Kurds are at risk of genocide by the regional powers of Iran, Iraq, Turkey, and Syria, all of which have sizable Kurdish minority populations. Currently the largest threat comes from Turkey. On January 20, 2018 Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan launched cross-border military operations into northwestern Syria with the code name “Operation Olive Branch,” The mission aimed to oust Syrian Kurdish People’s Protection Units (or YPG) from the district of Afrin. Turkey considers the YPG to be an extension of the Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK), which has been waging an insurgency within Turkey on and off since 1984 in the name of greater rights and regional autonomy. The YPG denies being an extension of the PKK and has been allied with the United States (among other countries) in the fight against the Islamic State/Da’esh since 2014.
Gregory Stanton, the chairman of Genocide Watch, sits down with Rudaw in April 2018 to discuss a warning issued by the Washington, D.C.-based organization regarding Kurds in all four parts.
During the 19th century, travelers around the world were writing home about the beautiful and luxurious Kurdish rugs they’d encountered. Usually woven by Kurdish women on long, narrow looms, the rugs were notable for their intricate patterns and deep, rich colors. The travelers were also intrigued by the various motifs and designs in the carpets and the striking and artful way the weavers integrated the motifs and borders into the overall design.
Russia’s cooperation with the Kurds of Iraq and Syria in the fight against ISIL has been widely publicized by the Western media. However, less well-known is the fact that Russia’s relations with various Kurdish groups date back almost two centuries.
Mehmet Eymür, a former senior official at MİT, openly spoke about how a crime boss was used in an armed operation in Germany to target the PKK, how the agency had failed to assassinate Abdullah Öcalan in Syria, and how torture has always been a legitimate method used in interrogating political prisoners.
Kurdish fighters who died during the clashes with the Turkish Army are buried in the cemetery of the unknown without their families being informed
(Beirut) – Turkey-backed armed groups in the Free Syrian Army (FSA) have seized, looted, and destroyed property of Kurdish civilians in the Afrin district of northern Syria, Human Rights Watch said today. The anti-government armed groups have installed fighters and their families in residents’ homes and destroyed and looted civilian properties without compensating the owners.
While concerns of a terrorist resurgence in Afghanistan are front and center, we need to remember that there are thousands of ISIS fighters waging a low-level insurgency in Iraq and Syria. Containing that threat is critical, and doing so over the long term requires an international relations moonshot: creating an independent Kurdish state.
Four years ago today, President Masoud Barzani defied the international community, Baghdad and neighbors and remained steadfast that Kurds must exercise their very basic right to determine their future.
A number of attacks on Turkish patrols in northern Syria have brought Turkey and YPG forces to the brink of war. In response to the latest attack, which saw the death of one Turkish soldier, President Erdogan vowed to clear northern Syria from the YPG. [1] In order to achieve this, YPG (Yekîneyên Parastina Gel – People’s Protection Units, itself the primary faction in the Syrian Democratic Forces alliance) forces would either have to leave the border region voluntarily or take up arms and fight the Free Syrian Army and Turkish military. In the latter case, the YPG’s armour is undoubtedly set to play a role as the faction’s primary fire-support platforms. This article attempts to catalogue the YPG’s fleet of AFVs and other heavy weaponry and explain how its armoured force came to be.
The Democratic Alevi Associations (DAD), HDP, EMEP, the Amed Branch of the Alevi Bektashi Federation ‘Pir Sultan’, the Socialist Councils Federation (SMF), Federation of Dersim Associations (DEDEF), the Federation of European Dersim Democratic Union (ADEF) organized a tribute to Seyit Rıza in Dersim, Seyit Rıza Square. Seyit Rıza had been hanged at 19.38 of 4 May.
Footage showing members of Turkey’s mercenary “national army” executing Kurdish captives as they led the Turkish invasion of northern Syria touched off a national outrage, provoking US government officials, pundits and major politicians to rage against their brutality.
In the Washington Post, a US official condemned the militias as a “crazy and unreliable.” Another official called them “thugs and bandits and pirates that should be wiped off the face of the earth.” Meanwhile, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton described the scene as a “sickening horror,” blaming President Donald Trump exclusively for the atrocities.
Since Turkey took control of Afrin in 2018, the city’s Syrian Kurds face arbitrary detentions, torture, sexual violations, property theft, extrajudicial killing, and gender-based violence.
