The Çorum pogrom or Çorum massacres occurred in the province of Çorum in north-central Turkey between May and July 1980.
Turkist ultranationalists targeted the Alevi minority which lead to as many as 57 deaths and over 200 injuries in the ensuing violence.
[citation needed] Another target was the social-democratic Republican People's Party (CHP).
[1] Many victims were young people and women.
[2] In 2012 "former rightist agitator" Adnan Baran stated that uncertainty remains about the exact nature of the events and urged that a dialogue between the rightists and leftists take place in order to better understand the events, which he speculated might have been part of a larger military plan to set up a pretext for the Sept. 12, 1980 coup d'état.