The Dersim Genocide 1938

[Mukuch]

Re: Dersim genocide 1938

It was ethnocide.

Most certanly it was!

[Alevigirl88]

Re: Dersim genocide 1938

You are misusing the word "genocide".

It was ethnocide.

[Alevigirl88]

Re: The Dersim Genocide 1938

Zaza / Dimili (Kirmanci/kizilbash) are not Kurds. There're similarities between them, but that does not automaticly mean that they are Kurds.

[Jam]

Re: The Dersim Genocide 1938

That is right. Around 70.000 people died in this genocide. After the genocide villages and other places that had Zaza and Armenian names were changed into Turkish names. Dersim was the last territory in Anatolia that was kind of independent from Ottomans and Turks. Zazas in Dersim didn't even know any Turkish at that time. Even my grandparents have difficulties with Turkish since they first learned Zazaish and had learned Turkish at school.

[Sako]

Re: Dersim genocide 1938

Can you explain why? I don't know, that's why I'm asking.

[bell-the-cat]

Re: Dersim genocide 1938

I know enough about it to know Kurdish propaganda. You are misusing the word "genocide".

[jano]

Dersim genocide 1938

you should know this tragedy.
dersim s zazas helped armenians during genocide. dersim rebels helped 30.000 armenians to escape from ottoman terror. after that turkish fascists punished dersim citizens.
----------
Dersim in Eastern Turkey, in 1937-1938, approximately 65000-70000 Alevi Kurds[1] were killed and thousands were taken into exile. A key component of the turkification process was the policy of massive population resettlement. Referring to the main policy document in this context, the 1934 law on resettlement, a policy targeting the region of Dersim as one of its first test cases, with disastrous consequences for the local population[2]. The Dersim genocide is often confused with the Dersim rebellion that took place during these events

[Vagharshapat]

