The Dersim Genocide 1937-38:

an Introduction
Note on pronuciation:
Dersim (dehr-sim) ; Tunceli (toon-jel-ee) ; Ahl-i-Haqq (ahl -ee-hawk) ; Alevi (ahl-eh-vee)

“…Dersim is like a melancholy song, a hole in the center of my country.” –Kemal

Burkay, Dersim Kurdish journalist in Turkey

From March of 1937 to September of 1938, approximately between 25,000 to 50,000

Dersim girls, men, boys, and women died when the Turkish state forces brutally
cleansed the Dersim area. Approximately 25,000 more were evacuated–sent to other
parts of Turkey, left to fend for themselves, some dying on their way to safe haven. The
Dersim is presently named ‘Tunceli’ in Eastern Turkey. Dersim is a famous name among
Turkish and Kurdish leftist resistance movements and is used as a symbol for resisting
the dominant Kemalist regime in Turkey, which holds a strong grip on the military elite
ideology that governs, and haunts, Turkish national unification politics till this day. The
locals call it “Dersim Tertele” in the Zaza language, or “Dersim Kirkirin” in Kurmanji
(Northern Kurdish) dialect, or “Otuz Sekiz” in Turkish language.

Dersim people’s cosmology was informed by the Ahl-i-Haqq and Alevi religions with
elements of local nature beliefs. In the 16th Century, the Ottoman Sultan committed
prolonged wholescale massacres of the Alevis in areas surrounding Dersim. The Alevis
began to practice their heterogeneous, pluralistic, individual-practice oriented faith in
secret through the ages. Dersim was also a safe haven for many persecuted people from
Persian and Ottoman lands, being within the rugged mountainous terrain that proved
difficult for most travellers and Ottoman officials to fully control. Dersim was known for
its robust hospitality as much for its brutal marauding bandits that would leave victims
naked. However, they only killed when one stood in the way. Protestant missionaries
from the US and Europe dotted the landscape and had friendly relations with the
Dersim. Within Dersim, Armenians and Sunni Kurds and Turks also lived, although
few. Their relations were hospitable and integrated into the Dersim. However, there
were ongoing tribal feuds and wars between the different factions of Dersim, much like
the rest of the Ottoman rural areas.

The Dersim dominant language was a form of Zaza, or Dimili–which is related to a

Gurani language that is facing extinction today. Throughout the centuries, the Ottoman
officials recruited many Dersimians into the Ottoman army and some became wealthy
representatives of the state. The rural areas remained poor and the Dersim were
extremely independent-minded. Moreover, the Ottoman state frequently sent in armies
to control and subjugate the area in order to have them pay the taxes and obey the
central government. However, the self-determination of the Dersim was always strong
and the Ottomans could not succeed in this. The Dersim were willing to negotiate and
this was the only way the Ottomans could work with them in regards to a rapidly
centralizing Ottoman state in the late 19th century. The European powers encroached,
along with the Russians, capturing territories.
A coup and subsequent establishment of the Young Turk government in 1908, seemed to
lift the spirits of Dersim, as well as the Alevi Turkish and Kurdish tribes in Eastern
Turkey because the Young Turks promised pluralism and religious freedom at first. But
what the Alevis and particularly the Dersim saw around them was a more virulent
racism and religious intolerance that did not look like the liberal principles the Young
Turk government announced earlier. When the CUP/Young Turk Coup established
their control of the ‘new’ Ottoman Turkey’ in 1908, there was fear that the same fate was
approaching them as the Armenians. There had already been massacres of Armenians
around Dersim. The Armenian genocidal events stirred Dersim. Besides losing many of
their co-inhabitants, the state’s actions increased their fear of impending doom. This was
intensified by the fact that many Dersimians helped thousands of Armenians escape to
Russia during the genocide, with the help of a Turkish officer and the American
Protestant missionaries. Many Dersimians were also killed along with the Armenians
during this time.

