Talaat Pasha
Mehmed Talât 'Pasha, commonly known as Talaat Pasha or Talat Pasha', was an Ottoman Young Turk activist, revolutionary, politician, and convicted war criminal who served as the de facto leader of the Ottoman Empire from 1913 to 1918. He was chairman of the Union and Progress Party, which operated a one-party dictatorship in the Empire; during World War I he became Grand Vizier. He has been called the architect of the Armenian genocide, and was responsible for other ethnic cleansings during his time as Minister of Interior Affairs.
Talaat was an early member of the Committee of Union and Progress, eventually leading its Salonica chapter during the Hamidian era. After the CUP succeeded in restoring the constitution and parliament in the 1908 Young Turk Revolution, he was elected as a deputy from Adrianople to the Chamber of Deputies and later became Minister of the Interior. He played an important role in the downfall of Sultan Abdul Hamid II the next year during the 31 March Incident by organizing a counter government. Multiple crises in the Empire including the 31 March Incident, attacks on Rumelian Muslims in the Balkan Wars, and the power struggle with the Freedom and Accord Party made Talaat and the Unionists disillusioned with multicultural Ottomanism and political pluralism, turning them into hard-line authoritarian Turkish nationalists.
In 1913, Talaat and Ismail Enver carried out a coup d'état with Mahmud Şevket Pasha as a reluctant partner. With the latter's assassination, an autocratic triumvirate of CUP Central Committee members lead the Ottoman Empire, consisting of himself, Enver, and Ahmed Cemal of whom Talaat was its civilian leader. Talaat and Enver were influential in bringing the Ottoman Empire into the First World War. During World War I, he ordered on 24 April 1915 the arrest and deportation of Armenian intellectuals in Constantinople, most of them being ultimately murdered, and on 30 May 1915 promulgated the Temporary Law of Deportation; these events initiated the Armenian genocide. He is widely considered the main perpetrator of the genocide, and is thus held responsible for the death of around 1 million Armenians.
In a move that established total Unionist control over the Turkish government, Talaat Pasha became Grand Vizier in 1917. He personally negotiated the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with the Bolsheviks, regaining parts of Eastern Anatolia which were occupied by Russia since 1878, and won the race to Baku on the Caucasus front. However breakthroughs by the Allies in the Macedonia and Palestine fronts meant defeat for the Ottomans and the downfall of the CUP, whereupon he resigned. On the night of 2–3 November 1918, Talaat Pasha and other members of the CUP's central committee fled Turkey. The Ottoman Special Military Tribunal convicted and sentenced him to death in absentia for subverting the constitution, profiteering from the war, and organizing massacres against Greeks and Armenians. Exiled in Berlin, he supported the Turkish Nationalists led by Mustafa Kemal Pasha in Turkey's War of Independence. He was killed in Berlin in 1921 by Soghomon Tehlirian, a member of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation, as part of Operation Nemesis.
Early life: 1874–1908
Childhood
Mehmed Talaat was born in 1874 in Kırcaali, Adrianople Vilayet into a middle-class family of Romani, Turkish, and Pomak descent. His father, Ahmet Vasıf, was a kadı from Çeplece, a nearby village. His mother Hürmüz was from a Turkish family that migrated to the region from Dedeler village, Kayseri. Talaat's family fled to Constantinople when their home was occupied by Russian troops during the 1877–1878 Russo-Turkish war, an experience that contributed to Talaat's nationalism. His father died when Talaat was eleven years old, putting his mother and two sisters under his care.Talaat had a powerful build and a dark complexion. His manners were gruff, which caused him to be expelled from the military secondary school at the age of sixteen without a certificate after a conflict with his teacher. Without earning a degree, he joined the staff of a telegraph company as a postal clerk in Adrianople to provide for his family. His salary was not high, so he worked after hours as a Turkish language teacher in the Alliance Israelite School which served the Jewish community of Adrianople. At the age of 21 Talaat was involved in a love affair with the daughter of the Jewish headmaster for whom he worked.