Gazprom Neft has published an electronic version of “The Kurds: Legends of the East”. This book, published at the company’s initiative, is the world’s first fully-fledged encyclopaedia dedicated to highlighting the history and culture of the Kurds.
Mehmet Gurkan, a Kurdish muhtar (headman) from the village of Akcayurt, Diyarbakir province, has not been seen since he was detained by security forces on 18 August 1994. It is believed his detention relates to statements he made to the press in which he alleged that he and many others were tortured while held in a containment area set up at Topcular gendarmerie post after the security forces had burned out his village.
Kurds are the largest minority group in Turkey and their position is one of conflict with the ‘Turkishness Contract,’ a concept that describes the unspoken convention ensuring the ethnic privilege of Sunni-Turks and the exclusion or assimilation of those who resist Turkification. Kurds have thus experienced oppression since late Ottoman times and throughout the Republican years, up to the present day. This article suggests that the Kurdish media in Turkey have always had to negotiate state oppression by articulating a strategy of resistance to the hegemonic knowledge imposed by the state and reproduced by the mainstream media. They thus reject the Turkification that would be required to abide by the Turkishness Contract. This article’s investigation of the Kurdish media takes place through an exploration of an online news platform, a self-proclaimed ‘voice of the weak.’ The data were collected through semi-structured in-depth interviews with journalists and editors of the platform.
The Turkish government must take immediate steps to abolish the system of village guards, which has given rise to some of the most serious human rights violations in southeast Turkey, and continues to present an obstacle to the return of displaced villagers in that area.
The Turkish government, security forces and paramilitaries are obstructing the return of hundreds of thousands of displaced villagers to their homes in the formerly war-torn southeast. This 78-page report documents the plight of mainly Kurdish villagers forced to flee their villages in southeastern Turkey during the 15-year conflict waged between the illegal, armed Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK) and Turkish government forces. Estimates of the number of displaced people range from 380,000 to 1,000,000, most of whom were forced out of their homes by Turkish security forces and paramilitary village guards determined to deprive the PKK of access to food, shelter and recruits. Human Rights Watch interviewed dozens of displaced villagers who longed to return home and escape cramped and impoverished lives in unfamiliar urban surroundings. But although active hostilities ceased in 1999, it appears that no more than ten percent have ventured home. Human Rights Watch identified a range of factors blocking return, from inadequate government assistance to continued violence by Turkish security forces and their paramilitaries. Human Rights Watch called on the Turkish government to engage with relevant international and nongovernmental organizations to develop and finance a new comprehensive return plan in line with international standards.
The Genocide and Persecution series offers readers a multitude of perspectives, allowing for a more nuanced understanding of these complex and horrific periods in world history; each volume is an anthology of previously published materials on acts of geno; Title explores genocide and persecution of the Kurds, including the historical/cultural background of Kurdish persecution in Turkey and Iraqevents from the rise of the communist People’s Republic of China in 1949 to the present; issues surrounding events ; The histories of nations across the globe are marked by dark periods of mass murder, brutal repression, and unrelenting persecution. Remembering and understanding such incidents is vitally important. The Genocide and Persecution series offers students and
Source: Publisher
Human Rights Developments
The human rights situation in Turkey continued to deteriorate in 1994, in large part due to the government’s heavy-handed response to an escalation of the conflict in southeastern Turkey. The government restricted freedom of expression and association, especially of groups voicing opposition to government policy in the southeast or toward Turkey’s large Kurdish minority. Political freedom also was limited. In March 1994, the Turkish parliament lifted the parliamentary immunity of eight deputies, six of whom were deputies from the Kurdish-based Democracy Party (DEP). In June, Turkey’s Constitutional Court banned the Democracy Party and stripped immunity from the remainder of its deputies, though a new Kurdish-based party, the Peoples’ Democracy Party (HADEP), was formed in its place. Eventually eight parliamentarians whose immunity had been removed, seven from DEP and one independent, were charged with treason and separatism, allegedly for collaboration with the banned PKK, a violent guerrilla group. Torture in pre-trial police detention, death-squad style assassinations with alleged links to security forces, and violent police house raids in which alleged suspects are killed all continued in 1994.
