The red sky: Zilan massacre

During the first decades of the twentieth century, ethnic and religious minorities in modern-day Turkey experienced untold violence and displacement in state-driven Turkification efforts.

The attempted assimilation of south-east Turkey’s Kurdish population through brutal force, led to a number of rebellions, subsequently put down by the central government forces, resulting in tens of thousands of deaths. 

Between the 1920s and 40s, at least four massacres took place against Kurds in Sivas, Diyarbakir, Agri, and Dersim (presently called Tunceli). 

In this newly released documentary, entitled ‘The red sky: Zilan massacre,’ survivors of a horrific massacre in Van province recount the tragedy that befell them at the hands of Turkish soldiers in the summer of 1930.

While the numbers of those said to have been killed during the event vary, those who survived the incident put the numbers at around 45,000 deaths. 

“The sweeping began. All those in the Zilan Valley were exterminated, and none of them survived,” read the front page of Cumhuriyet, one of Turkey's most-read newspapers at the time, on July 13, 1930. 

Witnesses of the event interviewed by Rudaw between September 2014 and June 2015 vividly recall the intimate details of those caught up in the wide-scale violence.

“With my own eyes, I saw them tear apart a pregnant woman's stomach open, taking the baby out and placing it on her chest,” Osman Illeri, a survivor, recalled.  “The soldiers were betting among themselves on the sex of the baby.”