Dr. Hussein Tahiri | Exclusive to Ekurd.net

Introduction

Genocide is a systematic use of violence or oppression with the aim of physically eliminating or culturally destroying a social group. The savagery involved in physical genocide often attracts international attention whereas the use of cultural genocide over time often goes undetected.

The methods used in cultural or physical genocide may vary but the end result is the destruction of a group. Nevertheless, the United Nations has failed to recognise cultural genocide as a crime. The closest it came to recognising cultural genocide was in 1994, when Article 7 of the United Nations Draft Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples used the phrase “cultural genocide” or the destruction of the cultural heritage of a group in such a manner that the group as a distinct entity no longer exists. Under pressure from state entities this phrase was omitted in subsequent drafts. This has given some states a free hand to use cultural genocide to destroy the identity of a minority in an effort to create a homogeneous society.

Turkey is one state that has utilised cultural genocide to destroy minorities within its borders. Turkey has also committed physical genocide against Armenians, and, I will argue, against Kurds. A plan for the physical and cultural genocide of Christians and Kurds started in 1915 under the Young Turks. The Young Turks eliminated Christians through expulsions and massacres. Non-Turkish Muslim populations such as Kurds, Arabs and Balkan migrants were dislocated and settled in areas with a Turkish majority population so they could be more easily assimilated.

This plan was instituted by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk from 1923, when the modern Turkish Republic was formed. The Kurds were denied of their basic human rights, their language, culture and identity. They were called mountain Turks.

This paper will discuss cultural genocide, why the United Nations failed to recognise cultural genocide and the implications of this failure for the Kurds of Turkey. I will then provide evidence that the Turkish state’s treatment of Kurds constitutes physical as well as cultural genocide.

Before starting the main discussion, it is crucial to understand what is meant by cultural genocide.

Definition of cultural genocide

The concept of cultural genocide has been the subject of debate since Raphael Lemkin incorporated the concept in the definition of genocide in the 1940s. Lemkin described genocide as “the destruction of a nation or an ethnic group”. His concept of genocide was much broader than that adopted by the United Nations Convention of 1948. In Article 2 of the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, genocide is defined as:

Any… acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; [and] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Lemkin’s definition was not confined to physical or biological elimination of an ethnic or national group, nor was it necessarily an immediate destruction of a nation. Instead genocide was considered “a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves.” He further described genocide as:

The crime of barbarity, conceived as oppressive and destructive actions directed against individuals as members of a national, religious, or racial group, and the crime of vandalism, conceived as malicious destruction of works of art and culture because they represent the specific creations of the genius of such groups.

Included in Lemkin’s concept of genocide are a state’s systematic plan to disintegrate the political and social institutions of culture, language, national feelings, religion and the economic existence of national groups. Also included were the destruction of personal security, liberty, health and dignity. According to Lemkin genocide is directed against the national group as an entity. The actions are “directed against individuals, not in their individual capacity, but as members of the national group.”

For Lemkin genocide had two phases. The first phase is the destruction of the national patterns of the oppressed group. The second phase it the imposition of the national pattern of the oppressor. These phases can occur during a time of war or peace. For instance, the imposition of the oppressors’ national pattern can occur while the population remains in their own territory but is forced to assimilate into the imposed national pattern. The imposition can also occur when the original population is removed and replaced by the population of the oppressor or coloniser.

Lemkin vigorously defended the inclusion of the concept of cultural genocide in the UN Convention. In fact, he considered cultural genocide as the most important aspect of genocide, in that biological and physical genocide is always accompanied by cultural genocide, including attacks on the symbols of the group or by violent interference with religious or cultural activities. Consequently in the final draft of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, cultural genocide was included and Article III, 1-2 defined cultural genocide as:

1) Prohibiting the use of the language of the group in daily intercourse or in schools, or in the printing and circulation of publications in the language of the group.