United States Department of State, U.S. Department of State Country Report on Human Rights Practices 1995 – Turkey, 30 January 1996, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/3ae6aa7dc.html [accessed 8 September 2021]
Summary, in English
Environmental destruction has long been used as a military strategy in times of conflict. A long-term example of environmental destruction in a conflict zone can be found in Dersim/Tunceli province, located in Eastern Turkey. In the last century, at least two military operations negatively impacted Dersim’s population and environment: 1937–38 and 1993–94. Both conflict and environmental destruction in the region continued after the 1990s. Particularly after July 2015, when the brief peace process that began in 2013 ended, conflict between the Turkish state and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) resumed and questions arose about the cause of forest fires in Dersim. In this research we investigate whether there is a relationship between conflict and forest fires in Dersim. This is denied by the Turkish state but asserted by many Dersim residents, civil society groups, and political parties. We use a multi-disciplinary approach, combining methods of qualitative analysis of print media (newspapers), social media (Twitter), and local accounts, together with quantitative methods: remote sensing and spatial analysis. Interdisciplinary analysis combining quantitative datasets with in-depth, qualitative data allows a better understanding of the role of conflict in potentially exacerbating the frequency and severity of forest fires. Although we cannot determine the cause of the fires, the results of our statistical analysis suggest a significant relationship between fires and conflict in Dersim, indicating that the incidence of conflicts is generally correlated with the number of fires.
When Koma Wetan was formed, singing in Kurdish was illegal in Turkey. Now, the group is a legendary influence among Turkish Kurdish rockers..
In contemporary Turkey, discussions on the concept of ethnicity and religiosity continue to maintain their utmost importance in politics and daily social life. In this context, Alevi and Kurdish identities have come to the fore with mass representation marked by protests and violence. In spite of the importance of Kurds and Alevis for the history of Turkey, one specific group, namely the Kurdish Alevis, has escaped the attention of the international world. Although wide interest upon the topic in the international academic sphere, there are very limited academic works about Kurdish Alevis in general. Who are the Kurdish Alevis? What are the particular conditions for its association with the Kurdish identity, Alevi religion, and the history of Turkey? What has been the role of Dersim within Kurdish Alevism? The main purpose of this edited volume, the first of its kind, is to contribute to the understanding of these and other questions. Based on six perspectives from scholars from various disciplinary, this approach will present new insights on contemporary research and discussions on the issue.
Submitted to the Institute of Social Sciences
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of Master of Arts
Turkey’s political history is littered with alarmingly numerous murders, ‘disappearances’ and unexplained deaths of investigative journalists, academics, officials, businessmen, and human rights and other activists of various kinds. A notable recent example was the murder of the Armenian journalist Hrant Dink in January 2007. Death threats to prominent public figures such as the writer Orhan Pamuk, suspiciously-staged terrorist incidents, and unsolved violent attacks on the Alevi and other minorities can be added to this litany.1 Incidents such as these have convinced many Turks of the existence of a so-called ‘deep state’, assumed to be composed of an ultra-nationalistic, arch-Kemalist and authoritarian network of bureaucrats, lawyers, soldiers, policemen, criminals and the like. They are often drawn from, but acting in parallel to the state, immune to prosecution, acting against those judged to be in opposition to the official secularist, nationalist and authoritarian ideology of the Turkish Republic. The activities of the ‘deep state’ are often believed to spill over into criminal activity of various kinds.
Human Rights Watch conducts regular, systematic investigations of human rights abuses in some seventy countries around the world. It addresses the human rights practices of governments of all political stripes, of all geopolitical alignments, and of all ethnic and religious persuasions. In internal wars it documents violations by both governments and rebel groups. Human Rights Watch defends freedom of thought and expression, due process and equal protection of the law; it documents and denounces murders, disappearances, torture, arbitrary imprisonment, exile, censorship and other abuses of internationally recognized human rights.
Human Rights Watch began in 1978 with the founding of its Helsinki division. Today, it includes five divisions covering Africa, the Americas, Asia, the Middle East, as well as the signatories of the Helsinki accords. It also includes five collaborative projects on arms transfers, children’s rights, free expression, prison conditions, and women’s rights. It maintains offices in New York, Washington, Los Angeles, London, Brussels, Moscow, Dushanbe, Rio de Janeiro, and Hong Kong. Human Rights Watch is an independent, nongovernmental organization, supported by contributions from private individuals and foundations worldwide. It accepts no government funds, directly or indirectly.
