Djene Bajalan
On Sunday, April 24, 1915, Ottoman minister of the interior, Talat Pasha, ordered the arrest and detention of Armenian community leaders residing within the empire. On the first night of the sweep over two hundred individuals were picked up by government forces; as the days wore on the number grew to over two thousand. Talat Pasha’s “decapitation” strike against the Ottoman Armenians was part of a broader and more systematic campaign of genocide directed at the empire’s Armenian community — a campaign which left between 800,000 and 1.5 million dead.
It is not necessary here to re-litigate the question of whether or not the events of 1915 — described in official Turkish sources euphemistically as the “relocations (tehcir)” — constituted genocide. Instead, in remembering the Armenian genocide and, more specifically, the arrests of “Red Sunday,” it becomes possible to situate the policies of Turkey’s present-day leaders towards representatives of the Kurdish movement — in particular, the detention of the leaders of pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), Selahattin Demirtaş and Figen Yuksekdağ, on November 4 — in a broader historical context.
While it would be hyperbolic to claim that the levels of violence currently being directed at Turkey’s Kurdish population today have reached the same magnitude as that directed against the Armenians just over a century ago, undeniable and frightening parallels can nevertheless be drawn.
It is not necessary here to re-litigate the question of whether or not the events of 1915 — described in official Turkish sources euphemistically as the “relocations (tehcir)” — constituted genocide. Instead, in remembering the Armenian genocide and, more specifically, the arrests of “Red Sunday,” it becomes possible to situate the policies of Turkey’s present-day leaders towards representatives of the Kurdish movement — in particular, the detention of the leaders of pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), Selahattin Demirtaş and Figen Yuksekdağ, on November 4 — in a broader historical context.
While it would be hyperbolic to claim that the levels of violence currently being directed at Turkey’s Kurdish population today have reached the same magnitude as that directed against the Armenians just over a century ago, undeniable and frightening parallels can nevertheless be drawn.
