The Settlement Law of June 1934 authorised the Turkish government to move populations for cultural, political or military reasons and classified regions by the degree of assimilation required of their inhabitants, providing the legal basis for dispersing Kurdish communities westward. In December 1935 the Tunceli Law placed the province of Dersim, largely Kurdish-speaking and Alevi, under military emergency administration and renamed it. Military operations in the spring of 1937, following an armed clash, and a far larger campaign in August and September 1938 subdued the region: villages were bombed and burned, and inhabitants were killed or deported. An unpublished official Inspectorate report cited by scholars gives 13,160 civilians killed and 11,818 deported; Alevi and Kurdish accounts give higher figures, some in the tens of thousands. The subject was taboo in Turkey for decades. In November 2009 Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan publicly described the events as a massacre, and in November 2011 he apologised in parliament, citing archival records of 13,806 people killed, while opposition parties disputed his use of the episode against them. The Turkish state has held no judicial inquiry.
The Turkish state used the 1934 Settlement Law and emergency rule to disperse Kurdish and Alevi populations and suppressed Dersim by military operation
The 1935 general census, taken the year the province was placed under the special Tunceli Law, recorded roughly 108,000 inhabitants, overwhelmingly Kurmanji- and Zazaki-speaking Alevis. The wider 1934 Settlement Law applied to Kurdish populations across the east - the same census recorded about 1.48 million Kurdish mother-tongue speakers nationally - but the deportations counted here were concentrated on Dersim.
The lower figure comes from an unpublished Turkish Inspectorate report and is close to the 13,806 cited by Prime Minister Erdogan from state archives in 2011. Kurdish and Alevi organisations and some researchers give figures of 40,000 or more, counting deaths during the deportations and in the depopulated highlands. Turkish military archives on the operations have only partially been opened.
Aerial and artillery bombardment of villages, the burning of settlements, the deportation of survivors under the Settlement Law and the placement of Dersimi children with Turkish families are documented in Turkish military and administrative records examined by the researchers of the Sciences Po Mass Violence and Resistance project.
Turkey