CENTRAL NEWS – The original publication is available here in turkish.
“9 September
Ah, if I were in Izmir today. However, we are dealing with Kurds at the top of the mountain. He always…. x
Today, we came to the plain by scanning the mountains and forests. Our squad brought the head of Satan Ali, who was the head of the Damascus Servants, and killed many more people and brought the heads of all of them. Now our squad is very popular, all the minutes call it a hero squad. Ali Galip Pasha said on the phone that he kissed the eyes of our division. We spent the night one hour ahead of Ovacik. We are still very tired…”
These striking lines, which describe the Dersim Genocide from a perspective that we have not seen until now, are taken from a memoir from 1938, which is among the digital resources that the Atatürk Library has recently made available on the internet. It is just one of the notes written in Ottoman Turkish between 27 July and 25 September in the Ece memorandum, formerly known as the Ece Agenda, by a soldier doing his compulsory military service. This memoir, which is quickly scribbled sometimes once, sometimes in several different times, but kept regularly every day, tells for the first time the atrocities experienced in Dersim from the perspective of its practitioners in the chain of command, warmly and without delay.
These daily notes begin with the words “I’m so bored, I went out for a bit” written on January 9th. The few pages before that appear to have been torn, but by whom and for what reason is unclear. Although it is not certain, we know that this young man from Samsun, whose name we guess is Yusuf Kenan Akım, neither his profession, nor his education, nor what he likes or dislikes. We learn from the notes that he has mother, father, siblings and a few good friends. Memories begin during a time when he had plenty of free time while waiting to enlist in the military. We know that he goes to the movies and concerts from time to time, reads novels, and sends lots of letters and cards to his friends, relatives and especially to his lover, Nedime. This memoir, which contains very few details about himself, is marked by its author’s intense, suspicious and sometimes obsessive love for a woman named Bridesmaid. Almost every day, she notes her longing, longing, anger, anger, and suspicion for her beloved, whom she calls ‘My Bridesmaid’, sometimes code-named ‘X’, or ‘traitor’ at least once a day. Perhaps the only thing that has not been forgotten or changed from the beginning to the end of this memoir is the need to express his intense feelings for the Bridesmaid and the record of the mood created by the answer that came from her or not.
Departure to Dersim
The writer of the diary goes to Amasya on April 27, 1938 to spend the inexperienced part of his military service. Her notes during this period are full of her efforts to adjust to the new environment, her illness, and her longing for and worries about the Bridesmaid. In addition to these troubled feelings, he also talks about the market permits, his short trip to Samsun, his sight of Nedime and his good relations with his commanders. At the end of the first month, on 28 May, they perform the oath ceremony as the 56th Regiment. On July 27, he wrote his diary with the headline ‘Mockingly Act’ and wrote under it that they were waiting to get on the train from Amasya, and stated, ‘They separated me as an unarmed medic.’ On July 30, he writes that their first move was to Dersim: “We are on Mount Dersim, by the Euphrates river. Today, we took a picture by the Euphrates again with friends.’ Shortly after, it is revealed that they were included in the Dersim scanning operation, which he called the Altunovası Maneuver. During the two months he spent in Dersim until September 25, he kept notes about the time he spent in the mountains, what he did and what he witnessed. The grades continue with his experiences in the military office where he was sent by distribution on return. In this process, returning to his writings on boredom, family issues, millionaire aunt from America, Atatürk’s health problems and his subsequent death are frequently mentioned. He ends his memoir with the following romantic note, written on 31 December, dedicated to his beloved Bridesmaid.
“There is no X…. They say there is death. Again, they say there are things that don’t die. I believe in both. Death is matter. And living is love. Here lies the bones of dead matter and the spirit of living love. Among this memorandum, a tomb and a palace, X…”
Summary of the year
In the last part of the agenda, he writes the names of boys and girls under the title of ‘Those born in this month’ in the section reserved for income and expense recording, and adds character analyzes of those born in these months, taken from the horoscope. On the remaining pages, he keeps notes on the year’s summary after a short income and expense account.
“July:
On 27 July 1938, we moved to Dersim, on the Kurds.
August:
We spent this month in Dersim, we suffered a lot.
September
We are in Dersim again. We came back from Alaska. We are scanning the mountains”
A shocking text
Since we rarely encounter memoirs about ordinary lives in Ottoman-Turkish studies, this notebook is a valuable source for historians in general. However, when we look at the Dersim issue specifically, this memoir not only contributes to the details of the Dersim 1938 narrative, which researchers already know and produced in written and visual form, but also provides an opportunity for a radical intervention in it. To start with the personal, although I am a historian who has been studying the Republic’s Dersim politics since 1999, having read countless reports and documents on the subject, including the imagination, plan and practice of violence, interviewed the victims and watched many articles, films and documentaries on this subject. , this text was more shocking to me than I expected, both emotionally and intellectually.
