"Hundreds of thousands of Christians and Kurds were murdered under Atatürk"

German President Christian Wulff's visit to Atatürk's mausoleum in Ankara has been called "perplexing" by the Society for Threatened Peoples (STP). "We welcome the fact that President Wulff publicly called for the protection of Christians in Turkey. But it makes it all the more difficult to understand why he placed a cross at mausoleum of Kemal Atatürk, under whose rule hundreds of thousands of Christians and Kurds were killed and several million more displaced," criticized the President of STP International, Tilman Zülch. "In view of these mass murders, Wulff should not have visited Atatürk's mausoleum. Not even Russia or Italy would expect foreign heads of state to pay their respects to Lenin or Mussolini." Furthermore, notes Zülch, when Wulff spoke to the Turkish parliament in Ankara he made no mention of the show trial against 151 Kurdish politicians and civil rights activists that began in southeast Turkey on Monday. More than 1600 Kurds, most of whom had been involved in advocating the rule of law and equal rights, have been imprisoned there since spring of 2009.

After the genocide by the Young Turks of some 1.5 million Armenians and some 500,000 Christian Assyrian/Aramaeans, Atatürk carried on with the elimination of Christians. At least 200,000 Christians in the region around the seaport of Smyrna, today Izmir, and in East Thrace, in the European area of Turkey, were victims of mass murder under his rule. According to other estimates, up to 350,000 Christians may have been killed. At least two million Greek Orthodox as well as Armenian and Assyrian/Aramaeans Christians from Pontus (Cappadocia) and Ionia, and Arab Christians from Alexandretta Sanjak, today Iskenderun, were displaced. Thus the proportion of Christians in the total population within Turkey's current borders dropped from 20 percent to about 0.1 percent in just 50 years.

Atatürk was also merciless against the Kurdish population. Three uprisings led by Kurdish liberation movements were viscously crushed. After the Sheikh Said rebellion in 1925, during the subsequent deportation of one million Kurds, hundreds of thousands died of malnutrition and illness on their way into exile. During negotiations with Kurdish leader Nuri Pasha in 1929 the Turkish army slaughtered at least 10,000 Kurds in more than 200 villages and razed up to 500 towns and villages to the ground. Hundreds of thousands were forcibly relocated. In 1937 in the Dersim region, the Turkish army defeated a rebellion of Kurds protesting Turkification, deportation and slave labor. Kurdish women and girls were raped on a mass scale and the general population was massacred. More than 50,000 Kurds were killed in the Dersim rebellion and 100,000 deported.

Translated by Elizabeth Crawford