Re: The Dersim Genocide 1938

30
Several other local rebellions followed, the largest of which took place in 1928-30 in
the area around Mount Ararat. This was the most purely nationalist of all rebellions,
organized and coordinated by a Kurdish political party in exile. In all these rebellions,
however, tribes played the major part, acting under their own aghas (chieftains) and
sometimes coordinated by shaikhs, religious leaders of wide-ranging authority. (Hence
the emphasis, in Turkish public discourse, on the need to abolish "feudalism,"
tribalism, and religious reaction.) The government, perceiving this, responded by
executing some shaikhs and aghas and separating the others from their tribes by
deporting them to other parts of the country. Some entire tribes (notably those that had
taken part in the Ararat rebellion) were deported and dispersed over western Turkey.
The first deportations were simply reprisals against rebellious tribes. In later years,
deportations became part of the concerted effort to assimilate the Kurds. The
turkification program announced by Inönü was embarked upon with characteristic
vigor. The Kurdish language, Kurdish dress, Kurdish folklore, even the very word
"Kurd" were banned. Scholars provided "proof" that the "tribes of the East" were of
pure Turkish stock, and that their language was Turkish, though somewhat corrupted
due to their close proximity to Iran. Henceforth they were to be called "Mountain
Turks." It goes without saying that there was no place for dissenting views in
academic or public life. Another historical theory developed under government
sponsorship in those days held that all great civilizations — Chinese, Indian, Muslim,
even ancient Egyptian and Etruscan — were of Turkish origin. Turkification, even when by force, was therefore by definition a civilizing process. The embarrassing
question why it was necessary to turkify people who were said to be Turks already
was never addressed.
Massive population resettlement was one measure by which the authorities hoped to
strengthen the territorial integrity of the country and speed up the process of
assimilation. Kurds were to be deported to western Turkey and widely dispersed,
while Turks were to be settled in their place. The most important policy document, the
Law on Resettlement of 1934, shows quite explicitly that turkification was the primary
objective of resettlement. The law defined three categories of (re)settlement zones:
— one consisting of those districts "whose evacuation is desirable for health,
economic, cultural, political and security reasons and where settlement has been
forbidden,"
— the second of districts "designated for transfer and resettlement of the population
whose assimilation to Turkish culture is desired,"
— and the third of "places where an increase of the population of Turkish culture is
desired."
31
In other words, certain Kurdish districts (to be designated later) were to be
depopulated completely, while in the other Kurdish districts the Kurdish element was
to be diluted by the resettlement there of Turks (and possibly deportations of local
Kurds). The deportees were to be resettled in Turkish districts, where they could be
assimilated.
The intent of breaking up Kurdish society so as to assimilate it more rapidly is also
evident from several other passages in the law. Article 11, for instance, precludes
attempts by non-Turkish people to preserve their cultures by sticking together in
ethnically homogeneous villages or trade guilds. "Those whose mother tongue is not
Turkish will not be allowed to establish as a group new villages or wards, workers' or
artisans' associations, nor will such persons be allowed to reserve an existing village,
ward, enterprise or workshop for members of the same race."
32
This is clearly more
than just legal discrimination; the Law on Resettlement provides the legal framework
for a policy of ethnocide.
It is against the background of this law that the pacification of Dersim has to be
considered. Dersim was one of the first regions where it was to be applied. A year after the Law on Resettlement, in December 1935, the Grand National Assembly
passed a special law on Dersim. The district was constituted into a separate province
and placed under a military governor, who was given extraordinary powers to arrest
and deport individuals and families. The Minister of the Interior of the day, ğükrü
Kaya, explained the need for this law with references to its backwardness and the
unruliness of the tribes. The district was in a state of lawlessness, caused by ignorance
and poverty. The tribes settled all legal affairs, civil as well as criminal, according to
