Gülşen Koçuk / JINHA

BEDLÎS – 100 years after the Armenian genocide, in the villages of the once heavily-Armenian province of Bitlis, in Northern Kurdistan, the children and grandchildren of the perpetrators of the Armenian genocide say they have seen the cost of the genocide that their parents did not.

In the seven villages of the Kavar region, located in the Bitlis province of Northern Kurdistan, the traces of the Armenian residents who long lived in this place are everywhere, in the ruins of churches and graveyards that dot the region and the still-standing impressive aqueduct and reservoir they built. Local families report that they are still unearthing Armenian bones under the foundations of houses.

Zülfinaz Kılıçaslan, 52, of Şamnis village, says that her elders related how the state told Kurdish villagers that the Armenians were "blocking Kurdish-Turkish brotherhood" and that those who killed them would go to heaven.

66-year-old Sitî Dilber Çaçan was forced to migrate to Izmir in 1994, when the state destroyed her village. She did not witness the genocide herself, but remembers the stories her grandmother told her.

"The state said, 'Kill them and burn them. If you don't, it's a sin,'" she said. "And the people killed the Armenians. One of their children was left behind. One villager, who saw the child going to the water to drink and then going back to his mother, picked up a rock and killed the child right there."

83-year-old Şekernaz Kutlu, also from Şamnis, says that all the villages in the region were inhabited by Armenians, but after the Armenians' forced "deportation," only Sunni Muslims were relocated into the region.

Today, state politics that rally people to kill based on Islamic, Sunni and Turkish identity are still a characteristic of the state's policy. Villager Harbinaz Kutlu, 51, says that throughout the state's dirty war, those who did not accept the state politics and become paramilitaries for the state saw their villages burned and evacuated. The state abducted and killed local children and blamed the crimes on Kurdish guerrillas.

In 1915, in the village of Qoto, Kurdish villagers locked the Armenians in a house and lit it on fire. According to Sitî Dilber, locals said that the Armenians in the house told them: "Don't kill us. The Turks are traitors. They'll do the same to you one day."

"Maybe this is their sigh, and it's us who are heaving it now," said Sitî.

(gk/fk/cm)