The Dersim Genocide, Kizilbas and the Republican Colonial Phantasies

The Dersim Genocide, Kizilbas and the Republican Colonial Phantasies

On June 4, 1937, the Minister of Interior, Şükrü Kaya, dispatched an “urgent” internal memo to the Ministry of Culture. “Within the scope of the reform movement in Dersim”, Kaya requested the opening of girls’ and boys’ boarding schools located in areas with a high density of Turkish population, situated geographically and culturally far from Dersim. He envisioned that in these boarding schools, children over the age of five would undergo specialized training and education determined by the state, entirely removed from their biological families and the influence of their indigenous socio-cultural environments. He further projected that when these children reached adulthood, they would be married to one another, thereby systematically rebuilding the nuclear Turkish home and re-seeding Turkish culture on the very lands inherited from their families. 

Only three months after this memo, a “boarding section for girls coming from Tunceli” was inaugurated at the Elazığ Girls’ Institute. By September 1937, approximately twenty girls between the ages of six and twenty were forcibly recruited. The cruelty of this recruitment was blatant: some were dragged from piles of corpses, one was snatched from her own wedding, and others were surrendered to soldiers by their fathers as a desperate sign of submission to state authority. From 1937 through the late 1950s, the systematic recruitment of girls continued under Kaya’s framework, a process that ultimately yielded both convoluted methods and contradictory results.

By examining official reports and archival state documents on the Dersim Question, this lecture uncovers the Republican elite’s deep-seated obsession with Kızılbaşness. These records reveal that for the Republican elite, Dersim was fore and most Kızılbaş in its essence and societal structure. For them, Kızılbaş was not a proper religion or identity, but an anomaly, in-betweenness, a deformation that has historically generated different forms of subversion such as banditry, disobedience, and disorder. Kurdification appeared in these reports as the most recent, most malignant and threatening form of   anomaly that had the risk of spreading beyond Dersim again through Kızılbaş networks into broader populations across central and eastern Anatolia. It was this anxiety that pressured the political elite to come up with the most radical plan to that date, to uproot and eradicate what was perceived as an insidious challenge to the nation’s body and authority. To explore these connections, this lecture is structured into three sections. First, it digs into the Kurdification thesis, through which the Republican elite racialized Dersim as a Kızılbaş question. The second section fleshes out how the Kurdification thesis gave way to a dual mechanism for the disciplining of Dersim, which necessitated the wrath of the state. The third and final section focuses on the Elazığ Girls’ Institute boarding school for girls from Tunceli as an embodiment of this dual mechanism, wherein officials separated redeemable Kızılbaş Turks from their local agents to win them over to their Turkish essence.

We start with the Kurdification Discourse

Having served as the Director of Migrants and Tribes in 1915, Şükrü Kaya had his first major experience with the “children” question with Armenian orphans,  and had utilized orphanages to show that the Ottoman authorities were carrying out deportation orders with utmost order and mercy. The Dersimli children’s question however was not about façade. It was integral to the political elite’s deep anxiety that, if not contained, future Kızılbaş generations were at risk of being ‘contaminated’ and ‘subjugated’ by what they diagnosed as an ongoing process of Kurdification. According to Kaya, Dersimlis, who “originally consisted of genuine Turks from Khorasan,” “as a result of excessive contact with people called Kurmanch, distanced themselves from their native languages, adopted a form of corrupted Persian,” and more importantly began to lean toward Alevi and Bektashism. Consequently, they became “a community that speaks like a Kurd but has not yet digested his character” but remained “squeezed between Kurdishness and Turkishness.” After centuries of in-betweenness, which owed itself to gross oversight  and misgovernance however, they had been rapidly becoming Kurdish. To prove the extreme urgency of the Kurdification process, Kaya pointed out to the woman and child. “Regrettably,” he  noted, the “Dersim mother,” whose relations with the outside world were more limited than men, had begun becoming Kurdish prior to the fathers. Kaya concluded his memorandum by underlining that removed from their mothers and homes, proposed boarding school would permanently disrupt the Kurdification process for these young children, and would return them, the majority of whom still had Turkishness in their blood, to the fold of Turkdom.  

