#dersim

[dersimarchives]

Children on a water fountain, watching someone wash their clothes.

Mankerek Village of East Dersim by Peter J. Bumke, 1974 – 1978.

[zzzilan]

[sessizligipaylasmak]

[sidaramed21]

Devrim yaptığımız zaman çok güzel olacak her şey, çünkü ben devrime güzelliğimi verdim...

Hacer Arıkan

19 Aralık Gazisi

[heretic-child]

The Turkish Republic, founded in 1923, was a one-party state during the interwar period. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (1881-1938) of the Republican People's Party (CHP) was omnipotent. Turkey’s state ideology was Kemalism. According to Dutch-Kurdish historian and genocide researcher Uğur Ümit Üngör, this was a combination of "republicanism, secularism, statism, populism, revolutionism and nationalism".

The Turkish government believed in one people, one language, one religion: their new Turkey was ethnically Turkish, linguistically Turkish, and the faith was Sunni Islam. This ideology was spread from the centre to the periphery. Everywhere CHP party buildings were erected, the new message was proclaimed.

In Kurdish areas of eastern Turkey, Turkish centralisation met with Kurdish resistance. Turkey crushed these uprisings and strengthened the power of its central authority in these areas, which used to be only nominally under Ottoman rule. One of the most problematic areas was Dersim, located around 400 km east of the capital Ankara. In this mountainous, difficult-to-access area, central government had only nominal authority. The actual rulers were the various Kurdish tribes, who regularly clashed with each other.

The Kurds in Dersim were also a triple minority. They were Kurdish, but spoke a different language to many Kurds: Zaza. In addition, they were Alevis.

According to Üngör, Kurds from Dersim can in a way be compared with the Yazidis, who were victims of a genocide by ISIS in 2014. "Yazidis also formed their own minority group, with their own ethnic and religious identity. And they were also killed for that," he said.

Dutch anthropologist Martin van Bruinessen, who has studied Turkish, Kurdish and Zaza cultures, said that the Turkish government compared the Kurds in Dersim with the Native Americans in the "Wild West".

"The Turkish rulers considered Dersim a desolate area where 'civilisation' was not yet ruling. This area had to be civilised. The Kurds in Dersim were barbarians in the eyes of the Turkish rulers. They were dehumanised and it was easy to kill them en masse in 1937-1938," he said.

"Children from Dersim who survived the slaughter were raised as Turks and as Sunni and in the Turkish language, with the aim of extinguishing their former identity."

In this context, Üngör speaks of three hammer blows that the Dersim Kurds had to deal with:

"The first blow was when Turkey decided in 1937-1938 to destroy the pilgrimage sites and to kill the carriers of its own Dersim culture. The second blow came when children from Dersim were raised Turkish and Sunni, and Dersim itself was filled with Sunni mosques. The third blow was the massive exodus of Dersim Kurds from Dersim, who immigrated to Istanbul, Izmir and abroad. New generations no longer learned Zaza. This language is now threatened with extinction. This also had to do with the nationalist education in Turkey after the 1980 coup. At school Zaza was banned."

The Dersim Massacre - Then and Now

[yksbulogumm]

[yezirgan]

[yargisizbela21]

“Doğmamış bebeklerin yarım kalan öyküsüdür Dersim.”

Unutma, Unutturma…

#dersimkatliamı #dersim1938 #dersim38 #alevikatliamı

#Dersim

#Munzur

#Aleviyim

#15kasım1937 #15kasım #seyidrıza