CONTENT WARNING
This article contains explicit descriptions of massacres, sexual violence, the killing of children, people being burned alive, the use of poison gas, forced marriage, and forced adoption. It addresses the genocide of the population of Dêrsim in 1937/1938. Please read with care.
Forgetting has a name: Tunceli. But the place is called Dêrsim. And what happened there in 1937 and 1938 is called Tertele.
In Kirmançkî, Tertele means reversal, destruction, massacre. The people of Dêrsim already knew the word: they called the Armenian genocide of 1915, in which many of their Armenian neighbours were killed, Tertele viren—the first massacre. What the Turkish army inflicted on them in 1937/38, they therefore called Tertele peen: the last, the subsequent massacre. It was not to be the last.
Background: A region in the sights of the Turkish nation-state
Dêrsim is a mountainous region in Eastern Anatolia, criss-crossed by rivers such as the Munzur and the Harçik and surrounded by peaks of the Anti-Taurus. For centuries, the valleys offered the population—Alevis who spoke Kirmançkî and Kurmancî, as well as Armenian Christians, Êzîdîs, and other groups—relative protection from state control. In the eyes of Turkish nationalists, this autonomy made the region a problem.
Ever since the founding of the Republic in 1923, Dêrsim was described in official reports as “rebellious,” “backward,” and a hotbed of non-Turkish identities. In 1926, a state official called the region a “carbuncle that the republican government must operate on.” The new state’s claim was clear: one country, one language, one identity—Turkish and Sunni Muslim. Alevi women were considered “heretics,” sometimes “crypto-Armenians.” Kirmançkî was dismissed as a mixed language that did not deserve protection in its own right.
The legal framework for annihilation was created step by step. The Settlement Law of 1934 enabled the forced deportation of non-Turkish population groups. The Tunceli Law of 1935—under which the province was renamed “Tunceli,” meaning “bronze fist”—declared Dêrsim a special province under direct military administration. The first governor, General Abdullah Alpdoğan, was granted extraordinary powers.
On May 4, 1937, the Council of Ministers—under the participation of President Mustafa Kemal “Atatürk” and Chief of the General Staff Fevzi Çakmak—decided on the military attack on Dêrsim: the annihilation of the armed, the destruction of villages, and the deportation of the population. Operations began in 1937 and reached their peak in 1938. Up to 40,000 soldiers, supported by 40 aircraft, advanced into the mountains.
What happened: massacres, poison gas, burning villages
Villages were burned down; fields and forests were set on fire. In the village of Irgan, women and girls were rounded up, doused with petrol, and set alight. Those who fled and hid in caves were killed with fire and smoke and, according to several consistent eyewitness accounts, with poison gas. Those who escaped the caves were beaten to death with bayonets. Faced with the threat of rape, thousands of women and girls threw themselves from cliffs or into the Munzur River.
The casualty figures clearly demonstrate the nature of the crime: according to Turkish military documents, around 33 soldiers died in the entire operations of 1937 and 1938. By contrast, official Turkish figures list 13,160 civilians killed and 11,818 deported—numbers that many researchers consider a significant undercount. The total population of Dêrsim was estimated at 65,000 to 80,000 people. The number of confiscated weapons—around 1,000—also stands in stark disproportion to the number of those killed, showing that the vast majority of victims were unarmed.
“From the air, from the ground, with cannons, and even with gas bombs, everything that moved in Dêrsim—whether children or women—was slaughtered,” as none other than then-Prime Minister Erdoğan later put it when quoting archival material in 2011.
Women in the Tertele: specific violence, specific silence
The violence of the Dêrsim genocide affected women in specific ways: as mothers, daughters, fighters, bearers of cultural identity, and as targets of deliberate strategies of annihilation. And yet their fate long remained invisible in historiography. Although alternative research in recent years has revealed far more about the fate of the people of Dêrsim who were murdered and forcibly resettled during this military intervention, the fate of the girls who survived the massacres and were taken away by officers remained unknown for a long time.
Sexual violence and death as an escape from it
The brutal, merciless military offensive was accompanied by continual rapes of women and girls. Faced with this threat, many women chose death. Reports by the veterinarian and activist Nuri Dersimi, who himself had to flee into exile in Syria, show that women and girls threw themselves into the gorges above the Munzur and the Harçik—the same strategy Armenian women had used in 1915, and one to which the people of Dêrsim repeatedly referred.