Critical Kurdish studies often dismiss this ontological thesis of the 1930s as a mere state bogus or propaganda. Burdened by a retrospective bias, they project late-twentieth-century state discourses backward, emphasizing accusations of banditry, religious reactionism, and feudalism as mere pretexts. In doing so, it wrongly generalizes the Kurdification thesis, which was rooted in the presumed essential Turkishness of Dersimlis, as if it were a blanket policy meant for all Kurdish groups. While this position was a reaction against subsequent state denialism in the 1990s, it overlooked the historical trajectory of the Kızılbaş. In contrast, the official reports written in the immediate aftermath of the 1925 Sheikh Said Rebellion present a different reality. The Kurdish identity of Hanafi and Shafi’i populations was explicitly recognized. The state pathologized them not by denying their ethnicity, but by framing them as racially inferior, backward, and trapped by feudal ties, intending to assimilate them over time.

In his report titled ‘Summary: Concerning the Kurds,’ an unnamed high-ranking official stationed in Elazığ in 1926 noted: ‘The Kurd has no history,’ ‘Kurdish is a highly primitive language,’ ‘There are a number of primitive laws and customs among the Kurds, these are not recorded,’ and ‘dirt and lice are the distinguishing characteristic of Kurdish families. Crucially, in the same text, the author separated the Kızılbaş groups, labeling them as ‘Turks whom we think are Kurds although they are Turks.’ He continued as follows: ‘The Kurds of Turkish origin are in the directions of Maraş, Dersim, Akçadağ, Erguvan, and Eymir […] Again, the Kızılbaş tag gave rise to the presumption that eastern Dersim, Akçadağ, Erguvan, and Eymir are Kurdish. This error stems directly from the failure to separate the concepts of religious sect [mezhep] and nationality.’

Many such reports that were devoted to refuting the  claims around Kurdishness of Dersim by citing the particularities of Kızılbaş  faith and the long-term alienation caused by it, actually exposed the ideological inconsistencies of the new regime. This almost innate distinction between the ‘Sunni us’ and the ‘Kızılbaş alien other,’ testified to the allegedly secular elite’s profound commitment to Sunni Muslim as the normative citizen not unlike the ancien régime it replaced. The new Republic also treated the socio-political unreliability of Kızılbaş, Alevi, Bektashi, and Tahtacı communities as a given, flatly refusing to share power or acknowledge them as separate religious rites or communities. Beyond this institutionalized denialism, specific historical turning points actively catalyzed the regime’s anxieties. Namely, the common belief that the Kızılbaş had abstained from voluntary participation in the 1915 Armenian genocide compared to Sunni groups, combined with minority-status proposals introduced at Lausanne and the ethno-religious disputes over the Sanjak of Alexandretta, hardened the state’s view of them. These developments cemented the ruling elite’s perspective that Alevi-Kızılbaş networks embodied ambiguous loyalties, making aggressive state intervention, containment, and preemption a structural mandate. 

To counter nineteenth-century missionary claims that Kızılbaş, Alevi, Nusayri populations were originally persecuted Christians or pagans, early republican elite inverted this narrative to enforce Turkishness. This intellectual shift was pioneered in the 1920s by Baha Said, who launched his ethnographic studies to explicitly refute missionary documents seized at the Merzifon American College. Gaining momentum in the 1930s, this new thesis racialized Kızılbaş and Alevi  groups as a transient, in-between community, and created a deep cognitive conundrum. It simultaneously celebrated Alevis as ‘original Turks’ who preserved pure pre-Islamic traditions, while stigmatizing them as a national threat because their lived faith relegated them to a corrupted, intermediate category stuck between Turkishness, Kurdishness, and Arabness.

Dersim presented an even more complex scenario for early republican administrators. For instance, the Diyarbakır governor, Cemal Bardakçı, initially advocated for a compassionate approach based on ethnolinguistic assimilation, stating: ‘In my Dersim journey, I did not come across anyone who does not know Turkish and a Kurdish type. Sunnis call Alevis Kurds; and Alevis call Sunnis Turks. In the Dersim Alevis neighboring the Kurds, there is the conviction that they are a nation other than the Turk, and even civil servants have fallen into this error.’ Yet, in another memorandum, Bardakçı inverted this logic to emphasize the futility of integration, highlighting an unbridgeable religious divide instead: ‘The worst and schism-worthy aspect of Alevism is the deep chasm between them and Turkishness. This chasm is the Kızılbaş faith. The Kızılbaş do not like the Sunni Muslim. The Kızılbaş believe that they carry the divine power and that the Imams were killed with torture at the hands of the Sunnis. For this reason, they are hostile to Sunnis. This has gone so far that the Kızılbaş considera the words Turk and Sunni, and Kurd and Kızılbaş, as the same…

