Dersim

This beautiful region is host to a grandiose and tragic history of rebellion and repression, the most famous being the massacre of 1938, also known as the ' Seyid Riza Rebellion'. Seyid Riza was the spiritual leader of the Assaban tribe. This year at the festival was indeed inaugurated a statue of the man. A sign of more liberal times dawning on the country.
The rebellion started when villagers burnt down a bridge connecting their village to an army garrison, whose soldiers were harassing them. Under the leadership of Seyid Riza, his tribe, the Abbasan, as well as the Haydaran, Demanan and Yusufan tribes took up arms. Negotiating with the Turks, Seyid Riza said, they would only put down arms if the Kurds were granted national rights.
So far so good. Unfortunately, in the face of the army, newly equipped with bomber-planes and other modern equipment, they did not stand a chance. And when the response came by the Turkish military, it was overblown beyond all proportions. Villagers were rounded up in caves and summarily executed. Women and children were barricaded inside sheds which were put on fire, or immured alive. 10s of 1000s lost their lives.
1938 was one of the three times the Kurds got bombed with chemical gas. The most notorious, and tragic instance was Halabja in 1989 under Saddam Hussein, but before that, there was the British RAF in the 1920's putting down Sheikh Barzinji's revolt in Northern Iraq. Winston Churchill at the time praised the effectiveness of gas in a rugged territory like Kurdistan with its many caves and ravines and said he did not understand chemical gas was not used more often. There are also rumours of contemporary use, such as in the winter of 2008, when the Turkish army bombed PKK hide-outs across the border in Northern Iraq. (Not properly equipped for the harsh, snow-rich mountain winter, this military campaign turned out a minor catastrophe. The Turkish state however refused to acknowledge this, and the media were full of praise for the heroic actions of the Turkish army afterwards.)
Back in 1938, one of the most sadistic bombers was a woman called Sabiha Gökçen, Atatürk's adoptive daughter. Today she has Istanbul's second largest airport named after her. The putting down of rebellions such as the one of the Koçgiri tribe in the Sivas region in the 1930's, or the one of Sheikh Said, where armed insurgents marched onto Diyarbakir in order to liberate it, or indeed the one of 1938, formed an important vector for the development of the Turkish army, who gained invaluable experience in putting their new equipment to use.
At the end of the campaign, Turkey changed all the Kurmanji, Zaza or Armenian names of towns and villages to Turkish ones, which is why I will be mentioning two names for many of the places I am going to mention. The name of Dersim city itself was changed to Tunceli, which can be translated as 'Iron hand', indicating the grip the state intended to have over this place from now on. No one from around here uses the new name much, although when the AKP government proposed to let this rebellious, traditionally intellectual and left-wing region have its old name back, many rightists got into a fluster, and Prime Minister Erdoğan had to quickly take back the offer.

In the run-up to the last elections, Erdoğan's Islamist AK party tried to buy people's votes by distributing free gifts such as fridges in this and other poor regions across the country, especially the East. Oftentimes simple villagers are easily influenced. They are happy when someone nattily dressed appears on their doorstep and deigns to talk to them. That year however, frustration hit a boiling point, and villagers made a pile on their village squares and burnt them. Some of them are said to have come from villages that had been left out the main campaign providing electricity at the end of the 80's and beginning of the 90's, and still have no electricity today. The electricity campaign, by the way, was not out of a belated desire of the Turkish state to develop the Eastern regions, but because the Kurdish Workers' Party (PKK) guerrilla war had taken up seriously by this time, and the military needed these infrastructures.

The PKK have privileged this territory and made it one of Turkey's most intense warzones, not so much because of the rebellious history of this region, but simply because of its geography, its many ravines, escarpments, hidden caves, which lend itself most readily to guerrilla warfare. First this started back in the 70'S with Ibrahim Kaypakkaya's Maoist insurgency, who are still active here today.
Back in the seventies the guerrillas would come and spend the nights with the village youth in their houses. Many a future activist was inspired by these long hours of song, dance and stories. A militant from a Maoist organisation I met was 12 years old when she first assisted such nights in the over 30 years ago. The guerrillas who came were mostly in their 20's, but some were up to 50 years old. There were a very few women among them.
From the eighties on, many more young Kurdish women were going to take to the mountains. Oftentimes, for them taking up arms was a liberation from a life of forced marriage, hard work and submission in the arch-patriarchal society of Eastern Turkey. The mountains became the burgeon of freedom, a promise of a brighter future for the women back in the village, too.
In the 70's radical Leftist organisations had always subordinated the question of women's liberation to the class struggle of workers against capitalists, delayed its resolution until after the revolution. Only the PKK, since its very inception, put the women's question at the forefront, stating this has to be resolved now, in connection with the Kurdish question, to which former Leftist organisations had had the same stance as to the liberation of women, supporting the principle but seeing it as subordinated to, and automatically resolved with the workers' revolution.
Today, the PKK has separate women's sections of its armed branch, where everyone down to the commanders is female, and which also conduct actions on places that epitomize the oppression of women, such as nightclubs.

Whole story here.