2) Destroying or preventing the use of libraries, museums, schools, historical monuments, places of worship or other cultural institutions and objects of the group.

However, within the United Nations, controversy continued regarding including the term. Those who opposed its inclusion argued that it would be dealt with under ‘minority rights’. Among those who opposed its inclusion were Western countries such as Great Britain and the United States that had colonised territories far beyond their borders or had minorities within their borders, and had directly or indirectly ruled the occupied lands and at times used brutal force to subjugate or assimilate their subjects to pacify them and eliminate any resistance to the rule of the coloniser. If the United Nations incorporated the concept, then these colonial powers could legally be implicated in cultural genocide. Therefore, while the Soviet bloc favoured the inclusion of cultural genocide in the Convention many Western countries opposed its inclusion. For example, Canada’s representative to the United Nations was asked to oppose the inclusion of cultural genocide in the Convention by R.G. “Gerry” Riddell, who would later be Canada’s permanent UN delegate. He instructed the representative:

You should support or initiate any move for the deletion of Article three on ‘Cultural’ Genocide. If this move not successful, you should vote against Article Three and if necessary, against the Convention. The Convention as a whole, less Article three, is acceptable, although legislation will naturally be required to implement the Convention.

Ultimately, the article was voted down by 16 states. Hence, the term ‘cultural genocide’ was excluded from the final Convention.

If the concept of genocide as defined by Lemkin was incorporated in the UN Convention on Genocide then Turkey could be prosecuted in a fair international court, because there is ample evidence that Turkey has conducted both phases of cultural and physical genocide of its Kurdish population. It began in the early 20th century, when the Young Turks decided to homogenise Turkey and rebuild the remains of the Ottoman Empire on the concept of a Pan-Turanic idea inspired by Pan-Germanic ideals. It was an idea that believed in the brotherhood of Turkey and Turanic people such as those of Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan and other Turkic territories. The problem of uniting pan-Turanic people was that Kurds and Armenians inhabited the territories in between. On the eve of World War I, the Young Turks decided to use physical liquidation and mass deportations to solve the problem. As Christians, Armenians were considered inassimilable and were largely exterminated. The Muslims Kurds were to be assimilated through dispersion, deportation, and if necessary extermination. Ottoman and Western archives provide extensive evidence of the Young Turks’ deliberate strategy of this ethno-religious homogenisation of Anatolia.

During World War I, the Ottoman government under the Young Turks sent confidential instructions to its army commanders to evacuate Kurds from their home territory and for them to be exiled and distributed among the Turkish population so that Kurds would not exceed five percent of the total population. Kurdish tribal and religious leaders were to be exiled to different areas, and separated from their constituencies. They were not to make contact with their people and families and were forced to speak Turkish. In other words, they were to be Turkified. Throughout World War I about 700,000 Kurds were exiled, allegedly to deny the Russian forces shelter and food. On their way into exile many died from hunger, diseases and cold.

This policy was implemented even more systematically under Mustafa Kemal Ataturk from 1923, although he had previously promised the Kurds an autonomous Kurdish state inside Turkey if they cooperated with him and supported his application to the League of Nations to form the modern state of Turkey. But Ataturk betrayed the Kurds who supported him. Although he passed legislation in the Turkish Grand National Assembly in March 1922, in which the Kurds were given limited autonomy, as soon as he consolidated his position he started suppressing the Kurdish identity.

Henceforth, there was a pattern of cultural genocide, followed by rebellion, followed by physical genocide of the Kurds.

On 3 March 1924, Mustafa Kemal issued a decree prohibiting the use of the Kurdish language, banning education in Kurdish, and making all Kurdish publications illegal. Kurdish writers were forced to write in Turkish; Kurdish families were forced to speak Turkish even inside their own homes; and many Kurds denied their identity just so they could live normal lives. On 4 May 1925, Turkish Prime Minister Ismet Inonu stated that nationalism was key to the social cohesion of Turkey, that only Turks had a say in the country, that all inhabitants of Turkey must be Turkified and those who could not be assimilated should be annihilated.

