How Turkey massacred the Kurds of Dersim

After five months on book leave, it is nice to be back in the Daily News.

I hope all has been well for everybody since June. As for Turkey, many new events and debates seem to have unfolded, but the scene is pretty much the same. Once again, one of the taboos of our not-so-democratic Republic is being hotly debated. (This time it is the “Kurdish question.”)

Once again, our incumbent “Islamist” party, despite the reckless machismo of its leader, proves to be more liberal and reformist than its secularist opponents. And, once again, some pundits in Turkey, or Washington, are propagating the line that this “Islamist” government is pushing us into “darkness,” by ending the good old days of the Kemalist quasi-dictatorship.

In fact, understanding the true nature of that Kemalist era is the key to realizing whether Turkey is heading toward “darkness,” or actually moving away from it. And Onur Öymen, the second man of the secularist opposition, the Republican People’s Party, or CHP, just gave us a good opportunity to reflect on that question a little bit.

Dersim? What Dersim?

Öymen’s controversial remarks came last week, when he strongly opposed the reform initiative to broaden Kurdish rights and disarm the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK. Criticizing the governments’ peacenik motto, “Let mothers cry no more,” Öymen said that Turkey has fought many lethal enemies, both within and without, and never stopped doing so for such bleeding-heart concerns. “Did mothers not cry in the Dersim uprising,” he asked. “No one stood up and said, ‘Let mothers cry no more’ and ‘let’s stop this struggle.’”

Protests then flared against Öymen, throughout the country, and even from some of the saner members of his party. “Dersim,” they said, “cannot be justified.”

But what was this Dersim thing all about?

Many Turks have no clue about the event because this nasty episode, like several others, is carefully excluded from “official history,” the only history they know. Even some Western authorities, such as Bernard Lewis and Stanford J. Shaw, have not written a single word about it in their books on modern Turkish history. Yet the violent suppression of the Dersim Revolt of 1937-38 is too tragic to be forgotten, let alone be cheered for.

Here is the briefest story. Dersim, a town in eastern Anatolia, was a tribal area of Alevi Kurds, who were both religiously and ethnically unorthodox in the eyes of the Turkish Republic. In the mid-1930s, the Kemalist regime tried to subdue this anarchic region by imposing “law and order,” and, of course, taxes. Some tribes conceded defeat, others resisted.

One day in March 1937, a strategic wooden bridge was burned down and telephone lines were cut. The government saw this as the beginning of a big rebellion. The military soon launched a brutal campaign on the province, in order to kill the rebels, but also a great many number of civilians.

The accounts from the massacres come mainly from the survivors, such as Nuri Dersimi, who wrote a book 13 years later in Syria. He explains that when troops began hunting down the rebellious tribes, the men gave battle, and the women and children hid in deep caves.

“Thousands of these women and children perished because the army bricked up the entrances of the caves,” Dersimi writes. “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.”

It is safe to assume that Dersimi, a Kurdish nationalist, is biased. But other accounts confirm the terrible story. Martin van Bruinessen, a Dutch anthropologist and an expert on Kurdish history, says, “At several instances, the [official military] reports mention the arrest of women and children, but elsewhere we read of indiscriminate killing of humans and animals.

“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.”

Overall, Bruinessen estimates “almost 10 percent of the entire population of Tunceli was killed.”

You can wonder where Tunceli was. Well, it was Dersim’s new title after the “pacification” of the province. Just like thousands of other Kurdish towns and villages, it was given an artificial Turkish name.

The ‘historical context’

This is the unpleasant story of Dersim. One can say that it needs to be seen in its “historical context.” That was a time when many other authoritarian governments, too, were terribly brutal toward civilian populations. Even Winston Churchill, as colonial secretary, was “strongly in favor of using poison gas against uncivilized tribes” in Iraq.

That contextualization certainly has a logic. What doesn’t have one is the fact that Turkey continues to idealize its authoritarian age and avoids facing its misdeeds. That was so apparent in Öymen’s defense of his own words. “I am just defending Atatürk’s methods,” he said. “Shall we deny him?”

Yes, we can deny, and criticize, even Atatürk. The regime that allows that is called liberal democracy. And we are getting closer to it day-by-day.