Victims of Gazi and Ümraniye massacres remembered

The victims of the 1995 massacre were remembered with a memorial march through the Gazi district of Istanbul on Saturday. People from all over the metropolis flocked to the demonstration organised by the families of the victims, the 12 March Platform and Alevi advocacy groups to commemorate the victims and demand punishment for the perpetrators. As every year, the event was accompanied by a large police contingent.

The commemoration march started in front of the Cemevi (Alevi prayer house) in Gazi. The police tried to confront the participants right at the beginning and tried to stop the demonstration because of a banner with the portrait of the 68er revolutionary Ibrahim Kaypakkaya. The organising committee did not give in to the threats and insisted on carrying the picture. Other pictures showed the faces of the 22 people killed in Gazi and Ümraniye.

The demonstration led to the cemetery accompanied by chants and slogans, including “The murderer state will give account” and “Our dead are unforgotten” – past those places in Gazi where the massacre took place in March 1995. At each place, a pause was made and those present laid red carnations. Arriving at the cemetery, some women sang Alevi dirges at the graves of their relatives. These were moments marked by the sadness of the first day.

“27 years have passed since the massacre, but our pain and anger have not subsided,” said Kibar Poyraz, who lost her sister Zeynep in 1995. At the time, she said, the state had tried to silence the revolutionary opposition by deepening the “Sunni-Alevi” polarisation of society. “Attacks were not new to the people of Gazi. After all, oppression and terror had always been part of people’s lives here. We had got used to it, but getting used to something did not mean resigning ourselves to it. We were angry, but did not engage in the provocative and conflict-fuelling practice of those murderers who already had blood on their hands.”

The massacre

The Gazi massacre took place from 12 to 15 March 1995 and ended as a pogrom against the Alevi population. At least 22 people were murdered by ultra-nationalists and police. Like the massacre in Sivas only two years earlier, it was directed against members of the Alevi community. A taxi in Gazi was hijacked by “unknown perpetrators” from nationalist circles on the night of 12 March and the driver’s throat was cut. Shortly afterwards, the perpetrators shot indiscriminately with automatic weapons into Alevi cafés, cultural houses and pastry shops as they drove by. One person died, countless others were injured. The vehicle was then set on fire.

Protests then broke out in front of a police station 200 metres from the scene. The peaceful demonstration escalated when a military tank drove into the crowd. The “security forces” murdered 20 demonstrators – five of them in the opposite district of Ümraniye – by targeted gunfire and wounded at least 300 others. The pogrom was accompanied by systematic mass arrests, house searches and police raids in several Istanbul neighbourhoods. Some of those detained are still considered “disappeared” today, as are thousands of other people in Turkey.

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