In these two months when the scanning operation is being told, this memoir does not say anything new about Dersim 1938 that no one, at least the people of Dersim, knew. However, it depicts a state of dying, being killed so much that the perpetrator doesn’t even need to count. He also notes the fear and resistance in the face of the destruction of all living things, including mountains, rivers, animals and people, from one end of Dersim, which was attacked by machine guns and soldiers from the ground, and planes from the sky. However, you do not see here the cold, analytical and ‘It is essential and permissible for the survival of the State’ justification in the official reports or the passionate defense of the nationalist framework. In other words, in the famous and ominous expression of Fevzi Çakmak, ‘Dersim cannot be won with caresses. The intervention of the musellah force is more effective and constitutes the basis of improvement. There is no determination in this memoir that ‘Dersim should be taken into consideration like a colony first. Or the symbolic face of the Dersim operation, the ‘devotion’ of the Republican soldier Sabiha Gökçen to use the weapon Atatürk gave her for herself, in case she fell into the hands of the ‘enemy’ after ‘shooting at anything that moves’.
In these lines, you read neither the awareness of those like Gen. Muhsin Batur, who refused to tell what happened in Dersim, and more importantly, what he did as an infantryman, by saying, “I apologize to my readers and refrain from describing this part of my life”, nor the regrets of soldiers who told their memories with tears as they got older.
Ordinary Evil
On the contrary, there is the embodiment of Banality of Evil, conceptualized by Hannah Arendt based on the Eichmann trial, who describes with great indifference all the atrocities she has seen, experienced and even perpetrated. It is known that this soldier came to Dersim not by choice but within the chain of command. It is even possible to say that he did most, perhaps all, of what he did as per the given order, and that disobedience would have a heavy price. Although there are soldiers in the narratives of the Dersimis who secretly try to save them or obey the orders with tears, they mostly emphasize that these are Alevi or Kurdish soldiers. In the memoir we have, however, you cannot see any remorse, question marks, pity, curiosity, fear, or any conscientious reaction such as bloodstain. There is no expression in their writing about a cause they believe in or that they see the other as an enemy. It is striking that there is not the slightest explanation or expression of curiosity about who the people who witness their deaths every day and cause them are and why they are exposed to them. He talks about the targets only as Kurds, and the word ‘Rebel’ is mentioned a few times. However, it does not talk about rebellion or any other kind of action. In the soldier’s narrative, neither why it started nor when it will end is important.
In short notes, for pages and days, you read about a killing that could last forever, in which the people of Dersim could be killed carelessly and without reckoning, and which did not require much thought from anyone. You follow the step-by-step construction of a tragedy that you know the end of and read the plans for, in these warm notes. There is neither the regret of time nor the desire to question the command, only death in these lines.
When you look at what he wrote before and after the Dersim operation, you can’t distinguish from any person you see on your right or left, the decapitated heads of a romantic and blindly in love young man, the rivers full of corpses, the burning villages, the feeling of insensitivity and the commonplace, a different perpetrator than we are used to. reveals the type. So much so that, as can be seen in the note she wrote on September 9, X or Bridesmaid comes to mind in the middle of the heads cut off out of anger at the situation she is in. Maybe sometimes as an escape or asylum, but mostly as indifference to the violence he has committed and witnessed. This not only expands the profile of perpetrators from decision makers to ‘ordinary’ practitioners in the case of Dersim, but also proves that perpetrator identification is a thorny issue in all experiences of collective violence and genocide in general.
“We’ve been so miserable here…”
The agency of the soldier in this memoir is also defined by the victimization he attributes to himself. In addition to the love that haunts him and accuses him of disloyalty, the only other situation that causes an emotional reaction is the “pain” of the owner of the memoir and his dissatisfaction with where he is. However, the reason for this is not the violence that the people of Dersim are exposed to, or being the perpetrator of this violence. The geographical or physical difficulties the soldiers found themselves in while the Dersimis were being exterminated. Since I have difficulty in describing it with my words, I will leave the word to the memoir:
“September 3
We are ahead of Cevizli. At 12 o’clock at night, we dismantled our tents and departed from Pertek. We walked until morning. Finally, we stopped at the water’s edge at 7 o’clock. But since the creek was full of human carcasses, we died of thirst. We’ve walked so much that I can’t stand. O Lord, save us from here…”
“September 11
Today we are scanning the mountains. It is not possible to enter the streams from human carcasses. It’s so cold in here that we’re freezing. Everyone cries at night for my mother. We are suffering the worst in the world. These days I always think of you X, always of you.”
“September 12
We got up early this morning. Again, we are carrying out a scanning operation in the mountains. We deal with beheading every day…..side article: Friends found oil today, we bought rice, we made a nice pilaf and ate it with friends.” Side article 2: We are dehumanized now, we are so miserable.”