In the same reports, the  Kızılbaş ocaks, pir-rayber networks, autonomous tribal structures, and  sacred geography that rendered Dersim mountains seemingly impassable fortresses framed as challenges against the Republic’s omnipotence. The emotional, cultural and religious bonds built upon dede-disciple networks among Turkish, Kurmanchi and Kurmancki speaking Kızılbaş, which superseded their attributed ethnic identities and demonstrated their volatile political potential during the Koçgiri Rebellion, deeply troubled the central government. As such, what Kızılbaş  embodied was no longer a heresy, non-conformity or Kufr, but an existential crisis and a deep-seated racial anxiety for the overly confident nationalist regime.

This takes us to our second point about what needs to be done 

In his report dated 1926, Inspector Hamdi noted that “Dersim, was gradually becoming Kurdish, becoming ideologically hardened, and its danger is consequently increasing, a boil for the Republican Government”. That document highlighted how Kurdification could sweep across a broad geographical line connecting Sivas, Malatya, and Erzincan, radiating outward from the mixed Turkish and Kurdish Kızılbaş communities of Dersim.  Chief of General Staff Fevzi Çakmak also warned of the threat of Kurdification expanding into other Turkish Kızılbaş regions and wrote: “…There are 10,000 Kurds in the central district of Erzincan. Weaponizing Alevism, they seek to Kurdify existing Turkish villages and spread the Kurdish language. It is feared that Kurdishness will invade the whole of Erzincan in a few years. Many Turkish villages that are ethnically Turkish by custom but Alevi by faith are speaking Kurdish and abandoning their mother tongue under the assumption that Alevism expresses Kurdishness…” Sharing an alarmist tone, both identified that Kurdification gained momentum over the last twenty years. While state officials could still converse in Turkish with older residents, the language was being completely displaced by Zazaified dialects among the younger generation, vanishing entirely among children under ten. If left on its own, they argued, it was beyond doubt that Kurdification would fully encroach Dersim’s Kızılbaş Turks, leaving behind no trail of Turkishness anymore.

In his 1932 text The Derebeyi and Dersim, Kütahya deputy Naşit Hakkı Uluğ  identified a social class of derebeys in Dersim, namely seyyids and tribal leaders for this malignant expansion. The seyids were blamed for weaponizing superstition among the ignorant masses to foster anti-state and anti-Sunni sentiment, while tribal chiefs were accused of land dispossession and impoverishing the peasantry. Both groups were criminalized as the agents of Kurdification, thereby becoming the primary targets of  the genocidal military operation. By defining the region’s inhabitants as a captive, landless underclass, Uluğ justified a violent, urgent ‘liberation’ of the population from these agents, famously writing: “The man who is bound to the land like a weed is called a ‘Kurd.’ The ‘Kurd’ is bought and sold with the land, he is the property of those who own the land. The Turk’s head is held high. He does not let be…”

Proposed by Fevzi Çakmak, Reform Plan for Dersim took shape after 1935 and was executed with minor adjustments. The modus operandi of the disciplinary and punitive campaign (tedip ve tenkil), which was expected to secure the absolute subjugation of Dersim, relied on a dual strategy: eliminating those identified as perpetrators of Kurdification or already Kurdified, and salvaging those who had not yet been Kurdified. Thereby,  solution to perennial Dersim operation was the burden of the Turkish state to  liberate its subjugated kins, terminate their captivity and return them to their ethnie  by unearthing the authentic Turk.  Long before the start of the operation, separate lists and plans for Kurdifiers and Redeemables set Dersimlis fate after 1938  radically different from each other. In the initial phases of the operation, tribal chiefs, seyits, and pirs whose names were  target lists were captured along with their tribesmen. Concurrently, during the military sweeping operations, villages were torched together with its inhabitants, those caught within the designated “Forbidden Zone” were slaughtered or exiled under the charge of having “Kurdified.” For the surviving “Mountain Turks” who were permitted to stay in now Tunceli, the state enforced a salvation scheme. As Kaya targeted the biological mothers in Dersim as already Kurdified, their capacity to transmit culture, language, and upbringing to her offspring had to be severed. Integral and concomitant with the military operation, a special schooling policy was designated to re-acculture the future generations and delegitimized Dersimli mothers’ maternal roles.

