Country: Turkey

Group: Kurds

Date Finalized: 10/10/2022

Team: Nichole Dahlen (lead), Gabriel Hernandez, Lauren Poklar, Jasper Booth-Hodges, Dave Hammerle, Erin Fagan

Content Warning: deportation, uprising, military, mortality

Approximate Time Period: 1914-present

An estimated 15-20% of people living in Turkey are Kurds (Minority Rights Group, 2018). There is a long-standing history of forced displacement within the borders of current day Turkey, starting in the Ottoman Empire. During World War I, the Ottoman Empire deported an estimated 700,000 Kurds. Half of the Kurds seem to have perished during the relocation (Üngör, 2009). In 1916 alone, the Ottoman Empire deported 300,000 Kurds from multiple cities now considered a part of Turkey (Dominik J. Schaller & Jürgen Zimmerer, 2008).

When Turkey gained independence, Ataturk pursued a policy of Turkification. The Resettlement Law of 1934 aimed to form a country with a unified culture, language, and thought. Because of this law, there is an estimation that the Turkish government relocated half a million Kurds (Sagnic, 2010). In the 1980s and 1990s, conflict broke out between Turkey and the PKK, a Kurdish terrorist organization, in the Turkish south-east. In response to PKK military operations, Turkish forces repeatedly retaliated against nearby Kurdish civilians (Human Rights Watch, 1993). Turkish forces burned more than 3,000 Kurdish villages, forcibly displacing over three million Kurdish civilians (Minority Rights Group, 2018; Medya, 2021). For example, in Sirnak, 33,000 of the 35,000 mostly Kurdish residents left due to the Turk’s systematic destruction of their village. Turkey claimed they burned Sirnak because 1,500 PKK troops attacked Sirnak. However, the people of Sirnak denied this, claiming that the PKK attack was minor or nonexistent. Meanwhile, “some reports indicated that a small band of PKK fighters had attacked a village on the outskirts of Sirnak, but not Sirnak itself” (Human Rights Watch, 1993) Similar attacks took place in in other cities, all culminating in the Kurds leaving south-eastern Turkey (Human Rights Watch, 1993).

As of December 2014, estimates from the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center reported that more than 953,700 Kurdish remained internally displaced within Turkey (Minority Rights Group, 2018). A peace process from 2013 to 2015 resulted in some Kurds returning to their lands, but, as of 2021, there are still many who have not returned (Medya, 2021). Kurds continue to face many forms of discrimination in Turkish society including arbitrary detention, torture, and ethnocide (Freedom House, 2022; Human Rights Watch, 2021).

Data Quality: The data quality is a 3/3 because there is a consensus between a plethora of sources that the Ottoman Empire and Turkey forcibly relocated the Kurds en masse. 

Sources

  1. Dominik J. Schaller & Jürgen Zimmerer (2008). Late Ottoman genocides: the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and Young Turkish population and extermination policies—introduction, Journal of Genocide Research, 10(1), 7-14, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14623520801950820
  2. Freedom House (2022). Turkey: Freedom in the world. Freedom House. https://freedomhouse.org/country/turkey/freedom-world/2022
  3. Gunes, C. (2013). The Kurdish national movement in Turkey: From protest to resistance. United Kingdom: Taylor & Francis.
  4. Human Rights Watch. (1993). The Kurds of Turkey: Killings, disappearances, and torture. Human Rights Watch. https://www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/reports/TURKEY933.PDF
  5. Human Rights Watch. (2021). Turkey: Events of 2021. Human Rights Watch. https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2022/country-chapters/turkey
  6. Medya, E. (2021). Forced migration of Kurds in Turkey is ‘linked to the Kurdish question’. Medya News. https://medyanews.net/forced-migration-of-kurds-in-turkey-is-linked-to-the-kurdish-question/
  7. Minority Rights Group. (2018). Kurds. Minority Rights Group. https://minorityrights.org/minorities/kurds-2/
  8. Sagnic, Ceng (2010). Mountain Turks: State ideology and the Kurds in Turkey. Information, Society and Justice: 127–134.
  9. Üngör, U.Ü. (2009). Young Turk social engineering : mass violence and the nation state in eastern Turkey, 1913-1950.
  10. Wikimedia Foundation. (2022a). Deportations of Kurds (1916–1934). Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deportations_of_Kurds_(1916%E2%80%931934)
  11. Wikimedia Foundation. (2022b). Human rights of Kurdish people in Turkey. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_of_Kurdish_people_in_Turkey