their own primitive tribal law, with complete disregard of the state. The minister
termed the situation a disease, and added that eleven earlier military campaigns, under
the ancien régime, had failed to cure it. A radical treatment was needed, he said, and
the law was part of a reform program (with "civilized methods," he insisted) that
would make these people also share in the blessings of the republic.
33
The minister's metaphor of disease and treatment appears to be borrowed from a
report on Dersim that was prepared ten years earlier for the same ministry. This
document was reproduced in the official history of the military campaign, as a
guideline for military policy. The author, Hamdi Bey, called Dersim "an abscess [that)
the Republican government. . . would have to operate upon in order to prevent worse
pain." He was more explicit than ğükrü Kaya about the nature of Dersim's malady: it
was the growing Kurdish ethnic awareness.
34
The treatment began with the construction of roads and bridges, and of police
posts and government mansions in every large village. The unrest resulting from this
imposition of government control provided the direct reason for the pacification
campaign of 1937-38, which at the same time served to carry out the first large-scale
deportations under the 1934 law.
35
After the Dersim rebellion had been suppressed,
other Kurdish regions being "civilized" from above knew better than to resist.
The Kemalist enterprise was a grandiose attempt to create a new world. Mustafa
Kemal and his associates had created a vigorous new state out of the ruins of the
Ottoman Empire, the Sick Man of Europe. By banning the Arabic script they
destroyed all memory of the past and were free to rewrite history as they felt it should
have been. The Kemalists set out to create a modern, progressive, unitary nation out of
what was once a patchwork of distinct ethnic communities. Whatever appeared to
undermine national unity, be it ethnic or class divisions, was at once denied and brutally suppressed. In the Kemalists' eyes, this was a process of liberation, an
assertion of human dignity and equality.
"The people of Ankara, Diyarbakir, Trabzon and Macedonia," Mustafa Kemal
proclaimed, "are all children of the same race, xxxels cut out of the same precious
stone." Reality often turned out to be less equalitarian. Even today, a person whose
identity card shows that he was born in Tunceli will be treated with suspicion and
antipathy by officials and will not easily find employment, even if he is quite
turkicized.
36
Another famous saying of Mustafa Kemal, inscribed on official buildings
and statues throughout the country, is subtly ambiguous: "how fortunate is he who
calls himself a Turk!" — implying little good for those who don't. Justice Minister
Mahmut Esat was less subtle but robustly straightforward when he proclaimed in
1930, "The Turks are the only lords of this country, its only owners. Those who are
not of pure Turkish stock have in this country only one right, that of being servants, of
being slaves. Let friend and foe, and even the mountains know this truth!"
37
The ambivalence, or internal contradiction, inherent in the Kemalist position on
the Kurds has persisted for over half a century. The Kemalist concept of Turkishness
is not based on a biological definition of race. Everyone in Turkey (apart from,
perhaps, the Christian minorities) is a Turk, and many are the Kurds who have made
brilliant political careers once they adopted Turkish identity. Both President Turgut
Özal and opposition leader Erdal Inönü are of (partially) Kurdish descent. But there is
also a sense of Turkish racial superiority that occasionally comes to the surface.
Mutually contradictory though these attitudes are, they have reinforced one another in
the suppression of Kurdish ethnicity.
The democratization of Turkey, which began after World War II, brought a resurgence
of Kurdish ethnic awareness, along with an upsurge of left- and right-wing radicalism.
Military coups in 1960, 1971, and 1980 sought to restore Kemalist purity, and resulted
in renewed efforts at forced assimilation of the Kurds. Tunceli, the old Dersim, has
come in for more than its share of repression. No longer a "den of ignorance and
primitive tribalism," it has for the past few decades been considered a hotbed of
communism, besides remaining ineradicably Kurdish. A few years ago, new plans
were made to evacuate large parts of Tunceli and to resettle the inhabitants in the
west, ostensibly for the sake of reforestation.
38
The majority of the people of Dersim
now live in the diaspora, either in western Turkey or abroad. Not much is left of
Dersim's distinctive culture.