Accounts by Turkish soldiers confirm the scale of the violence. One soldier described, in his preserved words, how units drove women, girls, and children into a mosque, doused them with kerosene, and burned them alive. Another witness reported how soldiers searched corpses for gold jewellery, tore bracelets from arms, and chopped off arms to get the jewellery: testimony to a total dehumanisation that was produced and tolerated by the state.
The lost girls of Dêrsim
One of the least examined dimensions of the genocide concerns the children—and among them, above all, the girls. In their field research, documentary filmmaker Nezahat Gündoğan and director Kazım Gündoğan uncovered that girls from Dêrsim were distributed to members of the military and civilian bureaucracy. The aim of this measure was to assimilate Alevi and Armenian girls into Turkish-Islamic culture.
These girls were between 3 and 14 years old; most were between 5 and 10. They were at a developmental stage in which they were only beginning to grasp their language, culture, and identity—and in which the rupture could be carried out most completely. The boarding schools were intended to advance the assimilation of the female population, which was expanded especially after 1938.
This abduction was planned by the state: a letter from the then Minister of the Interior, Şükrü Kaya, dated June 4, 1937, on the “education of Dêrsim girls and boys in boarding schools,” documents that children were systematically separated from their families by order. Handed over to Turkish and Sunni families, the girls were Islamised and Turkified. Their Kirmançkî names were erased, their language banned, and their memory systematically extinguished.
In addition, there were hundreds of girls who were adopted and taken away by soldiers, about whom no precise information is available to this day. Some girls later managed to find their real families again with the help of their adoptive parents or through the research of their biological relatives. The Turkish government has still not disclosed the relevant lists.
One documented example of the fate of these girls is that of the Armenian survivor Salihan Kiremijian. She was five or six years old at the time of the exile; her name was changed to Fatma, and she was married off at the age of 13. Her three cousins are also said to have been forcibly Islamised. For decades, she remained silent about her origins; even her grandchildren did not know where she came from.
Fecire: the poet who never forgot her river
Fecire (Kocer) Buke was handed over as a small child to a Turkish military family. She grew up in Istanbul, far from the mountains of Dêrsim, with no memory of her mother tongue or her family. What remained was a longing that she later captured in a poem—in Turkish, because Kirmançkî had been taken from her. The poem is addressed to the Munzur River, to the homeland she had never known. Today it hangs on a stone at Munzur Gözeleri, the river’s sacred source, as one of the testimonies to the abduction committed against the girls of Dêrsim.
Sabiha Gökçen: the world’s first fighter pilot and the genocide
The history of women in the Dêrsim genocide is not only a history of victims. It is also a history of perpetrators—and none is more symbolically charged than Sabiha Gökçen.
Sabiha Gökçen was the world’s first female military pilot and represented the model example of a modern Turkish woman, for whom every career choice was open. She flew her first missions in the summer of 1937 and the spring of 1938 during the suppression of the Dersim uprising, where she supported the advance of Turkish ground troops through bombardments.
Gökçen was the adopted daughter of Mustafa Kemal, who was granted the epithet “Atatürk,” “Father of the Turks,” by parliamentary decision in 1934. One of Istanbul’s two major airports was named after her. As a “modern” Turkish woman, Sabiha Gökçen dropped bombs on Alevi Kurds and understood Turkish women in general as daughters of a soldierly nation. As a representative of the majority ethnicity and the affluent upper class—and not least because of her role in suppressing the Dersim uprising—she is now viewed critically by parts of Turkish society and also in research.
The figure of Gökçen embodies one of the bitterest ironies of Kemalist nationalism: women’s rights were promoted as an instrument of modernisation and at the same time used to deploy a woman as a weapon against those whose lives and culture the state was prepared to destroy. The emancipation of the “modern Turkish woman” took place on the corpses of the women of Dêrsim.
Zarîfe Xatûn: fighter side by side
While Sabiha Gökçen was elevated to a symbol of state-defined femininity, on the other side Zarîfe Xatûn fought—a woman who scarcely exists in official Turkish historiography.
Zarîfe was the life and comrade-in-arms of the poet, thinker, and resistance leader Alişer. Nuri Dersimi described her as a woman who could read and write in her time and was politically and militarily skilled. Alişer sought her advice before every decision and made no decision without her opinion. Zarîfe was a fighter. Many other women fought alongside her; they too were armed. Before the fighting, they received military training.