Elazığ Girls’ Institute: Rescued, Redeemed and Turkified? 

“Republican anxieties of ‘Kurdification’ expose a grim truth about the Dersim genocide: military operation and education were inseparable. The physical overkill, the burned villages, forced deportations, and military sweeps have been  structurally embedded within the state’s civilizing and re-acculturation regimes. It shows us that what was paternalistically celebrated as ‘the compassion of the state’ was, in fact, an engine of genocidal destruction” for the Kizilbas “anomaly”

Accordingly, Abdullah Alpdoğan, the Inspector General of the Fourth Inspectorate-General led the military operation along with overseeing the Elazığ Girls’ Institute section for Girls from Tunceli.  When explaining his criteria for the students selected for this school, he underlined that they should be of the daughters of the peasants, who “had spoken ‘Mountain Turkish’ up to that point and had lacked the opportunity to learn the official state Turkish language,” yet belonged to families that had not engaged in rebellion or disobedience against the state.  He strictly observed the distinction between Kurdifier and the redeemable Dersimli. Similarly, an examination of the school’s registers confirms that recruitment areas were mainly outside of  the Forbidden Zone, which was tagged as Kurdified and rebellious and thus remained depopulated until 1947. With recruitment numbers increasing each year, school epitomized not only the means for long-term – de-Kurdification, Turkification, civilizing mission, but also an immediate privilege, and a protection for those designated as redeemable for Turkishness. An inspection report submitted to Republican People’s Party in 1941, conveyed a jubilatory praise to Kaya’s Kurdification thesis and already prevalent return to Turkdom: I quote  

“I entered the classrooms reserved for the children of Tunceli. They speak exactly like a city child. They work, they have learned, and they know their true nationality. They have embraced this not through mere imitation, but with conscious awareness.”

The figure who brought the Elazığ Girls’ Institute to the absolute fulfillment of its founding mission was Sıdıka Avar, who began her tenure there as a Turkish teacher in 1939, was soon promoted to principal in charge of the “boarding girls,” and held this post for twenty years, widely known as a “Turkish missionary.” Believed to have been appointed to this mission by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk himself, Avar spent her twenty years with Dersimli girls as far more than just a teacher; she became the state’s harsh yet affectionate mother figure, stepping into the place of their biological mothers with the explicit ideological aim of “re-birthing” them. Following a visit to a graduate whose progress she closely monitored, she contentedly recorded the seeds she witnessed regarding how future generations would be  ideologically “rescued” and racially de-Kurdified, and re-Turkified through education: 

“The mother was fair-haired, the child was blonde and spoke excellent Turkish. Her hair and grooming were immaculate, and her attire was orderly, just like city children. What the Ata had decreed had been realized: Turkish, alongside etiquette and knowledge, had entered the household via the mother.”

Epilogue 

Contrary to the maternal colonialist optimism of Sıdıka Avar, this process generated partial and contradictory outcomes. The diverse life trajectories of the Dersimli girls, whom Avar labeled as “Mountain Flowers” expose the ultimate limits of social engineering through genocide. The profiles of the graduates of Elazig Girls Institute testify to long-term personal transformations, political alignments, and the struggles of younger generations to re-evaluate this trauma and illustrate the sheer complexity Ultimately, the project’s “incompleteness,” or  “deviation from objectives, change nothing about the fundamental nature of the event: the violence inflicted upon young girls, their mothers, and their family units was inherently colonial and served as a core component of a genocidal blueprint.

Furthermore, Dersim genocide relied on a seemingly contradictory  but in  fact symbiotic policy of extreme violence and civilizing, physical liquidation on the ground via military operations, coupled with re-acculturating schooling policy. This lecture argues that this duality owed itself, and was only possible through the racialization Kızılbaş into an existential biological and ontological crisis for the early Republic. State elites pathologized the Kızılbaş population as a dangerous, malleable racial category sliding toward Kurdification, which not only enabled but also burdened them to kill the threat and save the redeemable in order to safeguard the Turkish nation. However, far from being a resolved question of the past, the volatile “conundrum” regarding Dersimli origins, search for their “true” identity and suspicious around Kızılbaş  malleability continue hunt the Dersimlis, Turkish state and Kurdish nationalism, making it an imperative to reconsider the ontological constructions of 1930’s and their policy implications  for Dersim 37-38 as well as for the Kızılbaş today.