Dersim: The Paradox of Disclosing ‘An Open Secret’

Abstract

Dersim refers to a large cultural geography in the Eastern part of Anatolia, where Zazaki-speaking Alevis live. In the wake of a harsh and inequitable military campaign conducted during the years 1937–1938 to assimilate Zazaki Alevis into a newly emerging republican national body, the name became a metaphor for distress and concealment. The Turkish state never took its oppressive hands off Dersim, and instead renamed and rescaled this region as a tiny province, Tunceli. The name of Dersim became one of the most controversial issues during the opening process initiated by AKP in the second half of the 2000s when AKP tended to instrumentalize most of the republican taboos to attract popular support from liberal sectors of the society. This chapter explores this process through which Dersim re-emerged from the shadows of the Republic. It focuses on a media incident, which revolves around Hüseyin Aygün, the then Tunceli MP from CHP, at the end of 2011. Based on this case analysis, the chapter provides a comparison of this process with the “Alevi revival” that happened at the beginning of the 1990s.