The Dersim Massacre: 13,806–75,000 (jan 1, 1937 – sep 1, 1938)

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The Dersim Massacre (also known as the Dersim Genocide or "Tertele" in Kurdish, meaning depredation) was carried out by the Republic of Turkey (under Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and Prime Minister Celal Bayar), the Turkish Army, Turkish Air Force (including bombing operations by Sabiha Gökçen, Atatürk's adopted daughter and Turkey's first female combat pilot), and the Fourth General Inspectorate forces against the Kurdish Alevi (Zaza-speaking Alevi Kurds) population of Dersim Province (forcibly renamed Tunceli, meaning "bronze hand") between March 1937 (start of first military operations) and November 1938 (end of major military operations), with an estimated death toll between 13,160 (official Turkish government figure from Fourth General Inspectorate report) and 70,000 (upper scholarly estimates, with most historians settling on 20,000-40,000 deaths, representing approximately 30-50% of Dersim's pre-massacre population of approximately 70,000-80,000).

The Turkish military and government also engaged in systematic mass executions and massacres (including the burning of surrendered tribesmen), aerial bombardment of civilian villages using heavy bombers, use of chemical weapons including mustard gas and chloracetophenone (20 tons ordered and deployed against civilians hiding in caves), burning of women and children alive in locked haysheds, mass shootings of surrendering combatants and civilians, beheading of men, women, and children with bodies buried in mass graves, forced deportation and ethnic cleansing (11,818 officially deported, with over 3,000 forcibly relocated and hundreds of thousands more displaced), systematic destruction of villages and tribal structures, burning of forests and agricultural fields to destroy livelihoods, confiscation of livestock, execution of Seyid Rıza (75-year-old Kurdish Alevi political and religious leader) and his 16-year-old son along with other tribal leaders on November 15, 1937, forced Turkification through boarding schools where Kurdish children were raised as Turks, forced assimilation of women (deliberately married to Turkish men to produce "Turkish babies"), abduction of the "Missing Girls of Dersim" (Kayıp Kızlar) who were separated from families and given to Turkish military families as foster children or domestic servants, banning of Kurdish and Zaza languages, destruction of Alevi religious sites (Ocax system and pilgrimage sites), construction of Sunni mosques to Islamize the region, complete dismantling of traditional tribal and religious governance systems, renaming of the province and systematic erasure of Dersim identity, and depopulation through death and exile of nearly half the region's population.

It has been labeled as genocide by Turkish-Kurdish anthropologist Dilşa Deniz (whose 2020 article "Re-assessing the Genocide of Kurdish Alevis in Dersim, 1937-38" in Genocide Studies and Prevention argues the events constitute genocide using census data analysis), Turkish sociologist and anthropologist İsmail Beşikçi (who characterized it as genocide and served prison time for his work on Kurdish issues), genocide scholar Uğur Ümit Üngör (expert on late Ottoman and early Republican violence), historian Christian Gerlach (who documented 30,000 massacred), Turkish-Kurdish scholar Annika Törne (who estimates 32,000-70,000 deaths)>

Numerous scholars who argue the military operations of 1938 were "genocidal in nature" as opposed to the 1937 phase which was primarily military, the Human Rights Association of Turkey (İHD, which characterizes it as genocide under both Turkish Penal Code Article 76 and the UN Genocide Convention), the Dersim 37-38 Genocide Association, Kurdish organizations and intellectuals including those who use the Kurdish terms "Qirkirin" (Kurmanci) or "Qirkerdan" (Kirmancki) meaning mass killings/genocide, various international genocide studies scholars who examine it within the framework of ethnic cleansing and cultural genocide, and genocide studies literature which increasingly frames it as meeting UN Genocide Convention criteria particularly regarding the intent to destroy Kurdish Alevi social, political, and cultural structures.

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