Physical genocide of the Kurds

In 1925, the Turkish government began a physical genocide of the Kurdish population. In response to legislation denying Kurdish national rights a Kurdish revolt started in Darhini under the leadership of Sheikh Said in 1925. After defeating the revolt, the Turks accelerated the process of deporting Kurds. Even the Kurdish tribes who helped the government against the revolt were deported to Turkish towns and cities in western Turkey. Abdurrahman Qassemlo stated that in response to the revolt, 15,200 people were killed, 206 villages were destroyed and 8,758 houses were burnt. A law was passed stating those whose mother tongue was not Turkish were not allowed to rebuild their villages. Shergo claimed that after the defeat of Sheikh Said, in one incident alone 25 Kurdish families hid in the mountains to the north of Lake Van but were captured by Turkish soldiers. The women and children were beheaded and their bodies were taken to Kurdish towns to create fear among Kurds. Shergo claimed that about one million Kurds were deported to Turkish areas, leaving many Kurdish villages empty if not destroyed.

Such repressive measures and a wish for autonomy, as promised by Kemal Ataturk at the League of Nations, led to the Khoybun revolt of 1927-30 in Mount Ararat. During and after the brutal defeat of the Ararat revolt, the Turkish forces again used deportations, mass arrests and summary executions, and bombed and burnt Kurdish villages to squash the insurgency. On 5 May 1932, a law was passed putting four zones in eastern Turkey under military control. Three of these zones were where Kurds lived. One zone was completely evacuated and forbidden to outsiders. The law also demanded the deportation of Kurdish tribal and religious leaders to Turkish populated areas. Another law decriminalised the killing of Kurds. Article 1, Law No.1850 stated that from the 20 June to the 10 December 1930 anyone who murdered or committed any action against an insurgent was exempt from criminal prosecution. The revolt may have been in and around Mount Ararat but these repressive measures were extended throughout the whole Kurdistan.

But the more the state suppressed the Kurdish population, the more the Kurds resisted, and so another revolt broke out in 1937, this time in the Dersim region, under the leadership of a 75 year old Alevi religious figure, Sayyid Reza. He mobilised the tribal leaders and using strategic locations fought well against government forces. But again, the revolt was brutally suppressed with the populations of entire villages being massacred or evacuated. The Turkish forces used poison gas, artillery and air bombardments.

There are reports that women and children sought refuge in caves but the Turkish army either bricked up the entrances or lit fires to cause those inside to suffocate. Those who tried to escape were finished off with bayonets. Many women and girls of the Kureyshan and Bakhtiyar tribes threw themselves from high cliffs into ravines in order not to fall into the Turks’ hands. The tribes cooperated with the government did not fare better. The Kirgan tribe had broken away from the rebels and put their trust in the army. They did not leave their villages but their leaders were tortured and shot. Others who tried to escape or sought refuge with the army were rounded up. The men were shot on the spot, the women and children were locked into haysheds and set on fire.

The British consul at Trebizond, the diplomatic post closest to Dersim, referred to the brutal and indiscriminate violence committed against the Kurds in Dersim and compared it to the Armenian massacres of 1915. He stated:

Thousands of Kurds … including women and children, were slain; others, mostly children, were thrown into the Euphrates; while thousands of others in less hostile areas, who had first been deprived of their cattle and other belongings, were deported to vilayets (provinces) in Central Anatolia. It is now stated that the Kurdish question no longer exists in Turkey.

Martin van Bruinessen asserts that the intention to destroy the Kurds appears in the wording of the Secret Decision of the Council of Ministers on the Punitive Expedition to Dersim dated 4 May 1937. He states that the Council of Ministers decided the people in the rebellious districts would be rounded up and deported. But then it ordered the army to “render those who have used arms or are still using them once and for all harmless on the spot, to completely destroy their villages and to remove their families.” Bruinessen maintains given the fact that almost every man in Dersim was known to carry arms, this reads like a brief to kill all men.

