Seyid Riza

Seyid Riza (also called as Sey Riza or Pîr Sey Riza in Zazaki), (b. 1863 in Ovacık, in Dersim, d. 15 November 1937)

He was a Zaza political leader of the Alevi Zazas, a religious figure and the leader of the Kurdish movement in Turkey during the 1937-1938 Dersim Rebellion.

In explaining the reason for the Kurdish rebellion to the British foreign secretary Anthony Eden he said the following:

The government has tried to assimilate the Kurdish people for years, oppressing them, banning publications in Kurdish, persecuting those who speak Kurdish, forcibly deporting people from fertile parts of Kurdistan for uncultivated areas of Anatolia where many have perished. The prisons are full of non-combatants, intellectuals are shot, hanged or exiled to remote places. Three million Kurds, demand to live in freedom and peace in their own country.

Note: it is very likely that this letter was not sent by Seyid Riza, but by a Kurdish nationalist from Dersim who took refuge in Syria, named Nuri Dersimi. He was trying to get support for the Kurdish nationalist cause from Western powers (which he didn't get). The Turkish state used the letter to incriminate Seyid Riza of rebelling against the state but never proved that the letter was written by him. English archives supposedly show that the signature underneath was from Nuri Dersimi.

The theory that this letter was not written and sent by Seyid Riza, is supported by the fact that he was not a nationalist leader who in the first place resisted the assimilation politics of the Turkish state, but a tribal and religious leader who was bothered by the state mingling in the local affairs.

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