In 1925, Dersim/Kocgiri tribes staged an attack against Turkish military outposts,

bridges and key buildings. Some Dersim Kurds, and a few Alevi Turkish and Sunni
Kurds who were former members of the Ottoman state calvaries participated. It was
brutally crushed by the Turkish forces and thousands were killed. Soon after, a law was
set into place in order to homogenize the Eastern Anatolian (Turkish) education system,
excepting only Turkish as the official language and instituting only Turkish versions of
history. Development to modernize, began intensifying in Dersim. State Military
outposts began cropping up everywhere. In state meetings, it was frequently mentioned
that the Dersim was a canker in the center of the country that must be excised, and other
such ’scientific’ racist terms that spoke to the urgency of eradicating Dersim. In addition,
several records mention that Turkish commanders and officials frequently made
reference to the Dersim coming under the same fate as the Armenians. Indeed several of
the same tactics would be used. Intelligence officers were sent into the Dersim to do
sociological, anthropological research on the people and culture. In this research, each
tribe, each association, maps etc. were carefully charted. This set the state for an accurate
devastation to come in the future. The Dersim were not to sit idly by, even as most of
their people began to outwardly fear what may come. The Western Dersim tribes began
attacking state military outposts and bridges, crippling the state and also feeding their
rage. The West Dersim spiritual wiseman and community leader–Seyit Riza, along with
others, sent letters to the United League of Nations and to the Ottoman government in
order to ask for self-determination rights–which was inspired by President Woodrow
Wilson’s principles during that time. At the same time, the Young Turk revolution gave
way to the establishing of Turkey as a nation-state. The ideological underpinning of the
governing peoples were strongly influenced by the popular ideologies in Europe at the
time: fascist French, Italian, and German right-wing thought. This emboldened their
ideas for forming a strong nation-state via ethnic cleansing. The target was more to
cleanse the culture–a cultural ethnocide.

As tensions mounted in 1935, the ‘Tunceli Law’ was established. This divided the
Eastern Turkish areas (Kurdistan) into evacuation zones. Kurds, Alevis, Christians were
uprooted from their homes and evacuated to various parts of the country. Central
governments were set up in each area controlled by Sunni Turks and assimilated Kurds
and Dersimians as well. Languages other than Turkish were eventually forbidden. The
name of the Dersim region capital ‘Kalan’ was changed, as was Dersim–both into the
name ‘Tunceli’ in 1936. In official records, it is written that the same system to eradicate
the Armenians were used especially in Tunceli (Dersim). In 1937, the assault
instensified. Turkey had amassed modern weapons from tanks to bomber planes,
assisted by French and German military officials. The Dersim was a first ’show’ for these
new technologies. Dersim villagers were no match with them.

Bombs fell. Rapes began. Women and girls were said to jump off ravines to their deaths
in order to avoid being raped. Some families hid in caves but the Turkish forces fired
flame-throwers into them, burning them alive. People were thrown off ravines and
mountain tops. Men were gathered together like cattle, then machine-gunned to their
deaths or were lit afire. Girls and women were led into buildings, then doused with
kerosene and lit into flames and ashes. Leaders, journalists, educators were captured
and shot. Dersim Kurds who served in the Ottoman army were shot. Seyit Riza–the
grand spiritual leader of the western Dersim tribes, along with ten others, were hung by
the state. Many Turkish officials protested the brutal force of their own commanders.
They were silenced or shot by others Turkish soldiers as sympathizers.

Although during the Armenian genocidal operations, Protestant and Catholic

missionaries and others would be there to witness and get word out, during these
operations the Turkish government made sure to evacuate all foreigners and ban
journalists. Still there are a few pictures that remain from secret cases and holes in the
fields that Dersimians made sure to record. Much like during the anti-Armenian
operations, many survivors speak of the Munzur river being literally red and filled, at
times, with bodies. From this period through 1948, when the military ban was lifted,
thousands of Dersim children were taken from their homes and made to be servants in
Turkish homes, not allowed to see their parents. Decades later, when they met their
parents, they could not communicate in their language.

Assimilation schools were set up as early as the 1920s in the Dersim and Eastern Turkey
areas. After the 1937-38 operations, many Dersim children and families were happy to
be able to go to schools to attempt to lift themselves out of the poverty they lived with
and from the scornful looks they often were objects of by more wealthy Turkish people
they encountered. The schools for the Dersim area were designed by the Turkish
government along the lines of the American Native American boarding school system.
An intelligence officer was sent to the University of Michigan in the 1930s just for this
purpose. She is considered the ‘Great Mother of Turkish Educaiton’ in Turkish history
textbooks. Also, the great feminist military leader/hero of Turkey is the daughter of
Ataturk–the founder of the Turkish state, who became a hero as a result of her being the
first female fighter pilot of Turkey, performing her first bomb raids over Dersim. A
Turkish journalist who travelled to the area in the late 1940s, was astonished to see the
state of things in Dersim. He mentioned the extreme poverty and the ‘easily intimidated’
people there. And now the railroads and pavement were glorious. This is the path of
nation-making.
In the 1960s, the world was in a powderkeg. Turkey’s socialist movements were born
then, and many of the young Dersim people joined leftist and socialist causes and
movements. During the brutal 1980 coup, severe restrictions and near-civil war
conditions intensified underground resistance movements. Since Dersim was a
relatively small area, the Sunni Kurdish socialist movements rose to influence because of
sheer size. Many Dersimians joined the movements while Dersim militant resistance
movements formed separately as well–the most famous of them being the TKP-ML, still
active today and espousing Maoist ideology.