The staff includes Kenneth Roth, executive director; Cynthia Brown, program director; Holly J. Burkhalter, advocacy director; Robert Kimzey, publications director; Jeri Laber, special advisor; Gara LaMarche, associate director; Lotte Leicht, Brussels office director; Juan Méndez, general counsel; Susan Osnos, communications director; Jemera Rone, counsel; Joanna Weschler, United Nations representative; and Derrick Wong, finance and administration director.
The regional directors of Human Rights Watch are Peter Takirambudde, Africa; José Miguel Vivanco, Americas; Sidney Jones, Asia; Holly Cartner, Helsinki; and Christopher E. George, Middle East. The project directors are Joost R. Hiltermann, Arms Project; Lois Whitman, Children’s Rights Project; Gara LaMarche, Free Expression Project; and Dorothy Q. Thomas, Women’s Rights Project.
The members of the board of directors are Robert L. Bernstein, chair; Adrian W. DeWind, vice chair; Roland Algrant, Lisa Anderson, Peter D. Bell, Alice L. Brown, William Carmichael, Dorothy Cullman, Irene Diamond, Edith Everett, Jonathan Fanton, Jack Greenberg, Alice H. Henkin, Harold Hongju Koh, Jeh Johnson, Stephen L. Kass, Marina Pinto Kaufman, Alexander MacGregor, Josh Mailman, Andrew Nathan, Jane Olson, Peter Osnos, Kathleen Peratis, Bruce Rabb, Orville Schell, Sid Sheinberg, Gary G. Sick, Malcolm Smith, Nahid Toubia, Maureen White, and Rosalind C. Whitehead.
The European Court of Human Rights on Tuesday issued a landmark ruling on one of the many incidents of killings and disappearances of Kurdish civilians by Turkish government forces in the early 1990s at the height of the conflict with the armed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). During that period the army forcibly evacuated and burned thousands of villages, in some cases killing villagers through shelling or aerial bombardment.
The European Court held Turkey responsible for the deaths of 33 people, including women and children, in an airforce bombing raid on the villages of Kuşkonar and Koçağılı on March 26, 1994.
In 1995 Human Rights Watch documented the bombing, which was the subject of an official cover-up, in a report on Turkey’s violations of the laws of war in the southeast in the early 1990s. Human Rights Watch talked to some witnesses of that attack again for a report last year on the importance of securing justice for victims of state-perpetrated killings and disappearances.
In its ruling on Tuesday, the European Court ordered Turkey to pay €2.3 million in damages because of its violations of the right to life and inadequate investigation into the deaths, and took an important and unusual further step, ruling that Turkey should now conduct a full domestic investigation into the case, “with a view to identifying and punishing those responsible.”
This ruling sends a message that there is an obligation under international law for Turkey to ensure justice for the victims and their families, even 20 years later.
But there are wider implications, and for more recent cases. One is the December 28, 2011 Turkish bombing that killed 34 Kurdish civilian men and boys at the Iraqi Kurdistan border as they attempted to return to their villages in the Uludere district of Şırnak, carrying smuggled goods.
Two years on, the case file has been passed from one prosecutor to another, and some families of victims have been fined for illegally crossing the border that night.
The Turkish government should read Tuesday’s ruling as a reminder that while embarking on important investigations into past abuses, it should show similar commitment to properly investigate allegations of human rights violations on its own watch. The European Court has made clear that this isn’t just a choice, but an obligation.
Kurdish civilians, including women, children and elderly residents, have been killed during security operations and armed clashes since July 2015 in southeastern Turkey. Local human rights groups have recorded well over 100 civilian deaths and multiple injuries. After unprecedented military deployments to the region in recent days, several cities are under curfew and some of their neighborhoods the scenes of shelling by the military and heavy clashes with armed Kurdish groups. The civilian death toll is likely to rise steeply in the coming days.
Turkish military forces and a coalition of Turkey-backed Syrian armed groups have displayed a shameful disregard for civilian life, carrying out serious violations and war crimes, including summary killings and unlawful attacks that have killed and injured civilians, during the offensive into northeast Syria, said Amnesty International today.
