On this day in 1937, the founder of the Turkish Republic Mustafa Kemal Atatürk gave the order for the 'Dersim Massacres', which culminated in a genocide that claimed the lives of 70,000 mostly Kurdish Alevis in Turkey’s Dersim province. #TerteleDersim
Three years earlier the Turkish government passed the "Law on Resettlement" which was part its nationwide “Turkification” of non-Turkish majority areas. The aim was to prevent a concentration of non-Turkish speaking populations, and to dissolve those that already existed.
A secret decision by the Council of Ministers on May 4, 1937 called for a "final solution". The army was to "disarm once and for all and on the spot all those who had used or were using weapons, completely destroy their villages and remove their families".
The autonomous community of 150,000 Kurdish Alevis in Dersim opposed the extreme Turkish nationalism promoted by the government. Their resistance to the military’s occupation of their province was used as a pretext for brutal massacres.
Atatürk himself asked Nazi Germany for 20 tons of chemical gas and warplanes. The Nazis obliged and trained the Turkish army to use their equipment which were then deployed during the massacres.
During the killing Turkish commanders asked the government to send "flammable and asphyxiating gas" to speed up the operation.
Kurdish, Alevi and Zaza speaking peoples in Turkey refer to the genocide as "Tertelê", the day the world ended. After 1938 the displacements continued. In 1987 more than half of Dersim’s 434 villages were relocated to western Turkey.
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