“September 5th
We stayed in Hozat again tonight. X—I saw him in my dream. We are so accustomed to sleeping on the ground that we even dream. Today, together with the headmaster, we entered the hamam in Hozat. We were so devastated for a few days. All our tiredness was gone in the bath.”
“August 16
Tonight, we expect forces from the rear on Visit Hill. We were hungry, we entered the caves. We ate it by making burrito with millet flour left by the Kurds. It’s so cold in here, the snow is knee-deep…”
The burden of the witness
The people of Dersim, who have been silenced for years in the narrative of rebellion and whose lives have been ignored, carried the traces of genocide they carried on their bodies and souls with them to witness their massacred relatives and the broken Dersim, let alone trying to get rid of it. One of the strongest recent examples of this is the story of Hüseyin Akar, who was five years old, in 1938, the story of fifty-five villagers and their relatives who were burned with gas in front of their eyes, ‘1938 is a different world for me. I don’t want to live this world again. But this world does not leave me… it was me who was burning there.
It is not known whether Hüseyin Akar’s village is one of the villages that the soldier burned with sandbags “on the way” within the framework of the orders thrown from the planes, but the type of perpetrator that the memoir conveys to the reader, who is used to violence and does not shed blood, makes two kinds of contributions to the studies of Dersim. First of all, he relieves the people of Dersim, who are trying to prove how and how often they have been killed, from the burden of witnessing. It makes it possible to prove the story through the narrative of the perpetrators, not from plans, sketches, or Muhsin Batur’s silence, or from the bomb purchase document to be found in the archive. Deadly planes, rivers full of corpses, heads cut off, people caught alive and killed, village burnings, herds of confiscated animals and the struggle to hold on to life in caves are the summary of the 1938 narrative of the Dersimis. However, an important difference here is that the soldier, while doing this, or while waiting for an order, tells it again with blood-curdling mediocrity, or as if it were a victimization story about himself:
“August 11
We raided the village across the street early this morning. But there was no one in the village. We are waiting for news of his burning. Light machine beats Snake Mountain with lead. While scanning the mountains today, 10 Kurds came out. Our division shot two of them. Some of them escaped, some of them were captured. Now, at 11:30, we are burning the village of Kozluca (not fully readable).”
“August 18
We set off from Zara’s township at half past seven in the morning. We came to Pulur and then to Cevizli village. We burned all the villages along the way. We entered a cabin in the mountain. We found 100 goats. And we were faced with an ominous situation. A Kurdish woman hung herself with a rope. A (unreadable) precipitate also left milk. We arrived in Karaoğlan at 21 o’clock at night. We spent the night here.”
As I mentioned above, this memoir makes it possible to understand how such a great massacre was brought to life in the Dersim Genocide by expanding the planning staff or the perpetrator profile that was compressed into high profiles like Sabiha Gökçen, detailing how ordinary people participated within the chain of command. Stating that he left as an unarmed medic to come to Dersim, the memoirist did not record any medical activities he personally carried out during the scanning operations, and he rarely uses personal statements about himself here. He notes his individual verb only once, on 14 August, with the note ‘We came to Ovacık today, we used a couple of hand guns’. In another example, he needs to note the individual verb of a soldier, not his own, about beheadings:
“September 10
Today the mountains and forests have been swept. Our company brought the head of one of the notorious ones. Another squad brought Seyithan’s head. There is a private named Ruşen in our division. He cuts all the heads off.
We’ve been so miserable here…”
He undertakes all movements, activities, and especially acts such as killing and burning in groups, using the first person plural. If we go back to the September 9 note that I quoted in the introduction, it is the squad that cuts off the heads and is referred to as the hero. So much so that both agency and heroism against the people of Dersim are possible and meaningful as part of a collective. Likewise, the short note he wrote on September 15 similarly describes his success in destroying another high-profile rebel:
“September 15
Side text:
Today we scanned the village of Söğütlü. We rounded up suspicious people. Today, we killed Ibrahim Agha, who was the ringleader of the Koç Butler, with a bullet in the creek…”
One wonders if the killing bullet came from the soldier who wrote the memoir.. Who found İbrahim Ağa, how did he identify him, who is the Koç Butler, he did not even feel the need to write it. He described an agency that only collectively scans, collects and kills.
Pillage…
Most of the applications made by the people of Dersim to the Dersim Sub-Committee, which was established at the Petition Commission of the Grand National Assembly of Turkey, upon the statements of Prime Minister Erdoğan at the time, included a request for investigation and compensation for the material damage they suffered, as well as the human losses they had suffered. Although material losses seem secondary to the destruction and trauma experienced, this memoir reveals how material plunder was an ordinary part of this operation.
“August 12
Early in the morning, the cannons and the sounds of the airplanes are shaking around. The Kurds are stunned by the blockade. Today we found a cow, 3 sheep and 15 goats in the forest. We just cut our division and ate it. We are in Yeşiltepe tonight as well.”