The organization gathered witness testimony between 12 and 16 October from 17 people including medical and rescue workers, displaced civilians, journalists, local and international humanitarian workers, as well as analyzing and verifying video footage and reviewing medical reports and other documentation.
The European Court of Human Rights on Tuesday issued a landmark ruling on one of the many incidents of killings and disappearances of Kurdish civilians by Turkish government forces in the early 1990s at the height of the conflict with the armed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). During that period the army forcibly evacuated and burned thousands of villages, in some cases killing villagers through shelling or aerial bombardment.
Constitutional Court has handed down its ruling regarding the bombing of Kuşkonar and Koçağılı villages in Şırnak 26 years ago. The Court has unanimously concluded that the right to life of 38 deceased people, the wounded and their relatives was violated.
Turkey’s modern history has been marked by impunity for serious human rights abuses highlighted by the state’s systematic failure to hold to account members of the security forces and other public officials for serious violations in the decades following the September 1980 military coup.
In the 1990s, during the armed conflict between the Turkish military and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), government military and security forces compelled hundreds of thousands of people to abandon their villages, and carried out enforced disappearances and killings of thousands of civilians. Affected were mainly Kurds in Turkey’s southeastern and eastern provinces. The PKK also committed grave human rights abuses in the course of the conflict. According to official estimates, by 2008 the armed struggle between the military and the PKK had resulted in an estimated 44,000 deaths of military personnel, PKK members, and civilians.
Despite two parliamentary inquiries in the 1990s into the state’s collusion in political assassinations and involvement in lawless activities, no-one in the Turkish state was held accountable during this period for the pattern of gross human rights violations committed by the military and security services. A handful of prosecutions in the domestic courts resulted in the conviction of low level members of the security forces and police, who received nominal, low sentences. But there was no attempt to probe higher level involvement of state officials or to examine whether the violations were a matter of state policy.
There were positive indications of change in 2009, however, when a remarkable trial began in the southeastern city of Diyarbakır of a gendarmerie officer, retired colonel Cemal Temizöz, three former PKK members turned informers, and three members of the “village guard” (local paramilitary forces armed and directed by the gendarmerie). The prosecution accused the defendants of working as a criminal gang involved in the killing and disappearance of twenty people in and around the Cizre district of Şırnak province between 1993 and 1995.
These twenty killings were just a tiny fraction of thousands of unresolved killings and enforced disappearances that took place in the area in this period, as well as many more in other provinces of the region and in some of Turkey’s largest cities. Nonetheless after years of impunity, the investigation and prosecution of these cases marked a significant milestone. Temizöz is the most senior member of the Turkish military ever to stand trial specifically for gross violations of human rights committed in the course of the conflict between the Turkish armed forces and the PKK.
The trial, which started in September 2009, offers an opportunity to examine the obstacles to securing accountability in Turkey’s domestic courts for state-perpetrated killings and disappearances in the mainly Kurdish-populated southeast of the country in the first half of the 1990s. In January 2012, the Commissioner for Human Rights of the Council of Europe described the trial as “a unique opportunity to shed light on a period of systematic human rights abuses in south-east Turkey, which feature prominently in the case-law of the ECtHR [European Court of Human Rights].”
This report examines some of the lessons the Temizöz trial provides about the current obstacles to effective investigation and prosecution of past abuses and highlights some of the reforms required to allow the effective criminal investigation of the hundreds and possibly thousands of similar cases. The report recommends further steps the Turkish government needs to take to combat impunity in Turkey.
Lessons of the Temizöz Trial
The Temizöz trial highlights obstacles to securing justice for victims of human rights abuses in the region in seven key areas:
Limited scope of investigation: The prosecutor failed to explore possible chain of command involvement in the killings beyond Cemal Temizöz, for example by investigating the command responsibility for the alleged crimes among the higher ranking officers in the region.
Non application of witness protection: While Turkish courts have widely used orders to conceal the identity of witnesses in organized crime and terrorism trials, there has so far been little application of the Witness Protection Law in trials relating to crimes committed by the security forces. Application of the Witness Protection Law in the Temizöz trial could have significantly increased the willingness of vulnerable witnesses to participate.
Witnesses retracting their statements: The Temizöz trial has demonstrated how witnesses called to testify because of their “insider” knowledge are liable to retract the initial witness statements they made before prosecutors when they appear before the court. Such witnesses include village guards, former PKK members turned informer, or military personnel and police.
