Epress.am News from Armenia
In the face of a call from the prime minister for his party to apologize for a massacre in Dersim during the 1930s, main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu on Thursday failed to an offer apology, but called on the government to release documents from the state archives that pertain to Dersim, Today’s Zaman reports.
Kılıçdaroğlu responded to Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who on Wednesday apologized for the Dersim Massacre on behalf of the Turkish state but accused the CHP of being the actual culprit and called on the party to offer an apology as well. The CHP leader said during a party meeting on Thursday that Erdoğan’s apology was not enough and asked the prime minister to open state archives.
However, Kılıçdaroğlu stopped short of apologizing for the massacre on behalf of the CHP, which was part of the single-party government at the time. “Why are not you opening the archives of the Turkish Republic? An earlier proposal we filed [to open the archives] in 2002 was rejected by the [Justice and Development Party] AK Party. You have to be sincere in facing up to history. I had also asked the prime minister to offer an apology [for Dersim]. He then said he could not. Anyway, he apologized yesterday [Wednesday]. But offering an apology is not enough,” he said.
Referring to some archival documents regarding the massacre in Dersim and which were made public by Erdoğan on Wednesday, Kılıçdaroğlu said the documents were not unknown to the public. “Opening state archives is not enough, as well,” Kılıçdaroğlu continued, saying the state should return the property of people from Dersim who were deported. “[The people of] Dersim will not let the AK Party exploit their pain. They cannot,” he added.
The much-debated Dersim massacre concerns the deaths of tens of thousands of Alevis at the hands of the military in 1937. According to a document Erdoğan revealed on Wednesday, which was dated 1939, a total of 13,806 people were killed in operations carried out against the people of Dersim between 1936 and 1939.