26 years have passed since we lost 33 intellectuals in Sivas. The burden and sorrow of the massacre still remain as a deep wound in our minds and hearts.
What is so grievous as the massacre itself is the severity and destructiveness of the reactionary transformation we have experienced after the Sivas Massacre. The Massacre unequivocally was one of the important breaking points in the implementation of this counter-revolutionary transformation in Turkey.
Sivas Massacre was a provocation encouraging the Islamic reactionism and attempting to suppress the progressive and working people of our country. It was a state operation incited, encouraged, and watched by the bourgeois order without doing anything while the massacre took place. It was a massacre that employed religious reactionary, that allowed the imperialists and the bosses to test its use as an organized network of murder, in our country and in the Middle East.
At the current stage in Turkish politics in 2019, the whole of the bourgeois political order has been based its political strategy on the use of religious discourses as well. All kinds of relations with Islamic reactionism, religious sects and cults are considered positive in politics. The perpetrators, abettors and supporters of the Sivas Massacre are presented as the wise men of today’s political scene.
Reconciliation with reactionism is tried to be promoted as an indispensable part of political achievement.
Yet, the Sivas Massacre was the credentials and action of the reactionary movement which is desired to be settled with today.
We will not settle with the Sivas Massacre, we’ll bring those responsible for it to book!
We won’t settle with reactionism, we’ll fight against it!
Communist Party of Turkey
2 July 2019