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: Ethnocide, terrorism, violence, mortality
Approximate Time Period: 1920-today
The Kurds are a stateless ethnic group. An estimated 15-20% of people living in Turkey are Kurds, many of whom wish to form an independent Kurdistan (Minority Rights Group, 2018).. There is a long history of lethal violence against the Kurds within Turkish borders, starting during the Ottoman Empire. During World War I, the Ottoman Empire deported an estimated 700,000 Kurds. Experts believe half perished during the relocation (Üngör, 2009).
The Turkish government perpetrated more than 15 Kurdish massacres between its founding in 1923, killing tens of thousands of civilian Kurds. Probably the largest such instance was the Dersim rebellion in 1937 and 1938. Estimates range that Turkish authorities killed between 7,500 and 40,000 Kurdish civilians (Wikimedia Foundation, 2022a; Wikimedia Foundation, 2022b; Wikimedia Foundation, 2022c).
In recent years, conflict between the Turkish government and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) resulted in both the PKK and Turkish security forces killing Kurdish civilians (Human Rights Watch, 1993). Because of the Turkish government’s use of extrajudicial killing and “indiscriminate shelling in populated areas” hundreds of Kurdish civilians died (Minority Rights Watch, 2018). Additionally, Human Rights Watch’s report on the Kurds of Turkey reported that in the Kurdish-populated south-east Turkish, security forces killed a hundred peaceful protesters in 1992 alone (Human Rights Watch,1993).
Human rights organizations reported multiple racially motivated attacks against Kurds and their organizations as recently as this past year (The State Department, 2021; Minority Rights Group, 2018). Anti-Kurdish mobs frequently attack the offices for the Kurdish political party, the HDP (Freedom House, 2022). Multiple attacks have ended in murder including an attack on a Kurdish human rights lawyer in 2015 and an attack on a young man for speaking Kurdish (Minority Rights Group, 2018). Additionally, Turkey chose not to investigate the 1992 murder of 450 people in the Turkish southeast that included human rights activists, political rivals, and left-wing or pro-Kurdish journalists (Human Rights Watch, 1993). Some victims were last seen in police custody. Arbitrary arrests and suspected extrajudicial murders continue today (Freedom House, 2022; Human Rights Watch, 2021).
Data Quality: The data quality is 3/3 because there is enough evidence from reliable sources to indicate that lethal violence occurred. Some less reliable sources provided unneeded but helpful specifics.
Sources
- Freedom House (2022). Turkey: Freedom in the world. Freedom House. https://freedomhouse.org/country/turkey/freedom-world/2022
- 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
- Human Rights Watch. (2021). Turkey: Events of 2021. Human Rights Watch. https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2022/country-chapters/turkey
- Minority Rights Group. (2018). Kurds. Minority Rights Group. https://minorityrights.org/minorities/kurds-2/
- The State Department (2021). Turkey 2021: Human rights report. The State Department. https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/313615_TURKEY-2021-HUMAN-RIGHTS-REPORT.pdf
- Wikimedia Foundation. (2022, September 24). Dersim rebellion. Wikipedia. Retrieved September 24, 2022, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dersim_rebellion
- Wikimedia Foundation. (2022, September 21). Human rights of Kurdish people in Turkey. Wikipedia. Retrieved September 24, 2022, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_of_Kurdish_people_in_Turkey
- Wikimedia Foundation. (2022, September 17). List of massacres in Turkey. Wikipedia. Retrieved September 24, 2022, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_massacres_in_Turkey