Finally, the government changed the name of the province from Dersim to Tunceli. The words ‘Kurd’ and ‘Kurdistan’ were prohibited and removed from all history books and other publications. The government forged a new history, calling Kurds ‘mountain Turks’.

Thereafter, there was a period of quiet, during which time only cultural genocide was practised. This period lasted until 1978 when Abdullah Ocalan and others founded the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) in response to the continued denial of the Kurdish identity, culture and language, and after the Kurds lost hope that the Turkish Left would recognise Kurdish national rights. In 1984 the PKK began an armed struggle following the mass imprisonment, torture and execution of its members after the 1980 coup. There appeared to be no other path to resolve the Kurdish issue. In response, the Turkish state used all means to destroy the insurgency. Amnesty International reported in 1996 that from 1992 to 1996 the army razed at least 3,000 villages and displaced two million Kurds, who were forced to live in shantytowns in Kurdish and Turkish cities.

The genocidal practice of the Turkish state has continued into recent times. A report by the United Nations’ Human Rights office published in 2017, states that the Turkish government conducted security operations targeting more than 30 Kurdish towns between July 2015 and December 2016, causing the displacement of between 355,000 and half a million people, mostly Kurds. The report said that there were evidence of massive destruction, killings and numerous other serious human rights violations. A report from the Turkish human rights organisation, Mazlumder, states that from December 2015 to March 2016 there was a blanket curfew imposed on Cizre which lasted 78 days. All entries to the town were completely blocked during this period. The report states that as a result of this operation between 203 and 266 people were killed. Russian TV reported that in the city of Cizre about 150 people were burned alive in basements by Turkish military forces. Some corpses were found without heads. A report published in March 2016 by the Kurdistan National Congress states:

For the past 6 months, in front of the world’s eyes, the Turkish state has been conducting a systematic massacre in Cizre, Silopi, Sur and now in Idil. Turkish state forces continue to maintain violent martial law in the towns, firing artillery overnight at inhabited areas. In the last 6 months, state security forces have killed 768 civilians in the country, most of them in Kurdistan. 98 of these were children and 87 were women.

Indeed, the photographs of the destruction of Kurdish cities and towns were reminiscent of World War I and II. Cities such as Cizre, Silopi, Sur , Nusaybin and Yoksekova were so extensively damaged that these cities need to be rebuilt.

A number of people have argued the Turkish state’s systematic violence against its Kurdish population constitutes genocide under the United Nations Convention on Genocide. For example, Karen Parker, a lawyer and analyst in international and humanitarian law, states:

Turkey’s actions [by 1999] clearly [met] the international law test for genocide: killing and causing serious bodily harm, inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part (ethnic cleansing and other acts) … I am convinced that Turkey qualifies as a racist regime vis-a-vis the Kurdish people … The ethnic cleansing scheme, taking place in the context of the war, is both genocide and a war crime.

But Turkey has not succeeded in eliminating the Kurds through physical genocide so its main focus has been cultural genocide.

Cultural genocide of the Kurds

Cultural genocide is a subtle and gradual destruction of a culture and a disempowerment of an ethnic group that does not attract as much attention because cultural genocide usually occurs over generations and as Lemkin states, can occur during times of peace as well as times of war. Cultural genocide is often used when a population is too numerous to be physically exterminated.

Burrowing deeper, I now want to explore how the Turkish state used both Lemkin’s phases on the Kurds: that is, the destruction of the national pattern of the oppressed group and the imposition of the national pattern of the oppressor.

