Kurdish city’s disputed name reveals uncomfortable truths in Turkey
The majority council decision on Dersim was not, in essence, a change in the official name, since the Interior Ministry is solely responsible for place names, even when it comes to the smallest villages and hamlets in a country of 783 thousand total square kilometers and almost 80 million people.
It was instead meant to be used on municipal signs since the locals and other Kurds in Turkey already refer to the city as Dersim.
The office of the governor of Dersim, appointed by the highly-centralized government of the Turkish state, is also reviewing the resolution by the city’s council, as it holds authority over the elected body.
In a press release on its website, the municipality justified its use of the name “Dersim” on the grounds of “preserving our city’s culture and history.”
Tunceli, which means “the Iron Hand” in Turkish, was initially the name of a military campaign by Turkey’s founder Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.
The March 1937 - December 1938 offensive of the young Turkish state, espousing the creation of a pure Turkish nation, was meant to bring the then largely self-ruling region under its control. Ataturk’s armies subjected the local Alevi Kurdish population to massacres now referred mainly by the Kurds as genocide and later as Turkification.
The region’s Kurds were led by Seyiz Riza, a then 78-year-old political leader whom Turkey executed by hanging after his surrender. The offensive claimed some 15,000 civilian lives and led to the forcible relocation of over 10,000 others to areas deep into Turkish-speaking western regions of the nation, according to Turkish accounts.
The chief of state security in the neighboring province of Malatya at the time, Ihsan Sabri Caglayangil, who was involved in the operation later revealed in a 1986 interview that the Turkish army used weaponized poisonous gases in Dersim.
