Glad to have you back, several times during the summer I wished I had your take on the events of the day.

With regard to the events at Dersim, I feel you overlook the most interest part of the narrative, (at least to me), namely how it relates to the Armenian issue.

The mantra of the Turkish government has always been that the absence of orders of extermination in official government documents proves that no such extermination took place, even thought this is universally described by eyewitnesses, both Armenian are foreign, including Turkey’s German allies. As Justin McCarty wrote: the government documents were “meant to inform”.
Yet, you describe: "Thousands of these women and children perished because the army bricked up the entrances of the caves," “the military lit fires to cause those inside to suffocate” and “were finished off with bayonets.” In other words, uniformed soldiers, not inter-communal warfare , took out the Dersim. Naturally, nothing about this shows up in official government documents. Does this mean the eyewitness accounts should be discounted ?
In fact, as can seen in this essay, the interior minister referred to the people of Dersim as authentic Turks in front of the National Assembly, and the Army spoke only of Bandits, not Kurds, even thought leaflets written in a foreign language were dropped. In other words, the purpose of official government documents was to disinform, and conceal. http://www.let.uu.nl/~martin.vanbruinessen/personal/publications/Dersim_rebellion.pdf

As for Lewis and Shaw, if they write about the history of this period and never even bother to mention this, what does this say about the quality of their scholarship?

Final question, the Dersim rebellion took place in 1937 so it’s quite likely that at least some of the regulars had also taken part in the 1915. If these men were capable of bricking up or lighting fires at the entrance of caves, at bayoneting women, during a rebellion by their fellow Muslims, how much more cruel could they have been while fighting Kafir Armenians?

Taken

Thanks for your enlightening article Mustafa Akyol, welcome back. I find it disturbing that Armenians continually bring up the claim of genocide against their people at every opportunity. This event in Dersim mentioned was an open rebellion against a repressive state. The Armenians of 1915 rebelled openly against the state and where involved in wholesale executions themselves when the state was at war. So trying to compare this event in Dersin in the year 1938 with World War I is utterley contemptable. The Armenians openly rebelled against the state that provided shelter for them and took part in criminal acts. Not only that, they also supported the invaded Russian army. The Dersim massacre was a rebellion against state authority. They did not support an invading army and they did not take part in massacres. I think Taken needs to get his facts right. The Dersim massacre took place in the year of Ataturk era and so therefore will be ignored by the West. However Armenian Genocide allegations that occurred before Ataturk is very opportunistic by many European and Western leaders. So in conclusion this article regarding the Dersim massacre are not related to the Armenians. This is related to how the state has treated its citizens. Also another important fact, Genocide is a legal meaning recognised by the United Nations in 1948. So therefore any alleged massacres or genocides cannot be termed genocides as it is against the UN charter legally and morally. So if the Armenian's are in any shape or form interested in International Law here is your answer. Turkey and its people will never recognise a crime that never occurred.

Looks like I'm not the only one comparing the Dersim massacre to 1915.

http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/n.php?n=if-dersim-was-a-massacre-how-about-the-other-2009-11-20

Let's convert what Mr. Öymen said into this. This is stark fictious and all similarities to any events or persons in real life are totally unintentional. (People in the U.S. started protesting old American governments and especially Mr. Roosevelt. They argue why the American Government sent hundreds thousands of troops to Europe. About 500000 soldiers died during this European war and their mothers cried a lot. Therefore, the government of Mr. Roosevelt should not have allowed that amount of troops to go to Nomandy. It was not an American business)

If you criticize Mr. Öymen, then we may strictly criticize Mr. Roosevelt in the same way. This might be how Mr. Öymen approach Tunceli events in the 1930s...

Mr. or Ms. Taken,

Neither most of the so-called Young Turk leaders who organized the Armenian exile in 1915 nor the Kemalists were not so much Muslim as they were secular nationalist modernists.

Moreover, the Young Turk and Kemalist ideologues, speaking based on known historical facts and not just some so-called conspiracy theories, even were largely non-Turkish and non-Muslim.

