To be a “DEVA” to Dersim

Cihan Söylemez

av.cihansoylemez@hotmail.com

04 December 2020

One of the routine annual news reports of Turkey is that the crimes against humanity of Dersim 1937-38 have created controversy among opposing views on the occasion of various commemoration days.

There are two great historicist poles in the country that discuss the “Dersim Issue” on the main axis; Official Turkish Historiography and Kurdish Historiography

These two poles have huge voter support as well as huge media support. As a matter of fact, the main agenda continues every year in a course that is usually shaped in line with the ideology of the two poles and is trapped in a vicious circle.

The result? No matter what you have, it is multiplied by zero (0) and there is no progress in the situation despite all these years of discussion.

And at this point, even “Yıldız Tilbe” can determine the agenda magazinely. In the country, people are divided into “Yıldız Tilbe supporters” and “Yıldız Tilbe Opposites” over the “Dersim” issue.

So what are the focus of the issue, the victims?

Today, the thousands of victims who sent the petitions I have prepared to the Parliamentary Petitions Commission have not been answered by the Parliament. Those who read journalist-writer Yalçın Doğan’s book “Drifting Lesson, 1937-1938 and even 1939” understand much better my approach to this issue as a lawyer, which is not based on magazines, is far from populism and focused on getting results.

Prosecutor’s investigation of Seyit Rıza’s burial place case
The case of the Opening of the Seke Surah Mass Grave.
Hüseyin Akgün’s compensation case against Devlet Bahçeli
Criminal case against Turkish Left Magazine
The case for the opening of the mass grave where Hüseyin Akgün’s family members were murdered…

All these processes are in our archive as a result of my struggle to confront law, democracy and history in my professional life that has completed ten years. In Prof. Dr. Şükrü Aslan’s book “Hozat”, these issues were legally discussed with an article written by me.

In all these legal processes, I saw sociologically that there were a thousand and one groups and a thousand voices acting on behalf of “Dersim”. The owners of these voices did not want to listen to each other. They were intolerant and impulsive to each other. A social situation that was divided into a thousand and one factions around a pain, that could be laughed at in a way to cry, was unfortunately in front of the eyes.

If the law benefits only one ideology, that was important for a thousand and one voices. For this reason, it was not the “Legal Struggle” for the media that fed on populism, but what the politicians who turned the issue into an Arab hair said. And as a result, at this point, we are watching the Dersim Issue, the chaos created by groups that cannot be addressed above politics, that are not based on universal law and that are sometimes nationalist, sometimes tribal and sometimes oppressive, and that show the stories of failure to the press as success and listen to their cacophony.
And now we are reading and watching Ali Babacan’s veiled “Dersim” messages from the press. I don’t know if the Deva Party will be a panacea for Dersim. Maybe I laugh at my heart that “Yıldız Tilbe will start politics in the Deva Party and the climate will become Yıldız Tilbe’s Soldiers”.

I remember for a moment the lines of poet Kemal Burkay’s poem “Smile”, whose poet direction I admired.

“… The whole city resents me
I don’t even have a cat you understand
The climate changes, it becomes the Mediterranean, smile.”

Yes, let us smile anyway and not leave our poet alone in his verses. And what is the “Deva” of Dersim, let’s try to look for it. From the main media to the local media, all the interlocutors… Without turning it into Arab Hair, without imprisoning it in ideology, without populism…””