Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan
Erdogan also said one of the main obstacles to Turkey’s becoming “one of the world’s most powerful states is that it can’t face up to its past, history, taboos and fears.”
ANKARA (Combined Sources)—Turkey’s prime minister apologized Wednesday for the first time for the killings of nearly 14,000 people in a bombing and strafing campaign to crush a Kurdish rebellion in the 1930s, reported the Associated Press.
The apology by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan was no big change of heart but a political tactic to tarnish the reputation of the opposition party, which was in power at that time. Still, comes at a tense time for relations between Turkey and its minority Kurds, and it sparked calls for Turkey to face another dark chapter of its history—the Armenian Genocide.
Erdogan on Wednesday offered his apology for the killings of 13,806 people in the southeastern town of Dersim — now known as Tunceli — between 1936 and 1939. The apology came after a war of words between Erdogan and the leader of the main opposition party.
According to Hurriyet Daily News, Erdogan showed documents dated August 1939, which stated the operations had killed more than 13,000 people between 1936 and 1939.
Erdogan further defined the Dersim killings as “the most tragic incident of our near past.”
An opposition lawmaker, Huseyin Aygun, from the Republican People’s Party said a dozen of his relatives were killed in Dersim and added that details about the suppression of the rebellion needed to become known, added the AP.
Erdogan’s apology appeared aimed at embarrassing opposition party leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu, whose party was in power at the time of the rebellion. Kilicdaroglu’s family is also rooted in Tunceli.
“Am I going to apologize or are you?” Erdogan asked Kilicdaroglu in a televised speech. “If there is need for an apology on behalf of the state, if there is such a practice in the books, I would apologize and I am apologizing.”
Some ruling party lawmakers called for a probe into the Dersim slayings, where troops of Turkey’s newly founded republic brutally crushed Kurdish clans that rejected central authority.
“Instead of looking for a culprit, we must chose to face history,” government legislator Mustafa Elitas said.
Mustafa Armagan, a historian and researcher, told state-run TRT television on Wednesday that the military’s campaign in Dersim was followed by forced migrations and massacres as well as policies of assimilation.
The prime minister also said one of the main obstacles to Turkey’s becoming “one of the world’s most powerful states is that it can’t face up to its past, history, taboos and fears.”
Turkey is also under pressure to acknowledge other dark pages in its history, including the Armenian Genocide a special wealth tax imposed on Jews in the 1940s and attacks on its Greek minority in 1955.
Despite the calls for search for truth over the Dersim incidents, Erdogan’s government has said it would only halt its current military drive if the rebels of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party or PKK disarm. However, the government has left the door open for future talks.
Turkey has long realized that it can’t end the Kurdish rebel war through military measures alone, and the government has granted more cultural rights to the Kurdish minority such as broadcasts in the once-banned Kurdish language