Recep Tayyip Erdogan

"LandepNews"

Recep Tayyip Erdogan

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Thursday made an apology for the killing of the Kurds in the late 1930s, being the first Turkish leader to do something like this. The apology issued by the PM comes at a time when the state has tense ties with the Kurdish minority in the southeastern part of the country.
The gesture was unexpected for the entire Turkish political landscape and occurred during a meeting with party officials in Ankara, the capital of the country, on which occasion the PM said that if there was a need for an apology on behalf of the state, and if there were such a practice, then he would apologize and he was apologizing.
The apology refers to crushing a rebellion at Dersim between 1936 and 1939, when the Turkish army used aerial bombings and poison gas, killing 13,000 Kurds. The Kurds then refused to accept the authority of the young Turkish republic over their province called now Tunceli.
It is said that the rebellion in Dersim laid the grounds for the current rebellious movement in the Turkish provinces where Kurds are majority. The matter is sensitive for the Turkish nationalists because when the tragedy occurred the president of the republic was its founder, iconic leader Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, and his adopted daughter, the first Turkish female pilot, participated in the bombing.
Kurds view with skepticism the apology issued by the premier, considering it no more than a way to diminish the influence of the secular Turkish Republican Party, which was in office at the time of the Dersim crackdown, and was jolted by a debate initiated by one of its own representatives from Tunceli province, who demanded that the party acknowledge responsibility for that tragic event.
In his apology, Erdogan said that Dersim was “the most tragic event in our recent history,” and that it should not be the Justice and Development party to be confronted with the responsibility for it but the Republican party, which was “behind this bloody disaster.”
Apart from settling the score with the Republican party, the move seems to be directed toward improving ties with the Kurdish population in the south-eastern part of the country, where up to 14 million Kurds live, making some 13 percent of the Turkish population.
Kurdish territory entered under Ottoman dominance in the 19th century, and continued to fight for autonomy since. In the late 20th century, the Kurdistan People’s Party took up the fight with the central government. It is estimated that since the 1980s, some 40,000 people lost their lives in the armed conflict.
Last month French president Sarkozy, in an attempt to win over 500,000 Armenian voters in France, said that it would impose penalties in denying another chapter in the modern history of Turkey, which the Armenians call the “Armenian genocide,” an action that is said to have happened in 1915, during and after the WWI, when 1.5 million Armenians are said to have been killed by the Ottoman Empire by massacres, deportations, starvation and other abuses that compelled the Armenian historians to consider it the first genocide in modern times.
The French assertion angered Turkish authorities and triggered a swift response because the Turkish republic does not recognize such an action, even though over the last decade Turkish intellectuals, grouped in a movement called Özür Dileriz! (“We apologize!”) have urged the state to issue an apology for this genocide.

Thank's for link: