Deportations of the Kurds: 350,000-700,000 (jan 1, 1916 – jan 1, 1934)

Description:

The Deportations of the Kurds was carried out by the Ottoman Empire (Committee of Union and Progress, particularly Interior Minister Talaat Pasha, 1916-1918) and the Republic of Turkey (under Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and the Kemalist government, 1923-1934) against the Kurdish population of Eastern Anatolia/Turkish Kurdistan between May 2, 1916 (Talaat Pasha's first deportation order) and 1934 (Turkish Resettlement Law and end of major deportation phase), with an estimated death toll between 350,000 (conservative estimate: more than half of 700,000 deported during WWI perishing) and 750,000 (upper estimate: approximately 700,000 Kurds perished according to some Kurdish sources, with Association France-Kurdistan estimating 1.5 million Kurds, a third of the population, were deported and massacred between 1925 and 1939).

The Ottoman and Turkish governments also engaged in forced deportations and death marches (700,000 to 1 million Kurds deported 1916-1918), starvation and famine (300,000 Kurds deported in winter 1916 from Bitlis, Erzurum, Palu and Muş to Konya and Gaziantep with most dying), forced sedentarization of nomadic tribes, mass executions and massacres (15,200 killed in Diyarbakir pogrom in 1925, 206 villages destroyed; 4,500 to 15,000 killed in Zilan massacre 1930; 13,000-70,000 killed in Dersim massacre 1937-1938), village burning and destruction (4,000 Kurdish villages destroyed 1984-1999), separation of tribal leaders from their communities, forced assimilation and Turkification, cultural genocide (Kurdish language banned, Kurds renamed "Mountain Turks"), confiscation of property and land, torture and arbitrary detention, deportation of Kurdish elite and intellectuals, lynching in western Turkish cities where Kurds were resettled, ethnic cleansing policies, forced displacement of millions (over 3 million removed from homes 1984-1999), systematic underdevelopment of Kurdish regions, and complete dismantling of Kurdish tribal and Islamic institutions.

It has been labeled as genocide or ethnic cleansing by Turkish historian İsmail Beşikçi (who characterized these policies as influenced by fascism and served prison time for his work on Kurdish issues), genocide scholar and historian Uğur Ümit Üngör (who extensively documented the deportations as part of systematic "Turkification" policies in his award-winning book "The Making of Modern Turkey: Nation and State in Eastern Anatolia, 1913-1950"), genocide scholars Dominik J. Schaller and Jürgen Zimmerer (who stated "victims could become perpetrators" in reference to Kurdish participation in Armenian genocide followed by their own persecution), Italian historian Giulio Sappeli (who argued the war against Kurds was "an historical mission aimed at affirming the superiority of being Turkish"), Kurdish intellectual Celadet Bedirxan (who documented how only 23 of 787 deportees from one village survived the death marches), Association France-Kurdistan, numerous Kurdish organizations and activists, international human rights organizations including the European Court of Human Rights (which condemned Turkey for thousands of human rights abuses against Kurds), and genocide studies scholars who examine these events within the framework of Young Turk and Kemalist population engineering, though the classification as "genocide" in the strict legal sense remains debated with Turkey denying genocide charges, and no countries have formally recognized it as genocide.

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