Turkey in Turmoil by Berna Pekesen

Author:Berna Pekesen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: De Gruyter
Published: 2020-05-22T12:20:16.552000+00:00

My Muslim brothers, do not dread, just hit and destroy! Worthless communist policemen have tortured your children! Muslim Turkey’s Kahramanmaraş’s heroic children, take our revenge on the communists!

(Parlar 1996, 335)

To prevent further violent clashes and unrest, the governor of Maraş declared curfew at about 10.30 a.m. Municipality officials refused police officers’ request to announce the curfew through the municipality’s loudspeakers and continued to call the people to the funeral. When the soldiers arrived and threatened to arrest them, the officials accepted to announce the curfew (Gerekçeli Karar 1980, 173). But it was too late. Approximately 15,000 people, some of them armed with rifles, took the Uzunoluk Street while shouting slogans like “Down with the communists!” and “We will avenge our brothers’ blood with blood; we will call those responsible to account for it!” (ibid., 265) The crowd aimed to enter into Yörük Selim neighborhood but the resistance of the residents stopped them. Later on, an army barricade stopped the crowd. One person in the attacking crowd said: “We do not care about the army; allow us to move forward!” Most of the crowd was dispersed but about 5,000 people continued to demonstrate in front of the barricade until the evening. In response to the army captain’s question of why they brought their children with them, demonstrators responded: “They are serving their cause. They are serving their cause at this age.” (ibid., 299) The crowd finally dispersed at about 9 p.m. Unable to break in the Yörük Selim neighborhood, far-right paramilitaries carried out armed assaults targeting the neighborhood throughout the day and night. Leftist groups responded similarly (ibid., 186).

While most of Yörük Selim residents were able to save their lives, the people living on the outskirts of the neighborhood and in other neighborhoods became victims of a massacre.18 Shouting slogans such as “Muslim Turkey!”, “Communists to Moscow!”, “Those loving God and the Prophet, march!”, “Kill the communist Alevis!” “Do not let the Alevis alive! Those of you who kill them will go to heaven!”, and “Death to Alevis!”, the crowd massacred Alevis in Serintepe neighborhood (Gerekçeli Karar 1980, 305). The incidents in Serintepe reveal the intersectionality of Alevi and Kurdish identities on the one side and Sunni and Turkish identities on the other in the context of Maraş. While designating the houses to attack, one person stated: “These are the Kurdish houses.” One attacker went to a door and asked whether there were any Alevis inside. The other side responded: “This is a Turkish house.” (İddianame 1979, 119)19 Serintepe incidents also showed the unbounded barbarism of the mob. An eyewitness recalled during the trial:

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