efendî, was a Kurdish poet, bard, intellectual and leader of Koçgiri tribe who fought against the Ottomans during World War I under Russian affiliation. He was the organizator of Koçgiri rebellion and one of the main leaders of the Dersim rebellion.
{{cite journal}}
: CS1 maint: DOI inactive as of November 2024 (link){{cite journal}}
: CS1 maint: DOI inactive as of November 2024 (link)But by far the bloodiest violence targeted Kurds during the Dersim uprising of 1937–38, when Turkish troops massacred about 30,000 people.
{{cite journal}}
: CS1 maint: DOI inactive as of November 2024 (link){{cite journal}}
: CS1 maint: DOI inactive as of November 2024 (link)