[Vagharshapat]

Re: The Dersim Genocide 1938

With professional pride, reports list how many "bandits" and dependents were
"annihilated," and how many villages and fields were burned. Groups who were
hiding in caves were entirely wiped out. The body count in these reports (in some
engagements a seemingly exact number like 76, in others "the entire band of Haydaran
tribesmen and part of the Demenan") adds up to something between three and seven
thousand, while tens of villages are reported destroyed. In seventeen days of the 1938
offensive alone, 7,954 persons were reported killed or caught alive;
19
the latter were
definitely a minority. According to these official reports, then, almost 10 percent of
the entire population of Tunceli was killed. The Kurds claim that their losses were
even higher.
Genocide or Ethnocide?
The killing in Dersim was undoubtedly massive, indiscriminate, and excessively
brutal, but was it genocide? Was the killing done "with intent to destroy, in whole or
in part" the Kurds (or only the people of Dersim) "as such"? Or was it only the
suppression of an armed rebellion, with considerable overkill? I shall try to show that
it was neither. There was never a policy of physically destroying the Kurds or part of
them as such. There was, however, in the Dersim campaign, a deliberate intent to
destroy rebels and potential rebels, and this was part of a general policy directed
toward the Kurds as such. But this policy is more appropriately termed ethnocide, the
destruction of Kurdish ethnic identity.
Intent to destroy may be inferred from the wording of the Secret Decision of the
Council of Ministers on the Punitive Expedition to Dersim of 4 May 1937.
20
The
decision envisages a final solution to the perpetual rebellions in Dersim. "This time,"
it reads, "the people in the rebellious districts will be rounded up and deported." But
then it orders the army to "render those who have used arms or are still using them
once and for all harmless on the spot, to completely, destroy their villages and to
remove their families." Given the fact that almost every man in Dersim was known to
carry arms, this reads like a brief to kill all men in the area.
It is not immediately obvious from official sources that the Dersim campaign was
directed against the Kurds as such. There are no explicit references to Kurds, because
the Kurds by that time had already been defined out of existence. The military reports
call all people of Dersim indiscriminately "bandits" (haydut). Interior Minister ğükrü
Kaya, however, had found it necessary to inform the National Assembly that the
people of Dersim were "authentic Turks," thereby implicitly mentioning the
unmentionable ethnic dimension of the Dersim question.
21
The problem was, of
course, that most people in Dersim were not yet aware of their Turkishness. Many did not know any Turkish at all, and the authorities had to communicate with them
through interpreters;
22
airplanes dropped leaflets "in the local language."
23
Dersimi and ğivan, both local men, are at pains to show that the Dersim rebellion
was in fact a Kurdish nationalist rebellion, and that this was the reason for the
brutality of the campaign. But they appear to project too much of their own sentiments
on the rebels, who acted out of narrower interests and loyalties than lofty national
ideals. The rebellion seems to have been primarily a response to government
interference in the tribes' affairs, resistance to what the government saw as its
"civilizing mission."
The regime presented this mission — begun well before the rebellion — as a
determined struggle against backwardness and the oppression of the people by feudal
lords, tribal chieftains, and reactionary religious leaders. One observer close to
government circles enthused, soon after the Dersim campaign, on its civilizing effects:
the tribal chieftains, the mischievous religious leaders and their accomplices
have been caught and deported to the west. The successful military operations
have once and for all uprooted any possibility for a future bandit movement in
Tunceli. Dersim is from now on liberated and saved. There remains no place in
Dersim now where the army has not set foot, where the officers and
commanders have not applied their intelligence and energies. Once again the
army has, in performing this great task, earned the eternal gratitude of the
Turkish nation.
24
In practice, however, the thrust of the government effort, including the operations in