Attempts to intimidate and direct witnesses: Clear evidence emerged in the course of the trial of attempts to interfere with witnesses.
Threats to lawyers: A striking aspect of the trial has been the threatening and insulting behavior in court of defendants towards some of the lawyers acting for the families of the victims. Judges in the case have failed to respond adequately to such behavior.
Length of proceedings: Since the Temizöz trial began in September 2009 there have been 36 hearings (up to June 22, 2012). The excessive duration of trials in Turkey is a long-standing concern. Long trials often lead to excessively prolonged detention for defendants pending verdict, and violations of the right to a fair trial. But lengthy proceedings also have serious implications for witnesses and their protection.
The village guard system: The continued existence of the village guards system by which civilian villagers are armed and paid by the state to join military and counter-terrorism operations alongside the regular security forces is a further social obstacle to efforts to secure accountability for the killings and enforced disappearances and other egregious violations of human rights in the southeast and eastern provinces of Turkey. The fact of some of the defendants in the Temizöz trial are village guards—in effect an irregular army operating within the local society—has contributed to the continuing fear of witnesses and families of victims.
The Dersim region, overwhelmingly populated by Alevi Kurds, resisted the centralization policies of the Ottoman Empire for many decades. While the Alevi Kurds wanted to continue their indigenous cultural and political autonomy, this was considered a threat to the sovereignty of the newly established Turkish Republic (1923). Seyit Riza was one of the most prominent figures in the region, not only as the leader of the Hesenan tribe; he was also seen as a religious figure by the Alevi Kurds in Dersim. In 1937-38, the Turkish military started two major military operations targeting the Dersim region, with the aim of breaking the armed resistance organized by local militias. Gross human rights violations took place in Dersim during these military operations. Although the exact number is still unknown, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has said that state documents indicate 13,806 people were killed in the campaign. In January 1937, Seyit Riza sent his son to Aptullah Alpdogan (the commander of a military division in the region governed by emergency law) to find a way to end the armed clashes and mass killings. But Riza’s son was killed, and clashes continued relentlessly. At the end of the year, after Alpdogan promised to spare his life, Riza turned himself in to prevent further killings. We know what happened to Riza through the testimony of Ihsan Sabri, a state official who witnessed his execution (Çaglayangil later became Minister of Foreign Affairs). A quick trial was held, and the verdict read to Riza; he could not understand it, as he was unable to speak Turkish. Riza was sentenced to death and executed immediately.
Military operations did not stop or lose momentum and gross human rights violations continued, including aerial bombardment. Ultimately, the remaining Alevi Kurds were forced to migrate to the western regions of Turkey. Since the archives of the Turkish military are not yet accessible, it is not known what happened to Seyit Riza’s body or where he was buried. Therefore, Seyit Riza’s grandchildren have demanded to be told where his body was taken or buried. Discussions about the Dersim massacre intensified in the mainstream media after a speech by Onur Oymen, a deputy for the Republican People’s Party, in the National Assembly in 2009 in which he called the state policy of killings in Dersim “legitimate.” Since then, Riza’s grandchildren have become more vocal in their demands. But there has been no legal resolution to the questions surrounding his death as yet, and military officials have remained silent.
On May 4, 1937 the government-in-power, Republican People’s Party (CHP), launched the “Punitive Expedition [Operation] to Dersim [Tunceli]” which marked the beginning of Dersim massacres and gave rise to regional operations that later transitioned into extermination operations in 1938.
In his chronicles, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, İhsan Sabri Çağlayangil, has recorded that “[the ‘pundits’] had taken shelter in the caves. The militia used poisonous gas. They poisoned [these pundits] like rats in their caves. They slaughtered Dersim Kurds from all ages. It [the operation] was a bloodshed. So the Dersim issue was done with, the government authority was brought to the village [the east] and to Dersim. Now we can enter Dersim conveniently.”
Tens of thousands of people from all ages were massacred as a result of the several operations that took place between the years 1937 and 1938. Thousands were forced out of and banished from their lands. Likewise, thousands of children, especially girls, were taken from their families and placed into orphanages and given to foster families across Turkey to rid them off their roots as part of a cleansing initiative.