Cultural Genocide as a destruction of national patterns

Successive Turkish governments have systematically tried to destroy Kurdish national and cultural patterns. The most significant attack on Kurdish national patterns was a ban on any Kurdish cultural manifestations, particularly the Kurdish language. Article 3 of the Turkish constitution of 1923 stated, “No language prohibited by law may be used for the disclosure or publication of ideas and opinions. Written or printed materials, records …, as well as other means of expression that are in violation of this prohibition will be confiscated …”

On 3 March 1924, a decree was issued by the Turkish state banning all Kurdish schools, organisations, publications, religious fraternities and madrasahs, which were the source of education for most Kurds. The Law on Resettlement in 1934 was designed to further assimilate the Kurds and it clearly targeted the destruction of national patterns. Law No. 2510 in June 1934 ordered further dispersion of the Kurdish population to areas where they would constitute no more than 5 percent of the total population.

The Law on Resettlement of 1934 defined three categories of (re)settlement zones. Two categories were designed to destroy Kurdish national patterns and the third category was designed to impose the national pattern of the Turks:

One category of resettlement consisted of those districts “whose evacuation is desirable for health, economic, cultural, political and security reasons and where settlement has been forbidden”;

The second category of resettlement was “designated for transfer and resettle the population whose assimilation to Turkish culture is desired”; and

The third category of resettlement referred to “places where an increase of the population of Turkish culture is desired”.

Article 11 of this law banned attempts by people whose mother tongue was not Turkish to preserve their cultures by living together in ethnically homogeneous villages, and banned them from forming trade unions or professional associations.

In April 1983, the Turkish parliament passed Law No. 2820, which states that it was forbidden to claim that minorities exist in Turkey and it was forbidden to protect or develop non-Turkish languages and cultures. The Turkish state continued to ban Kurdish language and culture despite the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child in which Turkey ratified with some reservations. Article 8 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child adopted by the General Assembly Resolution 44/25 of 20 November 1989 and entered into force on 2 September 1990, states, “State Parties undertake to respect the right of the child to preserve his or her identity, including nationality, name and family relations as recognized by law without unlawful interference.” Article 29 (C) states that State Parties agree that the education of the child shall be directed to “The development of respect for the child’s parents, his or her own cultural identity, language and values”. Article 30 of the Convention, states:

In those States in which ethnic, religious or linguistic minorities or persons of indigenous origin exist, a child belonging to such a minority or who is indigenous shall not be denied the right, in community with other members of his or her group, to enjoy his or her own culture, to profess and practise his or her own religion, or to use his or her own language.

Nevertheless, the Turkish state continued to deny the existence of Kurds and their language. Alpaslan Pehlivanli, chairman of the Justice Committee in the Turkish parliament, argued:

If the word ‘language’ now in the bill stays in we will have admitted that the Kurds are a nation […] If it passes this way, tomorrow there will be cafes where Kurdish folk songs are sung, theatres where Kurdish films are shown, and coffee house where Kurdish is spoken. If this is not separatism, what is?

In 1990, Helsinki Watch reported that in May 1989, the Turkish National Security Council launched a campaign denying the existence of a distinct Kurdish nation and a Kurdish language. The Pamphlets were distributed to schools in the Kurdish regions, claiming that Kurdish was not a distinct language but a dialect of Turkish.

In 1991, under the Prime ministership of Tugut Ozal, Law 2932 legalised the use of Kurdish language in private but continued to ban the Kurdish language in education. Subsequently, under the Justice and Development Party, Articles 26 and 28 of the constitution were amended to allow the establishment of local language courses and broadcasting in those languages. Soon after, attempts were made to establish private Kurdish language courses but conditions imposed on such courses made it practically impossible to teach the Kurdish language.

In January 2009, the Turkish Radio and Television Corporation, TRT 6, started broadcasting in Kurdish. This was to divert Kurdish viewers from watching Kurdish satellite TV stations broadcast in Southern Kurdistan and from Europe. TRT 6 became a propaganda machine for the Turkish state to broadcast government views to a Kurdish audience. It also played a role in teaching Turkish to its Kurdish viewers as it was required to provide Turkish subtitles with anything broadcast in Kurdish. These cosmetic reforms were being used to facilitate Turkey’s negotiations on accession into European Union. Meanwhile, the Turkish state continued its policy of denial in various ways, one way being to link any demand for cultural and language rights to separatism and terrorism.

