by Tunahan Hazır, M.A.
The Iraqi Turkmen are an important community with which Turkey has kinship relations. Therefore, the influence of Turkmen in the Kirkuk region is very important for Turkey. The July 14, 1959 Kirkuk massacre was a very important event for the Turkmen community, and it left severe scars and caused trauma in the community. Through the collection and examination of oral history, this study aims to identify the perpetrators of the Kirkuk massacre and the accuracy of the portrayal of the incident in written sources.
The statements of witnesses were obtained through oral history, and the intention of this was to question the existing written history. Furthermore, the trauma and subsequent behaviours within the Turkmen community caused by the 1959 massacre will be examined in the light of the statements given by witnesses of the massacre; in this context, face-to-face interviews were made with these witnesses. In addition, the statements of the witnesses will be discussed with respect to the consistency and discrepancy of the narratives in written sources regarding the events.
This study was conducted using the oral history method, where witness statements are recorded and then transcribed, resulting in a study that will contribute to the literature. The focus group interview method was used as the qualitative data collection technique. The fact that the questions were open-ended, focused on a certain topic, and that the incident has a political and psychological aspect makes the group interview method ideal. The interviews were conducted with the method that was most suitable for the purpose of the study.
The purpose was to gain detailed qualitative information on the perspectives, lives, experiences, feelings, concerns, perceptions, and tendencies of the participants. The subjects of the study are the witnesses of the massacre who live in Turkey. Questions that raise curiosity and serve the purpose of the study were prepared and presented transparently to the witnesses. In this context, it is important that the participants were old enough at the time of the massacre to recall what they had gone through. However, since it was also important that the interviewees were representative of the entire group of witnesses, it was necessary to ensure that they were prominent people who had active roles in the Turkmen community.
In our study, 10 people were interviewed, with an average time of 42 minutes per interview; a total of 14 questions were presented to the interviewees. Since a one-to-one interview format was used, there was no possibility of participants being influenced by other individuals in any manner. Based on the interviews and the sources, it can be stated that the incident caused trauma in the social memory of the Turkmen community. Although there are various narratives regarding the perpetrators of the massacre in written sources, the statements provided by the witnesses of the massacre lead us to a specific conclusion.
Although the Communist Party of Iraq (CPI) is generally identified in written sources as being responsible for the massacre, based on the statements of the participants in the current study, the conclusion was reached that Turkmens do not regard the Communist Party of Iraq as being solely responsible for the event. Written sources and oral sources were thus confronted with each other. Therefore, the question of the accuracy of the information in the written sources was tested with this method. In the eyes of the witnesses, Kurdish groups reporting to Barzani had a more prominent role than the Communist Party of Iraq. The findings obtained with the oral history method were interpreted using political and psychological concepts, and the conclusion was reached that these incidents should also be taken into consideration in the question of the trust of the Turkmen in Kurdish people.