Alişer and his wife were lured into an ambush and killed on July 9, 1937, by people posing as supporters of the rebellion. Both resisted, and both were punished with defeat: their heads were cut off and handed over to General Alpdoğan. Zarîfe’s writings, her poems, and her documents were confiscated and have disappeared.
Zarîfe Xatûn stands for a tradition that was not an exception in Dêrsim: women as political and military actors, as thinkers, and as co-decision-makers. Women have long played a central role in Kurdish resistance movements. Yet this resistance was brutally crushed through a physical and cultural genocide.
Gulîzar: “The massacre was only the beginning”
Gulîzar was three years old when the Tertele began. Her father was taken away by soldiers and never seen again. That day, Turkish soldiers shot twenty-five Alevis in the open street in Dêrsim. Gulîzar survived with her mother in a neighbouring village. Her first mother tongue is Kirmançkî; she only learned Turkish as an adult.
She remembers one scene: a Turkish military commander rounded up women and children, struck traditional head coverings with a stick, and forced the women to put on Western clothing. Burning the traditional dress was not only humiliation—it was the symbolic execution of the annihilation order: the destruction of identity as a condition for survival.
What followed was hunger. The animals had been slaughtered, the fields burned, the means of existence destroyed. And what followed after that were decades: house searches in the 1940s and 1950s, village burnings in the 1990s, arrests up to the present. Gulîzar’s assessment is brief and relentless: In the 1930s they massacred us. In the 1970s they tortured us. In the 1990s they destroyed our villages. Now they imprison us. Nothing has changed.
Continuity of violence: from Tertele to today
The Dêrsim genocide was not a historically closed event. In the 1990s, when the armed conflict between the PKK and the Turkish military escalated, Dêrsim burned again. The population was halved through forced migration. Forests were deliberately set on fire. The people of Dêrsim call this period the “second 1938.”
After 2015, when the peace process collapsed, military security zones, curfews, and arrests followed again. The elected co-mayors of Dêrsim—including Nurhayat Altun, who after her arrest in 2016 faced the risk of more than twenty years in prison on the basis of terrorism allegations—were replaced by state-appointed trustees.
The mass grave that Huseyin Baran discovered in Hozat in 2014 contained eleven skulls, seven of them belonging to children, the youngest four years old, all killed by Turkish military ammunition. More than one hundred mass graves from 1937/38 are known in Dêrsim. Not a single one has been exhumed on state initiative.
Demands and lack of recognition
The demands of the people of Dêrsim have been the same for decades: the restoration of the name Dêrsim; the opening of state archives; the disclosure of the lists of the abducted girls; the announcement of the burial places of Seyit Rıza and his companions; the renaming of all places named after perpetrators of the genocide—Sabiha Gökçen’s name still belongs to one of Turkey’s largest airports. An end to forced assimilation.
In 2011, Erdoğan spoke of a “tragedy” and issued a conditional apology—without concrete measures. The former barracks building from the 1930s was reopened in 2020 not as a Dêrsim Museum but as a Tunceli Museum. The place name remains officially Tunceli.
For the 2026 day of remembrance, the Democratic Alevi Federation (FEDA) and the Association of Democratic Alevi Women (DAKB) described the events in a joint statement as a “targeted process of annihilation” and called for comprehensive accountability. Confronting the crimes committed, they said, is not a matter of choice but a democratic obligation.
Dêrsim lives
Despite everything, Dêrsim has not disappeared. People gather at the Munzur River, light çira at sacred sites, sing in Kirmançkî, and write slogans on walls. The language, officially considered endangered (UNESCO 2010), is spoken, preserved, and passed on. Memory lives in songs, in the laments of survivors, in books, documentaries, and oral history projects.
And it lives in Fecire’s poem to the Munzur River, written in the only language she had left: Turkish, the language of the perpetrators, which had become the only form of expression for an abducted woman. Dêrsim is everywhere a woman is not allowed to speak her own language.
Sources:
Dinç, in: A Hundred Years of Republican Turkey (Springer); Federation of Dersim Communities in Europe (FDG); Ruhr University Bochum, Dêrsim Project; zazaki.de Tertele and Roza Şiae; ANF Deutsch (April 2026); Sciences Po, Mass Violence (Kieser); Institut Kurde de Paris / Jacobin (Ashly); İHD (Human Rights Association Turkey); Kurdistan Tribune; Nezahat & Kazım Gündoğan / aslifiliz.com; taz; Berliner Zeitung; Wikipedia (Sabiha Gökçen, Alişer); ANF (Tertele Remembrance Day); aga-online.org; KOMintern.