In 2002, the state security court in Diyarbakir opened a case against 27 Kurdish children aged 11 to 18, who had demanded the right to be educated in the Kurdish language. The state prosecutor accused them of aiding a terrorist organisation and called for prison term of three years and nine months. In March 2004, the Radio and TV Supreme Council (RTUK), ordered a 30 day closure of ART TV, a local television channel broadcasting from Diyarbakir, on the grounds that it had violated ‘‘the principle of the indivisibility of the state’’ by broadcasting two Kurdish songs in August 2003. In June 2007, Turkey’s highest administrative court, the Council of State, dismissed Abdullah Demirbas, Mayor of the Sur district of Diyarbakır for voting to provide services in languages other than Turkish. On 21 February 2017, Hurriyet Daily news reported that the administration of a religious vocational high school in the western province of Aydın filed a complaint against a group of students for listening to Kurdish music and dancing the Kurdish “halay” folk dance. The students were called to testify by the police upon the orders of the prosecutor’s office on 14 February 2017. They were referred to court on charges of “making terrorist propaganda.”

By banning or putting severe restrictions on Kurdish language and culture, the Turkish state has tried “to destroy or cripple” the Kurds “as a human group”. As Lemkin said, if the culture of a group is violently undermined, the group disintegrates and its members are either absorbed into other cultures in which he described as a wasteful and painful process, or they face personal disorganisation and even, perhaps physical destruction. Thus, for Lemkin the destruction of cultural symbols of a people constituted an act of genocide.

But Turkey not only banned Kurdish identity and cultural manifestations; it imposed Turkish nationalist patterns on the Kurdish population.

Cultural genocide as an imposition of national patterns

The pan-Turanic ideals of the Young Turks gradually faded to be replaced by the ultra-nationalism of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. Turkish nationalism became self-centric: everyone in Turkey was either a Turk or should become a Turk. There was no place for any other nationality or ethnic group. The slogan of “how happy to be a Turk” became the centrepiece of ultra-Turkish nationalism after the establishment of the Turkish Republic. In 1930, the Justice Minister Mahmut Esat claimed, “The Turks are the only lords of this country, its only owners. Those who are not of pure Turkish stock have in this country only one right – that of being servants, of being slaves. Let friend and foe, and even the mountains know this truth!”

All state policies and resources were designed to impose the Turkish culture and identity on others. The Law on Resettlement of 1934 defined the third resettlement zone as places where an increase of the population of Turkish culture was desired. According to this plan about 500,000 Turks were to be settled in Kurdish inhabited areas to dilute the Kurdish population.

The Turkish state also tried to impose the Turkish identity on Kurds by falsifying history. Ismail Besikci states that Mehmet Sherif Firat wrote a book in 1948 titled, Dogu Illeri ve Varto Tarihi, claiming that in reality the Kurds were Turks and that the Indo-European language of Kurdish was a Turkish dialect. In 1960, the book was reprinted and widely distributed free of charge by the Ministry of Education to universities, professors, student associations, journalists, writers and school libraries. Turkish President at the time, Cemal Gursel, praised the book and helped popularise the phrase, “spit in the face of he who calls you a Kurd”. Turkish bureaucracy and media helped make the word ‘Kurd’ an insult. Turkish language experts tried very hard to prove that Kurdish was a dialect of Turkish. Law No. 1587 instructed that all Kurdish names had to be changed into Turkish names as Kurdish names were harmful to public opinion and were not suitable for Turkish national culture, morals, values, customs and traditions. All these measures created a culture that made many Kurds ashamed of their history, culture, language and identity. This enabled them to be more easily assimilated into Turkish culture.