Dersim, was not so much directed against "feudalism" and backwardness as against
Kurdish ethnic identity. The brutal Dersim campaign was but the culmination of a
series of measures taken in order to forcibly assimilate the Kurds, as I shall presently
show.
The Kurdish Policies of Republican Turkey
The Republic of Turkey, proclaimed in 1923, owes its existence to the War of
Independence fought by Mustafa Kemal and his associates against the various other
nations claiming parts of the former Ottoman territories in the wake of the First World
War-notably Greeks, Armenians, French, and Italians. A "National Pact" defined the
extent of territory for which the independence movement fought as the former
Ottoman lands inhabited by non-Arab Muslims — in other words, by Turks and
Kurds, for these were the major non-Arab Muslim groups in the Empire. Kurds took
part in this struggle along with the Turks, and the movement's leaders in fact often spoke of a Turkish-Kurdish brotherhood, and of the new state as being made up of
Turks and Kurds. In January 1923, Mustafa Kemal still suggested there might be local
autonomy for Kurdish-inhabited areas,
25
but his policies soon changed drastically.
The very fact that the new republic was called "Turkey" (a borrowing from European
languages) already indicated that some citizens were going to be more equal than
others.
26
The new republican elite, careful to preserve their hard-won victory, were obsessed
with threats to territorial integrity and with imperialist ploys to sow division. In this
regard, the Kurds were perceived to be a serious risk. There was a Kurdish
independence movement, albeit a weak one, which had initially received some
encouragement from the British. The call for Muslim unity, sounded during the War
of Independence, had been more effective among the Kurds than Kurdish nationalist
agitation, but when Turkey set on a course of secularization the very basis of this unity
disappeared. The Kemalists attempted to replace Islam as the unifying factor by a
Turkey-based nationalism. In so doing, they provoked the Kurdish nationalist response
that they feared.
Some policies caused grievances among much wider circles than those of
committed Kurdish nationalists alone. In the World War, numerous Kurds had fled to
the west when Russian armies occupied eastern Anatolia. As early as 1919, the
government decided to disperse them over the western provinces, in groups not larger
than three hundred each, so that they would not constitute more than 5 percent of the
population in any one locality. Some Kurds who wished to return to Kurdistan were
prevented from doing so.
27
In the new Turkey, all modern education was henceforth
to be in Turkish; moreover, traditional Islamic schools (medrese) were closed down in
1924. These two radical changes effectively denied the Kurds access to education.
Other secularizing measures (abolition of the caliphate, the office of shaikh al-islam,
and the religious courts; all in 1924) caused much resentment in traditional Muslim
circles. Kurdish nationalist intellectuals and army officers then joined forces with disaffected religious leaders, resulting in the first great Kurdish rebellion, led by
Shaikh Said in 1925.
28
The rebellion was put down with a great show of military force. The leaders were
caught and hanged, and severe reprisals were taken in those districts which had
participated in the uprising. According to a Kurdish nationalist source, the military
operations resulted in the pillaging of more than two hundred villages, the destruction
of well over eight thousand houses, and fifteen thousand deaths.
29
Shaikh Said's
rebellion did not pose a serious military threat to Turkey, but it constitutes a watershed
in the history of the republic. It accelerated the trend toward authoritarian government
and ushered in policies which deliberately aimed at destroying Kurdish ethnicity.
Immediately after the outbreak of the rebellion, the relatively liberal prime minister
Fethi Okyar was deposed and replaced with the grim Ismet Inönü. By way of defining
his position on the Kurds, Inönü publicly stated, "We are openly nationalist.
Nationalism is the only cause that keeps us together. Besides the Turkish majority,
none of the other [ethnic] elements shall have any impact. We shall, at any price,
turkicize those who live in our country, and destroy those who rise up against the
Turks and Turkdom."

