ABSTRACT
The Kurds number at present perhaps 18 to 20 million; their ancestral land, Kurdistan, has since the First World War been divided among Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran, with a few significant enclaves in the Transcaucasian republics of the former Soviet Union. Most Turkish authors dealing with the events speak of resistance to modernization by reactionary tribal and feudal chieftains and mention their violent suppression by the Army, but neglect mentioning massacres. The people of Dersim were culturally distinct from the other Kurds, and by their fierce independent-mindedness they had come to epitomize in the Turkish bureaucratic mind reactionary obstacles in the way of progress. A stronger claim that actual genocide took place can be made for the pacification of Dersim, a particularly unruly part of Kurdistan, in two extremely bloody military campaigns in 1937 and 1938. The study of genocide in Saddam Hussein's Iraq will be facilitated by the regime's somewhat astonishing penchant for documentation of its own terror.