“August 13
Today, our company caught twenty thousand sheep and 50 Kurds in a stream.”
In all these plundering stories, the only example in which the author makes one feel that he does not like and disapprove seems to be the attack of soldiers on beehives. Although he came to the village together, he prefers to keep himself separate by using third person plural pronouns to describe the attacks of the other soldiers, especially their entering the hives, as he describes it as plundering. Although it is not possible to know the reason for this sensitivity, I think it should be kept in mind as an example of how the owner of the memoir can convey his reactions and disapproved situations in a very nuanced manner.
“September 7
We set off from the forest early in the morning and came to a village. The whole soldier plundered the village. They got into the honeycombs, most of them inflated by bees stinging their faces, noses and all over. They’re sick. Towards the afternoon, they left our bags at the foot of a mountain and made us climb the mountain. We waited for the mountain peaks until morning. We are all sleepy. A flock of sheep and clusters of people can be seen in the stream. We look forward to the morning. We are very thirsty.”
1938: Fear and Resistance
This memoir has recorded very little about the Dersimis except death. Empty villages, villagers who took refuge in the mountains, abandoned caves seem like situations that the busy writer does not need to elaborate. However, he notes that during the search on 8 August, the villagers went to the mountains with fear, and when they found it as a result of the search, they said, “We are not rebels”. Similarly, resistance does not take up much space in his notes. Although he mentions a few conflicts, the mountains visible from his whereabouts, beaten by machine guns and bombarded by planes, and herds of people and animals stuck in their crevices, fleeing and needing to be followed. Perhaps the phrase that sums up his situation regarding the people of Dersim and the remaining resistance are two words he wrote during a conflict on 9 August: ‘Kurds are in a blockade.’
Conclusion
After returning from Dersim on September 25 and taking a few days off, the author of the memoir continues his military service as a writer. After returning from Dersim, the first note, perhaps ironic but certainly striking, was dated October 7 and is as follows:
‘I was weighed today, I weighed 61 kilograms, so my lesson was worth it..’
In the notes he took until the end of 1938, there is no indication of a re-evaluation of Dersim or of following the operation. At the end of 2 months, when they followed the orders in a squadron, the Dersim issue was probably closed for this soldier. While reading the memoir, he always said, “Is there something I missed, am I wrong, is there another reason for this indifference and indifference? Was he afraid that others might read it?’ I thought, I wanted to think. Two notes at the top of the agenda, written in Ottoman on August 13, prompted me to read it even more carefully:
“Please, if you find this diary, send it to the following address without reading it:
Yusuf Kenan Current
Government House, Scripture
Wednesday
in the mountains of Dersim
On Saturday, August 13, 1938
On the next page, this time in Latin: ‘Please don’t read it, because it belongs to my own life. 14.8.1938, Sunday. My lesson”
Did he think it would hurt him to be read by others, about two weeks after he was involved in the operation? If so, wouldn’t the grades before this date be expected to be different? scared? So why did he continue to write, and write in the same way? Why didn’t he add anything else about him after Dersim? Of course, readers will answer these and similar questions for themselves. As a historian who studies social violence, my answer is neither fear nor anxiety, which cannot deny the fact that the soldier was a perpetrator of genocide, personally and as part of a collective, that he recounted over the course of two months in his memoir. As in all other examples of collective violence, the unusual portrait of the perpetrator and the fact that the acts are almost mechanically committed in the chain of command do not change the fact that Dersim has been irreversibly destroyed and ‘reformed’, but how high the perpetrators and the responsibility are; and that they are too different from one another to be reduced to one category, ideology, or situation. Dersim’s rehabilitation project was the closest example to the Holocaust model among the Ottoman-Republican genocides in terms of analysis, racial categories, planning and implementation. The type of perpetrator revealed by this soldier’s memoir shows that there are other important aspects of this similarity.
A second point I wondered about is how this memoir first reached Samsun Public Library and then Atatürk Library. Did the author himself want to reveal his agency when time intervened, as in one or two other examples? Did he regret it? Or did a family member want to share this memoir with researchers without his consent and perhaps without his knowledge? Even if other scenarios come to mind, I think these two possibilities are very important and valuable. One of the demands of the people of Dersim after 2011 was the opening of the state’s Dersim archives, including the General Staff Archive. Although this is a legitimate and important request, this memoir shows us that if there is a possibility of confrontation and saying ‘Never again’, this is only possible with the participation of other ‘non-state’ archives and memories in this process. For this reason, the emergence of materials like this provides an opportunity for healing for the people of Dersim, but is essentially a moral imperative for the perpetrators and their families. Because it is not a small family secret that is kept, but the great wound of Dersim. It is now their turn to shoulder the burden of both history and proof against the irreparable.