[Vagharshapat]

Re: The Dersim Genocide 1938

The Suppression of the Dersim Rebellion in Turkey (1937-38)
[excerpts from: Martin van Bruinessen, "Genocide in Kurdistan? The suppression of the Dersim
rebellion in Turkey (1937-38) and the chemical war against the Iraqi Kurds (1988)", in: George J.
Andreopoulos (ed), Conceptual and historical dimensions of genocide. University of Pennsylvania
Press, 1994, pp. 141-170.
An Almost Forgotten Massacre: Dersim, 1937-38
In 1990 a book was published in Turkey that by its very title accused Turkey's one-
party regime of the 1930s of having committed genocide in the Kurdish district of
Dersim.
1
The book was immediately banned and did not generate the debate its
author, the sociologist Ismail Be ikçi, had hoped for. Be ikçi was the first, and for a
long time the only, Turkish intellectual to publicly criticize Turkey's official ideology
and policies regarding the Kurds, beginning with his 1969 study of the socioeconomic
conditions of eastern Turkey through a whole series of increasingly polemical works.
He paid a heavy price for his moral and intellectual courage; all his books were
banned, and he spent more than ten years in prison for writing them. Although my
conclusions may be slightly different from his, I wish to acknowledge my
indebtedness to his committed scholarship, and dedicate this chapter to him.
The massacres with which Be ikçi's book deals occurred in the course of Turkey's
pacification of the rebellious Kurdish district of Dersim (presently called Tunceli) in
1937 and 1938. The events represent one of the blackest pages in the history of
Republican Turkey, gracefully passed over in silence or deliberately misrepresented by
most historians, foreign as well as Turkish.
2
As the campaign against Dersim went on,
the authorities made sure that little information about it reached the outside world.
Diplomatic observers in Ankara were aware that large military operations were taking
place, but had little idea of what was actually going on. After the events, however, the
British consul at Trebizond, the diplomatic post closest to Dersim, spoke of brutal and
indiscriminate violence and made an explicit comparison with the Armenian
massacres of 1915. "Thousands of Kurds," he wrote, "including women and children,
were slain; others, mostly children, were thrown into the Euphrates; while thousands
of others in less hostile areas, who had first been deprived of their cattle and other belongings, were deported to vilayets (provinces) in Central Anatolia. It is now stated
that the Kurdish question no longer exists in Turkey."
3
I shall first, using the few available sources, attempt to give an impression of the
situation in Dersim prior to the pacification campaign and sketch the events of 1937
and 1938. Then I shall attempt to show that what we are dealing with was not merely
the brutal suppression of an internal rebellion but part of a wider policy directed
against the Kurds as such.
Dersim is an inaccessible district of high, snowcapped mountains, narrow valleys,
and deep ravines in central Eastern Turkey. It was inhabited by a large number of
small tribes, eking out a marginal existence by animal husbandry, horticulture, and
gathering forest products. Their total numbers were, by the mid-1930s, estimated at
65,000 to 70,000.
4
Dersim was a culturally distinct part of Kurdistan, partly due to
ecological-geographical factors, partly to a combination of linguistic and religious
peculiarities. Some of the tribes spoke Kurdish proper, but most spoke another, related
language known as Zaza. All adhered to the heterodox Alevi sect, which separated
them socially from the Sunni Kurds living to the east and south (among whom there
were both Zaza and Kurdish speakers). Although there are Alevis in many other parts
of Turkey, those of Dersim constitute a distinct group, with different beliefs and
practices.
5
Dersim was, by the mid-1930s, the last part of Turkey that had not been effectively
brought under central government control. The tribes of Dersim had never been
subdued by any previous government; the only law they recognized was traditional
tribal law. Tribal chieftains and religious leaders wielded great authority over the
commoners, whom they often exploited economically. They were not opposed to
government as such, as long as it did not interfere too much in their affairs. Many
chieftains, in fact, strengthened their position by establishing close relations with the
military and police officers appointed to the region. There was a tradition of refusing
to pay taxes — but then there was little that could be taxed, as the district was
desperately poor. Young men evaded military service when they could, but by 1935 a
considerable proportion of them did in fact serve in the Turkish army.
There were perpetual conflicts between the tribes, often taking the form of
protracted feuds. Many of the tribesmen carried arms, and raids against neighboring tribes were not uncommon. The local military officials were often drawn into the
tribal conflicts too, as some chieftains accused their enemies of conspiring against the
state. At the same time there was Kurdish nationalist agitation among the tribes,
carried out by the educated sons of leading families.
6
In 1936 Dersim was placed
under military government, with the express aim of pacifying and "civilizing" it. The
tribes' response to the modernization brought by the state, consisting of roads, bridges,
and police posts, was ambiguous. Some chieftains sought accommodation with the
military authorities, others resented this interference in their former independence. By
early 1937, the authorities believed, or had been led to believe, that a major rebellion
was at hand, a show of resistance against the pacification program, instigated by
nationalists. The person said to be the chief conspirator was a religious leader, Seyyit
Riza. Five tribes (out of around one hundred) were said to be involved in the
conspiracy.
The military campaign against Dersim was mounted in response to a relatively
minor incident, and it would seem that the army had been waiting for a direct reason