Adopted on 9 December 1948, the United Nations Resolution 260 (III) A, of which Turkey is a signatory nation, states that: “genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”
According to the definition set by the aforementioned resolution, the systematically carried out 1937-1938 Dersim massacres against the Kurdish population and the people of Qizilbash (Alevi) religion constitutes an act of genocide. On its 76th anniversary, the victims’ agony persists.
In 2011, Prime Minister Erdoğan stated that, “If there is an apology on behalf of the state and if there is such an opportunity, I can do it and I am apologizing” and left the issue hanging as that point. The Prime Minister has to prove that he was not using the Dersim massacre just as a political tool against the main-opposition.
The pressing demands of the people of Dersim are unequivocal: the city’s name “Dersim” has to be restored to replace “Tunceli”, a name closely identified with the massacre. The government should disclose the burial grounds of the executed rebellious leaders, including that of Seyit Rıza, compensate for the loses of the banished people of Dersim, reveal the truth behind the banished missing children and declassify the military archives. Both the AKP government and the state should fulfill what an apology entails.
It is imperative to confront the truth behind the Dersim Massacre [Dersim Tertelesi in local Kirmanckî] for the construction of societal peace. As Peoples’ Democratic Party, we mourn the thousands that were massacred on the 76th anniversary of the massacre. We call upon the governing party and opposition parties that still carry remnants of similar racist practices today to confront the truth and our history.
The city of Dersim plays an important role in the Kurdish collective memory. Dersim, now the eastern Turkish province of Tunceli, was the scene of mass murders between 1937-38 by the Turkish army in which between 20,000 and 30,000 Kurds died.
The massacres are commemorated on November 15 each year. On that day in 1937, the Kurdish leader Seyit Rıza and some of his followers, who had opposed the Turkish government, were hanged.
In a two-part series, a number of experts provide insights into key questions about the massacres, as more information and evidence has come to light in recent years.
“Fifteen years ago, we couldn’t say many things with certainty, now we can. It was not only about the destruction of one’s own Dersim culture, but also about the destruction of human lives. It was the intention to kill many Kurds. It is also striking that some Turkish dignitaries who played a key role in the mass killings in Dersim were involved in the Armenian Genocide in 1915,” he said.
In the breathtakingly rugged Turkish province of Hakkari, pristine rivers surge through spectacular mountain gorges and partridges feed beneath tall clusters of white hollyhock. I’m attending the marriage celebration of 24-year-old Baris and his 21-year-old bride, Dilan, in the Kurdish heartland near the borders of Syria, Iran and Iraq. This is not the actual wedding; the civil and religious ceremonies were performed earlier in the week. Not until after this party, though, will the couple spend their first night together as husband and wife. It will be a short celebration by Kurdish standards—barely 36 hours.
This month marks the 30th anniversary of a remarkable humanitarian action, known as Operation Provide Comfort, led by the United States, the UK and France, which saved hundreds of thousands of Kurds who had fled the genocidal actions of Saddam Hussein in 1991.
Following the Kurdish uprising against the dictator in March 1991, Hussein used his helicopter gunships and tanks to attack the people who had risen up against his regime. Fearing that Hussein would use chemical weapons again, up to 2 million Kurds fled to the border mountains of Turkey and Iran, where they were stranded, facing death from exposure to the elements, malnutrition, and disease.
NEW YORK (A.W.)—In recent years, there has been a growing awareness of, and interest in, exhuming the stories of Islamized Armenians in Turkey. Though filmmaker Nezahat Gündoğan did not initially seek to portray the account of this “hidden” community, after researching the project for four years, she determined that it absolutely had to be told. Her documentary, The Children of Vank (“Vank’in Çocuklari”), weaves together the stories of an Islamized Armenian family who survived both the 1915 Armenian Genocide and the Dersim Massacre of 1938, unraveling the truth behind their lost Armenian identity.
A Turkish historian recently discovered the diary of a Turkish soldier who took part in the 1937-38 genocide in the Kurdish-majority province of Dersim, eastern Turkey.
