TURKEY’S Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) has demanded an official apology for the 1937 Dersim massacre and the establishment of a truth commission to heal the wounds of one of the bloodiest stains on the country’s history.  

HDP MP Alican Onlu tabled a series of parliamentary questions today calling on President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to restore the rights of the people of Dersim, in the largely Kurdish south-east.

He called for a truth & acknowledgement commission to open the archives and court records to the public and for the perpetrators of the massacre to be tried in absentia. Mr Onlu asked for May 4 to be officially recognised as Dersim massacre memorial day.

Measures must be taken to end to the forced assimilation policies that crushed the Kurdish language, beliefs and culture of the people of Dersim, which is known by the official Turkish state name of Tunceli, he said.

A decree signed in the Turkish parliament on May 4 1937 led to an onslaught by the army and the massacre of up to 70,000 people.

The massacre followed a rebellion led by Kurdish Alevi chieftain Seyid Riza against the Turkification policies of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of the Turkish republic. Riza was hanged by the state in November 1937 and buried in an unknown location.

Witness statements describe the brutality inflicted on the people of Dersim, including chemical weapons dropped by the Turkish air force. Among the pilots was Ataturk’s adopted daughter Sabiha Gokcen, celebrated as the country’s first female flyer.

Thousands of residents were forced from  their land and banished. Thousands of children, especially girls, were taken from their families and placed in orphanages or given to foster families across Turkey as part of an ethnic-cleansing operation.

The people of Dersim named the massacre Tertele, meaning big flood, destruction and extinction.

It is the greatest massacre committed in Turkey after the Armenian genocide. But there have been no lessons learned from the suffering and the incident remains one of Turkey’s darkest days.

Mr Erdogan offered an apology in 2011, but this was seen as an opportunist attempt to embarrass the People’s Republican Party, which was in power at the time.

The HDP demanded that the region be officially renamed Dersim from Tunceli, the name associated with the massacre, and the mass graves be uncovered, especially Riza’s resting place.