37 Years After Maraş Massacre
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Pir Sultan Abdal Cultural Associations (PSAKD) are prohibited from commemorating the 37th anniversary.
Maraş Governorship has prohibited the commemoration activities of Alevist institutions on the grounds that these would “disturb the peace of the persons living fraternally in the province beyond repair”. PSAKD Maraş Branch planning to organize an event on December 19, Saturday between 11 a.m. and 3 p.m. at the terminal square of General Directorate of Turkish State Railways (TCDD) had made a notice to the Governorship as required by procedure.
The Governorship has also announced that all commemorating activities between December 18-26 concerning the massacre were prohibited.
In the last six years, Alevist institutions have only been allowed once in 2011 to commemorate the Maraş Massacre in Narlı yet the gendarmerie had blocked all roads and not let activists and relatives of the dead go ahead and that clashed with protesters.
What had happened in Maraş?
Emma Sinclair-Webb wrote a commentary in 2008 to bianet, which still resonates today:
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Akın Birdal from Diyarbakır MP of Peace and Democracy Party (BDP) had submitted in December 2010 a parliamentary investigation to establish a Parliamentary Investigation Commission on the Maraş Massacre. In the parliamentary investigation, Birdal had summarized the process of the lawsuit as follows: "After the incidents, charges have been brought against 804 persons who had been qualified mostly as rightists and extreme rightists. The trials brought to martial courts have continued until 1991 "29 of the suspects had been sentenced to death penalty, seven others to life imprisonment and 321 others to imprisonment from one to 24 years. For the one except death penalty and life imprisonment one sixth of their punishment had been abated. "Yet the punishments have been suspended due to the Anti Terror Law enacted in 1991, and the suspects have been released. The involved attorneys of the massacre Ceyhun Can had been attacked on September 10, 1979, Halil Sıtkı Güllüoğlu on February 3, 1980 and Ahmet Albay on April 7, 1980 having lost his life in the hospital on May 3, 1980. Some of the judged have later come to service as MPs under the Grand National Assembly of Turkey (TBMM). The number one suspect of the trial Ökkeş Kenger has been tried, acquitted and later changed his surname to Şendiller. Afterwards he has been elected as the 19th term Kahramanmaraş member of the parliament from Welfare Party (RP). |
Eight hundred and four defendants stood trial for participating in the December 1978 massacre in Maraş which according to official figures left 111 dead and a thousand people injured. The Martial Law Military Court No. 1 (Adana, Kahramanmaraş, Gaziantep, Adıyaman, Hatay İlleri Sıkıyönetim Askeri Komutanlığı 1 Numaralı Askeri Mahkemesi) convened in a sports hall in Adana to hear the case. For the first time the proceedings which ran on consecutive days were taped and full transcriptions running to thousands of pages produced.
Although thirteen provinces of the country were put under martial law in direct response to the Maraş massacre, this did little to guarantee security of life. Political assassinations continued to occur on a daily basis; just in the course of the trial three lawyers acting for the victims of the massacre (mudahil avukat) were murdered, and the others faced death threats and were obliged to switch their places of lodging in Adana for the duration of the proceedings.
A number of defendants were sentenced to life imprisonment, though all were released by 1992. The court never probed the evidence and circumstances to discover what lay behind the massacre, how it was planned and by whom.
Discussing and explaining the December 1978 massacre in Maraş has been largely confined to Alevi and leftist circles. There has been little wider discussion, apart from by some on the far right associated with the events. For those who have discussed the events, the overwhelming focus has been on the fact of the killings being the result of a planned conspiracy, the work of rightists and allegedly deep state elements. In some quarters it is even argued to have been the work of international intelligence agencies. That the military court made no attempt to get to the bottom of the incidents has of course fuelled this speculation about the dimensions of the conspiracy.
The fixation on the conspiracy itself, however, has been at the expense of confronting the human tragedy and the fact that the actual perpetrators of the killings were not only a group of conspirators. Rather they were ordinary people, villagers and townsfolk who became capable of horrific acts of torture and murder of young and old, women and men. Among the defendants were local muhtars and imams. It is difficult to resist the view that the conspirators behind the killings must themselves have been surprised at the dimensions this massacre took on.
Three attorneys of the trial had been murderedAhmet Albay Attorney Ahmet Albay, Provincial Chairperson of CHP was an involved attorney of the trial. Coming out of his office, he had been shot from behind and, severely injured and had been brought to Ankara where he had struggled to live and was at the age of 33 when he died. His murderer was Muhsin Kehya who then had been sentenced to life imprisonment but released within the scope of the third judicial reform package in 2012. Ceyhun Can He was born in 1940 in Kozan district of Adana province. After graduating from Adana Boys’ High School in 1960, he performed his military service. When he came back, he graduated his higher education at the İstanbul University, Faculty of Law. He was one of the founders of Workers’ Party of Turkey (TİP) after 1972. Besides he had served as Adana Provincial Chairperson of TİP. He was an involved attorney of the Maraş Massacre and was murdered on September 10, 1979 in his office. Halil Sıtkı Güllüoğlu The murdering of Halil Sıtkı Güllüoğlu has been brought to trial together with the main trial against the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) after the military coup on September 12, 1980 to the Ankara 1st Marital Court. Later Adana incidents have been separated and tried as a single case. Perpetrators of the incidents have been punished. |
The massacre was triggered by a series of events including the bombing of a cinema and the murder and then funerals of two teachers. The victims were mainly singled out for being Alevi and leftist/CHP voting. For nationalists and rightists, a simple understanding of leftist or communist political affiliations viewed them as atheist ideologies which threatened to an entire religious moral order. Converging left identity with Alevi seemed to provide the proof of this threat. The accounts of the killings bear out the fact that the question of religious affiliation became central as a means of demarcating who needed to be purged. Witnesses testified in court that victims were frequently asked by their assailants to prove that they were Muslim and Turkish.
Explanations of the Maraş incidents tended to resist examining the responsibility of the local population for what happened by focusing on a "hidden hand" in the events, blaming everything on outsiders, or simply insisting on an age-old "brotherhood" of Alevi and Sunni (a slightly apologetic "we are all brothers"/"hepimiz kardesiz"). In Maraş a silence hangs over the incidents of 1978. There has been no attempt to confront what happened. The incidents have been subjected to a collective forgetting in which it is not even possible for most people in the town today to empathize with the victims of the massacre. It is more readily admitted that the incidents were damaging to the town than to a part of its population. A great majority of the Alevi population left the town after the incidents. (BÇ/DG)