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.
ERBIL (Kurdistan 24) – Influential Kurdish writer, intellectual, and radio personality Kereme Seyad, who played an important role in preserving Kurdish culture for decades, succumbed to illness on Saturday at the age of 83 in the Armenian capital of Yerevan.
Young Kurd Kemal Kurkut was shot dead in 2017 in Diyarbakir and while his police officer killer will go unpunished, the photographer who documented the incident faces serious charges.
Turkish soldiers tortured two Kurdish villagers they had detained, throwing them from a helicopter after battering them, eyewitnesses claim.
Melek Çetinkaya, mother of Furkan Çetinkaya, one of the military cadets who were jailed on coup charges in the aftermath of a failed military coup in July 2016, has marched to the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) headquartrs in Ankara in order to demand an end to her son’s 3-year-long imprisonment.
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.
“For over a year, the Turkish army has illegally occupied the city and region of Afrin. This has particularly impacted the women of the region, with rape, kidnapping and gendered violence systematically used as weapons. The Turkish army and the jihadist militias they fund and support work together in these aims, and have forcibly imposed Sharia law on women of all different beliefs.” Kongra Star
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.
Two weeks ago, fighters allied to the Democratic Union Party (PYD), the strongest local Kurdish group with its well-armed and effective militias, captured the town from Nusra fighters
A protester arrested for assaulting a police officer was found not guilty last week. A jury at Southwark Crown Court reached their verdict after watching damning police bodycam footage.
EXCLUSIVE: 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.
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.
Anatomy of a Civil War demonstrates the destructive nature of war, ranging from the physical to the psychosocial, as well as war’s detrimental effects on the environment. Despite such horrific aspects, evidence suggests that civil war is likely to generate multilayered outcomes. To examine the transformative aspects of civil war, Mehmet Gurses draws on an original survey conducted in Turkey, where a Kurdish armed group, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), has been waging an intermittent insurgency for Kurdish self-rule since 1984. Findings from a probability sample of 2,100 individuals randomly selected from three major Kurdish-populated provinces in the eastern part of Turkey, coupled with insights from face-to-face in-depth interviews with dozens of individuals affected by violence, provide evidence for the multifaceted nature of exposure to violence during civil war. Just as the destructive nature of war manifests itself in various forms and shapes, wartime experiences can engender positive attitudes toward women, create a culture of political activism, and develop secular values at the individual level. In addition, wartime experiences seem to robustly predict greater support for political activism. Nonetheless, changes in gender relations and the rise of a secular political culture appear to be primarily shaped by wartime experiences interacting with insurgent ideology.
Main opposition CHP group deputy chair Engin Altay has referred to President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan “as the world’s most expensive president,” saying his presidential palace complex in Ankara’s Beştepe district costs the nation over 10 million liras ($1.3 million) per day. Altay also said that 110 vehicles and two helicopters escort Erdoğan on the 6 km route between the presidential palace and parliament building.
The Imrali Island prison, where Kurdish leader, Abdullah Ocalan, has been held in isolation for twenty-two years, accepts no visitors and the annual delegations never actually reach this island fortress. But the delegation’s visit to Turkey provides an opportunity for an international group to draw attention to the conditions faced by a political prisoner that many have called the Kurdish Mandela and find out about the state of human rights in Turkey more generally.
Official correspondence from Turkey’s consulate general in Frankfurt to the Justice Ministry in Ankara has revealed that a German prosecutor denied a request for judicial assistance submitted by a Turkish court in the case of famous singer Ferhat Tunç.
To serve as a mayor from Turkey’s pro-Kurdish political party these days is to fear arrest at any moment and govern in circumstances that hover between stifling and absurd, said Ayhan Bilgen, one of the few who has kept his office during an unrelenting government purge.
ANKARA/BAGHDAD (Reuters) – Turkey is taking its decades-old conflict with Kurdish militants deep into northern Iraq, establishing military bases and deploying armed military drones against the fighters in their mountain strongholds.
Turkey is moving to close its second-largest opposition party, the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), in what is widely seen as perhaps the last bolt for a government that has exhausted all other options as its public support craters and the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) faces an uphill battle in the next national elections.
Eight hostages released as part of peace process with Turkish government in a bid to end deadly 29-year conflict
The Iranian Kurds risking death to cross into Iraqi Kurdistan, and train as Peshmerga fighters in the Komala military training camps.
Syrian Kurdish women battled ISIS in 2014 in the city of Kobani to defend their people, and fought alongside U.S. forces as they drove ISIS out of Raqqa.