to punish the tribes. One day in March 1937, a strategic wooden bridge was burned
down and telephone lines cut. Seyyit Riza and the tribes associated with him were
suspected. The army may have believed this to be the beginning of the expected
rebellion. One Turkish source mentions that there was around the same time another
minor incident elsewhere in Kurdistan and suggests coordination by Kurdish
nationalists.
7
The official history of the military campaign, however, considers the
incident as of a local nature only.
8
It is hard, in retrospect, to separate intertribal
violence from deliberate rebellion against the state. One pro-Turkish source in fact
suggests that the suspicions against Seyyit Riza were based on denunciations by his
local enemies.
9
In any case, the army had its warrant for intervention. The first troops,
sent in to arrest the suspects, were stopped by armed tribesmen. The confrontations
soon escalated. When the tribes kept refusing to surrender their leaders, a large
campaign was mounted. Military operations to subdue the region lasted throughout the
summer of 1937. In September, Seyyit Riza and his closest associates surrendered, but
the next spring the operations were resumed with even greater force. They must have
been of unprecedented violence and brutality.
The few existing accounts of the events are necessarily partisan. One important book
was written by a local man, the veterinarian and nationalist activist Nuri Dersimi, who
was involved in the early stages of the rebellion, and who lost many relatives in the
military reprisals. The book he published fourteen years later in Syrian exile is
obviously colored by his nationalist views and may contain certain cosmetic
corrections, but seems on the whole reliable.
10
The best I can do is to quote verbatim
some passages.
When the Turkish troops began hunting down the rebellious tribes, the men gave
battle, while the women and children hid in deep caves. "Thousands of these women
and children perished," Dersimi writes, "because the army bricked up the entrances of
the caves. These caves are marked with numbers on the military maps of the area. At
the entrances of other caves, the military lit fires to cause those inside to suffocate.
Those who tried to escape from the caves were finished off with bayonets. A large
proportion of the women and girls of the Kureyshan and Bakhtiyar [two rebel tribes]
threw themselves from high cliffs into the Munzur and Parchik ravines, in order not to
fall into the Turks' hands."
11
The Kirgan, a tribe that had opted for submission to the Turkish army and broken
with the rebels, was not treated with greater clemency: "Because the Kirgan trusted the
Turks they remained in their villages, while the rebel Bakhtiyar withdrew. As a result,
they were destroyed. Their chieftains were tortured and then shot dead. All who tried
to escape or sought refuge with the army were rounded up. The men were shot on the
spot, the women and children were locked into haysheds, that were set fire to."
12
When winter approached and the army could not continue its operations, it offered
a cease-fire and a peaceful settlement with the rebels, while promising to leave the
other tribes in peace and to give compensation for the damage done.
13
These promises
served to lure the chief rebel leader, Seyyit Riza, into the town of Erzincan (whose
governor he knew and trusted). He was arrested, together with his retinue of some fifty
men. They were summarily tried and eleven of them, including Seyyit Riza, were
immediately executed.
14
In the spring of 1938 military operations resumed on an even larger scale. The
Karabal, Ferhad and Pilvank tribes, which surrendered, were annihilated. Women and
children of these tribes were locked into haysheds and burnt alive. Men and women of the Pilvank and A a₣ı Abbas tribes, that had always remained loyal to the
government, were lined up in the In and Inciga valleys and shot. The women and girls
in Irgan village were rounded up, sprinkled with kerosine and set alight. Khech, the
chief village of the Sheykh Mehmedan tribe, which had already surrendered, was
attacked at night and all inhabitants were killed by machine gun and artillery fire. The
inhabitants of Hozat town and the Karaca tribe, men, women and children, were
brought near the military camp outside Hozat and killed by machine gun. (...)
Thousands of women and girls threw themselves into the Munzur river. (...) The entire
area was covered by a thick mist caused by the artillery fire and air bombardments
with poisonous gas. (...) Even young men from Dersim who were doing their military
service in the Turkish army were taken from their regiments and shot.
15
Another Dersim-born Kurdish nationalist, Sait Kırmızıtoprak, published in 1970
under the pseudonym of Dr. ğıvan a history of the Kurdish movement, in which he
devotes a few pages to the Dersim massacres.
16
Though clearly indebted to Dersimi's
book, he adds some information from oral sources. On the 1938 campaign he writes
(in free translation):
In the spring of 1938, the government offered amnesty to all who would
surrender their arms. The Karabal, Ferhad, Pilvank, Sheykh Mehmedan and
Karaca tribes, who responded to this call, were entirely annihilated. In a later
stage, they also killed most of the Kureyshan tribe of Mazgirt district, the
Yusufan and the Bakhtiyar tribes, not sparing women, old men and children.
They were killed en masse, in many cases by the bayonet. Towards the end of
summer, the Hormekan, Kureyshan and .Alan of Nazimiye district, and part of
the Bamasuran of Mazgirt were also annihilated, by poison gas bombs as well
as by bayonets. Their corpses were doused with kerosine and set alight.
17
Improbable though it may seem, these accounts are to a large extent confirmed by the
documents published in the official military history of the campaign.
18
Only the claim
that the army used poison gas in the 1938 offensive, made by both Dersimi and ğivan,
cannot be substantiated. At several instances the reports mention the arrest of women
and children, but elsewhere we read of indiscriminate killing of humans and animals.