The birth place of both the Young Turk ideology and therefore its later offshoot called Kemalism was Thessaloniki. Not conspiracy theorists but usual, well-known historians on Turkish history, such as Eric Zürcher at the university of Leiden, all express the fact that the main ideologues of this secular Turkish nationalism were primarily the usual inhabitants of Thessaloniki.

We are talking about Thessaloniki, that only "Jewish city" of the world in the Early Modern times, which could exist only under the tolerant administration of the Muslim Ottoman Turks... Among these main (and some of them quite famous) secular "Turkist" ideologues were people like the pseudonymous Tekin Alp or actually "Moiz Kohen" and the various famous Sabatayists, members of a well-known crypto-Jewish sect of Thessaloniki, who included probably most of the Young Turk ideologues... Some of the Sabatayists are still very prominent people in Turkey today. A few of them occasionally talk of their sectarian Jewish roots but most of them don't like to bring it to the open.

So, please stop linking the (at least partially reciprocal) tragedy of 1915 and the Dersim massacre to the Islamic faith of the normal, ordinary Turks. Because if we are to be as historically objective as possible, we have to know that the Islamic faith was totally unrelated to the evil that went on.

P.S. The Sabatayists, some of whose ancestors created the Young Turk and secular nationalistic disasters for us religiously conservative Muslim Turks, are our brethren in humanity. This is what I think of them and I condemn all attempts at accusations against them about what happened in a past, for which neither the current generations nor the overwhelming majority of the older generations are to blame.

There are quite a few interesting and defensive comments about Dersim and the 1915 events.

In both Dersim and the 1915 events, there is a weak state whose sovereignty is being challenged, and the state in both cases suppressed the uprising violently. In both cases, there is excessive use of force against civilians. There is nothing to justify in it.

What does all have to do with the Jewish connection, the Muslims or Islam? If they were not Muslims or Jewish, would such events not take place?

I also do not share Mr.Akyol's optimism that we are getting closer to liberal democracy day-by-day. What we are witnessing is nothing but the demand of the "other" in governance and distribution of wealth. But that is not necessarily a call for liberal democracy. Unfortunately, the definition of liberal democracy is limited to headscarves at public spaces in Turkey, nothing more. I hope I am wrong.

To the Turk Miltecileri (Turkish Nationalists) who are incapable of admitting any improper treatment of minorities during the history of the Ottoman Empire & Turkish Republic:

The question is not if the Turks had the right to use force to put down the Armenian and later the Kurdish insurrections. All states have the right to fight for their territorial integrity.

The question is if they used targeted force that was focused on insurgents or excessive force that was directed against the general population?

If Armenians were simply deported from the eastern warzone (Erzerum, Diarbakir etc.) PERHAPS they could make the claim that they were taking harsh, but necessary steps to put down an insurgency.

However, Armenians were deported from peaceful areas that were far from the war zone, in which their demographic significance was so minor they could not possibly challenge Turkish rule, such as: Konya, Kastamonu, Ankara, etc. So, I would judge these measures as excessive and overgeneralized.

Jason,

The U.S.A. and the West as well as the West-fearing secular Turkish governments also don't have the right to ignore the 19th century series genocides against the Turks and other Muslims. Do you agree or do you think that we Turks just deserve to be eliminated physically whereas all lives other than Turkish and Muslim lives are sacred?

For more information about the said genocide that took place between 1821 and 1922, please see the book "Death and Exile: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ottoman Muslims, 1821-1922" by the American history professor Justin McCarthy. You can type the title and the name and easily find the book on all major book websites.

My best wishes of further intellectual enlightenment for people like you, Jason, who are totally unclear on the general, real picture of what has happened between Ottoman Muslims and the non-Muslims. As for the current Republic as well as the Young Turk regime of the year 1908 to 1918, they have been secular and positivist Western regimes themselves, having almost nothing to do with the Ottoman Muslim heritage.