In 1990 was published there a book in Turkey with a title, that the only party then in Turkey accused of genocide. According to the book, the party a genocide had exported in the Kurdish district of Dersim. The book became at the same time bans and it saw to not for the debate on which the writer and sociologist, Ismail hoped had. Was the first and for a long time the only that in all openness the Turkish official ideology and administration opposite the Kurds criticized. [1] He began in 1969 with its study of the social economic conditions of Turkish Koerdistan with a whole series of increasing polemic writings. He has a large price paid for its moral and intellectual courage; all its books its bans and he remained more than ten year in the prison for its books. The mass slaughters of the book of treated the pacificatie of the rebel scholar Kurdish district of Dersim (these becomes now Tunceli named) in 1937 and 1938. The events its one of the most black pages in history of the republic Turkey. On the book of the crtical sociologist was not reacted or been wrong reproduce to by most historians, as well foreign historians as Turkish. While the campaign against Dersim further went, saw to the Turkish authorities for it that little information to disposition came for the outside world. The diplomatic observanten in Ankara were of it conscious that it large military operations were, but she knew actual not what it precise at the hand was.
On that day, Kurds commemorate the victims of the massacre attempted against the Kurdish province of Dersim in 1937 and 1938. The Turkish armed forces bombed houses, forests and caves, using even poison gas, to kill people indiscriminately in an attempt to exterminate an entire community and its culture.
On January 6, 2008, newspapers in the province of Tunceli in eastern Turkey appeared festooned with the holiday wishes, “May your Gaghand be merry.” [1] Celebrated on the same day as Armenian Christmas and bearing the same name, Gaghand is an important, if almost forgotten event in the religious calendar of Tunceli, or Dersim, to use the area’s historical appellation. In the villages of Dersim, bearded men calling themselves Gaghand Baba (Father Christmas) pay visits to children and the elderly, offering them presents of sweets and pistachios. Historical accounts from the early twentieth century also mention a ritual administered by religious leaders the very same day and highly reminiscent of Holy Communion. [2]
The people of Dersim are not Christians, but Alevis, a catch-all term for a variety of ethno-religious minorities in Turkey whose core religious heritage is Islamic but whose beliefs and practices are highly varied and syncretistic. [3] In Dersim, Christian and other influences infuse a heterodox Islam of distant Shi‘i origin whose adherents do not normally pray in mosques, fast in Ramadan, accept the Qur’an as a source of jurisprudence or make the pilgrimage to Mecca. Like many Alevis, they do commemorate the martyrdom of Imam Hussein on the plains of Karbala’ in the month of Muharram, a reminder of the Shi‘i component of their tradition.
Two and a half years after Turkey and its jihadist allies invaded the predominantly Kurdish region of Afrin in northwestern Syria, excessive violence, looting and expulsions continue to occur in the formerly self-governing canton. There are almost daily reports of kidnappings, arbitrary arrests, torture, rape and murder in the occupied territories. The cases are increasing from month to month and are becoming more and more brutal as the activities of the jihadists become part of everyday life. Numerous brutal crimes were also reported in August this year.. Below, the crimes such as murder and kidnapping are documented from the month of August. In addition, figures are given for crimes such as death, torture, abduction and rape from the occupation of Afrin in May 2018 to the present day. As there is no access to the occupied territories for independent human rights observers and organizations (after the occupation of Afrin in 2018, Sere Kaniye and Gire Spi were occupied in October 2019), access to information on human rights violations is very difficult. Human rights organizations and activists conduct research in the strictest secrecy in order to protect the population remaining in Afrin. The cases documented here are those that come to light with the help of these organizations and activists. The number of unreported cases of human rights violations is most likely much higher.
In 2018 Turkish armed forces invaded and took control of the northern Syrian region of Afrin, which was largely populated by Kurds, Yazidis, Christians, and other minority groups. The Turks and their allied militias drove hundreds of thousands of people out of Afrin, many of whom sought refuge in northeastern Syria, governed by the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANE). At the end of 2019, Turkey also invaded northeastern Syria after President Trump ordered most US forces out of Syria.
The repression of the Kurdish political opposition has intensified as Turkey’s authoritarian turn gathered pace since 2015. Since then, the HDP’s district and provincial mayors have been removed from their positions on spurious allegations and thousands of party officials have been arrested and imprisoned.
Joel David Moore and Rishi Bajaj’s Balcony 9 is teaming with Pop Front Pictures for Stefan vs. ISIS, a feature film that has script from C.C. Kilpatrick and Zack Stentz.