In the 1990s, Tunceli/Dersim experienced an intensified evacuation and scorched-earth

low-intensity warfare by the state. Hundreds more Dersimians were evacuated with
‘anti-Terrorism’ as its discourse. Thousands of acres of forests were burned to the
ground. Farm animals were killed or shipped away for Turkish businessmen, and water
was destroyed in certain areas to prevent drinking. Dersim’s fame as a center of anti-
state activity was geographically connected to Dersim’s isolation in the mountains, and
fueled by the brutality and the non-acceptance of the Turkish state in difference.
Terrorism and counter-terrorism is today’s state tool of Dersim’s subjugation.

Tunceli has been under military surveillance and law off-and-on since these times.
Today, Tunceli is still under military law. Most of the people that live there today are
not locals. They are assimilated Sunni Turkish, Kurdish and Arab officials and their
families. Most of the Dersimians have left the area and live in other areas of Turkey and
Europe primarily. The Annual Munzur Cultural Festival has brought socialist resistance
movements and ecological awareness to the world stage. However, Dersim cultural
practices and worldview continue to be diminished under the tremendous militarization
of resistance necessary to combat Turkish state military apparatus. Cultural groups in
Europe, such as the European Dersim Federation, and the Dersim Memorial & Historical
Foundation in the US, hopes to generate more interest in the culture that even
Dersimians themselves have forgotten (by forced and/or voluntary assimilation or for
survival).

The Turkish state has also named Alevism as ‘an original folk Islam’ and combines
elements of Turkish Alevism and Sunni Hanefi Islam (which is the dominant faith and
cultural practice in Turkey). This has been an effective tactic to fight against the PKK
Kurdish resistance movement’s power as well as inserting state dependency and ‘truths’
into formerly heterogenous, non-homognized forms of Alevism. For the elders of
Dersim, the Raa-Haqq Alevism of Dersim hardly resembles any of the Alevism touted
by the younger generation. Since the younger generation does not know their history of
their particular forms of spiritual and cultural beliefs, they have freely assumed their
Alevism is Alevism. Coupled with the socialist movement blaming Dersim elders for
their ‘backwardness’, the generation gap develops and creates a vacuum between
Dersim’s past and Dersim identity issues today. This very vacuum helps to create an
area where the state can gain people’s loyalty, as well as divisiveness so the state can
control. Tunceli is attempting to become a tourist attraction. Its natural beauty is
splendid. But the military continues its heavy surveillance of all who enter and exit.

As of 2007, over 500,000 landmines are said to still be on Eastern Turkish territory,
according to Turkish official sources. Locals are banned from much of their own land or
are injured and/or killed by one of these mines. Another of the most pressing concerns,
which has helped in galvanizing resistance groups of various kinds, is the planned
construction of the Munzur dams. This has helped bring attention to the many Biblical
historical sites (yes, from the Bible), the incredible Hittite, Roman, and other ruins, and
thousands of indigenous flora and fauna unique to Dersim, which would be destroyed
and/or altered forever by a dam project. Scientific experiments continue to alter the
ecology while archaelogical projects steel the precious historical memory objects from
the Dersim region while lining the pockets of museum operators. Many see these issues
as yet more disguised tactics towards the state’s dream of ethnocide.

The elderly who survived the genocide of 1937-38, are mostly in Europe with some in
Turkey. Today, most of the elderly survivors of the genocidal events of “38″ are 70 to 90
years of age and lessening in numbers. Most have much difficulty speaking about it or
refuse to. A few documentaries have now come out in Europe and on You Tube.

It is a hope of the Dersim Memorial & Historical Foundation (in the US), and its
founders: myself and Serkan, that historical memory and empowerment can work
alongside each other in order to create respect for difference and empowerment through
ethical commitments to remembering and change.