Turkish Court Orders Compensation For 33 People Burnt Alive

On 2 July 1993, 33 intellectuals, most of them Alevis, were killed in the Madimak Hotel in Sivas, where they had gathered for a festival, in a fire started by a crowd of radical Islamists.

Alevis are attached to secularism and their religious practices differ from those of the traditional currents of Islam.

The attack became a symbol of discrimination and violence faced by Alevis.

“The court has ruled that the right to life was violated in procedural terms,” Gunal Kursun, the lawyer for three descendants of victims, told AFP.

“This means that the state failed in its obligation to conduct an effective investigation in this case… This violation justifies a retrial.”

The ruling concerned the procedural protection of the right to life, which requires the state to investigate deaths effectively and hold those responsible to account.

Relatives filed the suit in 2014, arguing that the proceedings had not been conducted effectively and that the arson should be treated as a crime against humanity, which would prevent the use of a statute of limitations.

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The compensation, the amount of which will remain unknown until the publication of the reasoned judgement, “cannot constitute full reparation for these families”, Kursun stressed.

“For genuine reparation, all those responsible, including senior officials and political leaders, must be brought to justice.

“The state has failed in its duty to prosecute its own officials,” he added.

One of those present at the Madimak Hotel was writer Aziz Nesin.

He was working on a translation into Turkish of Salman Rushdie’s “The Satanic Verses”, whose publication in 1988 prompted death threats against the British writer from Islamic extremists.

Nesin survived the fire but died of a heart attack in 1995.

Thirty-three people were sentenced to life imprisonment for the Sivas attack but some perpetrators were never tried and benefitted from the statute of limitations, human rights advocates say.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan granted amnesty to two of those sentenced to life for the massacre, in 2020 and 2023.

AFP