Activism against Abdul Hamid II
The Ottoman Empire was ruled by the sultan Abdul Hamid II, who ran a modern autocracy, complete with a secret police, mass surveillance, and censorship. This autocracy in turn produced a culture of suspicion as well as a spirit of clandestine rebellion in many Ottoman citizens, young Talaat included. He was caught sending a telegram saying "Things are going well. I'll soon reach my goal." He was confronted by the police for this telegram, and claimed that the message was to his dalliance, who defended him. With two of his friends from the post office, he was charged with tampering with the official telegraph and was arrested in 1893.After being released from prison, he joined the Committee of Union and Progress, a revolutionary Young Turk organization which was agitating against Abdul Hamid's autocracy. In 1896 he was imprisoned for having been part of a CUP cell together with his brother-in-law. Sentenced to three years in jail, Talaat was pardoned after serving two years but exiled to Salonika, where he became a postal clerk in July 1898. Between 1898 and 1908 he served as a postman on the staff of the Salonika Post Office, during which he continued his revolutionary activities in secret. He was promoted to municipal chief clerk in April 1903, following which he could afford to bring his mother and sisters to Salonika. His job in the postal administration gave him the opportunity to smuggle into the city newspapers published by the dissidents abroad. That year he joined the Salonica Freemason Lodge Macedonia Risorta and began a correspondence with Ahmed Rıza. Talaat met then economics professor, later friend and CUP Finance Minister Mehmed Cavid in Salonika Law School, where he took classes to supplement his lackluster education. The government was still monitoring his activities, and he was almost exiled again to Anatolia. However the Inspector General for Macedonia Hüseyin Hilmi Pasha was partial towards the secret committee and intervened, and Talaat returned to Salonika to work as a school principal.
In September 1906, the Ottoman Freedom Committee was formed as another secret Young Turk organization based in Salonika. The founders of the OFC included Talaat, the CUP's future general secretary Dr. Midhat Şükrü, Mustafa Rahmi, and. He served on the Central Committee of the OFC with Rahmi and Canbulat. Many officers of the Third Army were recruited into the OFC, including the future heroes of the revolution Ahmed Niyazi and İsmail Enver. Under Talaat's initiative, the Salonika-based OFC merged with Ahmed Rıza's Paris-based CUP in September 1907, and the group became the internal center of the CUP in the Ottoman Empire. Talaat was briefly secretary-general of the internal CUP, while Bahattin Şakir was secretary-general of the external CUP. After the revolution, Talaat's more radical and militant internal CUP would see themselves supplant the older cadre of Young Turks that was Rıza's network of exiles.
Rise to power: 1908–1913
Young Turk Revolution and aftermath
The Unionists found themselves at the behest of a spontaneous revolution in the summer of 1908, which commenced with Niyazi and Enver's flight into the Albanian hinterlands. Talaat's role during the Young Turk Revolution was to organize a plot to assassinate the garrison commander of Salonika, Ömer Nâzım, who was a Hamidian loyalist and spy master of the area. Nâzım survived his hired Fedai with injury, but the incident, as well as other assassinations carried out by the CUP during the revolution, intimidated the Hamidian establishment enough to reopen the parliament and reinstate the constitution. For the first time in three decades, an election was held for the Chamber of Deputies, which this time featured political parties. Talaat was easily elected into parliament as Union and Progress's candidate for deputy of Adrianople, and then was elected the parliament's deputy-president under Rıza.A year later in the 31 March Incident, what started out as an anti-Unionist demonstration in the capital quickly turned into an anticonstitutionalist-monarchist counter revolution where Abdul Hamid attempted to reestablish his autocracy. The Grand Vizier Hüseyin Hilmi Pasha was forced to resign for Ahmed Tevfik Pasha. Khachatur Malumian, leader of the Dashnak Party, hid Talaat and Dr. Nâzım in his house while mob violence targeted MPs. Three days later, Talaat and 100 MPs escaped Constantinople for Ayastefanos to organize a separate national assembly from the volatile situation in Constantinople, and declared the change in government illegal. Relief came in the form of pro-constitutionalist forces known as the Action Army led by Mahmud Şevket Pasha, which stopped in Ayastefanos before marching on the capital; it was secretly agreed there that Abdul Hamid would be replaced by his brother. After the reactionary revolt was crushed, Talaat bullied the Shaykh-al-Islam Sahip Molla to get a fatwa for Abdul Hamid's deposition, and convinced Tevfik Pasha to step down and return Hilmi Pasha to the premiership. With the fatwa, the parliament voted to depose Abdul Hamid II. Talaat and Ahmed Muhtar Pasha headed the delegation to announce to Prince Reşad of his ascension to the throne.
In August 1909 Mehmed Talaat led a 17-member parliamentary delegation to Westminster. He learned there that he was appointed Minister of the Interior in Hilmi Pasha's cabinet reshuffle, becoming the second Unionist with a cabinet position. He continued Hamidian era anti-Zionist restrictions in Ottoman Palestine, as well as enforce imperial rule in revolting provinces like Albania and Yemen. That year, Louis Rambert, director of the Régie des Tabacs, wrote that Talaat was "the acknowledged head of the Committee of Union and Progress and the Young Turks." Biographer Hans-Lukas Kieser writes that he was under the influence of Bahattin Şakir and Mehmed Nâzım before 1908, but after late 1909 he had an increased interest in the new Central Committee member Ziya Gökalp and his more revolutionary and Pan-Turkist ideas.