In a further move to impose Turkish culture on Kurds the Turkish state created boarding schools for Kurdish children to accelerate the process of assimilation. In the 1960s, Regional Boarding Schools, Bolge Yatili Ilkokullar, were constructed in various parts of Kurdistan. Children who had reached primary school age were taken away from their homes, families and villages and placed in boarding schools so that they would be educated by Turkish teachers in a very harsh environment. By 1998 there were an estimated 88 boarding schools operating with a total capacity of 49,614 students, and another 38 boarding schools were under construction. The Turkish state used the same principals of assimilation used by the USA for Native Americans in the nineteenth century. To kill the languages of Native Americans, the US established boarding schools in 1879. By the 1920s there were about 72 boarding schools intentionally located far away from the native environment and culture.

The Turkish state imposed the Turkish identity on Kurdish children through education. Each morning all children at school had to recite an oath saying:

I am a Turk, honest, hardworking. My principles are to protect the younger, to respect the elder, to love my homeland and my nation more than myself. My ideal is to rise, to progress. May my life be dedicated to the Turkish existence. … How happy is the one who says ‘I am a Turk!’

Assimilation through education is a component of cultural genocide. Skutnabb-Kangas states, “Assimilationist education is genocidal because it forcibly transfers children from their own group to another group, linguistically and culturally.”

Thus, Turkey has not only banned the national patterns of the Kurds but has imposed Turkish national patterns on the Kurds using force, education and other methods to destroy the Kurds as a people. According to Lemkin’s definition, this clearly constitutes cultural genocide.

Conclusion

Leaving aside Lemkin’s definition, with over 3,000 Kurdish villages having been destroyed and depopulated; hundreds of thousands of Kurds having been forced to migrate to Turkish cities; tens of thousands of Kurdish men, women and children having been arrested, imprisoned, tortured, raped and killed with over 4,000 extra-judicial killings since the early 1970s; with the Kurdish language, culture and every manifestation of Kurdish identity having been banned; and the imposition of the Turkish identity, language and culture on the Kurds, the trauma the Kurdish people have gone through has caused serious mental harm, which constitutes genocide under Article 2 of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948).

The Office of the UN Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide outlines the evidence of intent to conduct genocide. This is “to destroy in whole or in part” to include: a) in a non – conflict situation, widespread and/or systematic discriminatory and targeted practices culminating in gross violations of human rights of protected groups, such as extrajudicial killings, torture and displacement; b) the specific means used to achieve “ethnic cleansing” which may underscore that the perpetration of the acts is designed to reach the foundations of the group or what is considered as such by the perpetrator group; and c) the destruction of or attacks on cultural and religious property and symbols of the targeted group that may be designed to annihilate the historic presence of the group or groups. As has been evidenced in this paper, the Turkish state has systematically carried out all these actions of ethnic cleansing “to destroy in whole or in part” the Kurds as a distinct people.

Yet, Turkey has escaped any meaningful criticism or international reaction to its physical and cultural genocide of the Kurds, as it has escaped being prosecuted for the physical genocide of the Armenians. This sets a precedent for other states to follow suit. Thus, for the sake of humanity, international peace and security, Turkey should be prosecuted for its crimes against humanity.

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– United nations Treaty Collection, https://treaties.un.org/Pages/ViewDetails.aspx?src=IND&mtdsg_no=IV-11&chapter=4&clang=_en#EndDec

– United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner, http://www.ohchr.org/EN/ProfessionalInterest/Pages/CRC.aspx

– M. van Bruinessen, ‘Genocide in Kurdistan? The Suppression of the Dersim Rebellion in Turkey (1937-38) and the Chemical War Against the Iraqi Kurds (1988)’, George J. Andreopoulos (ed.), Conceptual and historical dimensions of genocide, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994, pp. 141-70.

– R. van Krieken, Cultural Genocide Reconsidered, Australian Indigenous Law Review, Vol. 12 (Special Edition), 2 0 0 8, pp, 76-81.



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