Bekir Sami Kunduh

Bekir Sami Kunduh

Bekir Sami Kunduh (* 1865 in Saniba ( Ossetia ), † January 16, 1933 in Istanbul ) was an Ottoman and Turkish diplomat and politician and the first foreign minister of modern Turkey.

Bekir Sami was of Ossetian descent, his father Musa Kunduh Paşa , a general first in the Russian and then in the Ottoman army, had emigrated from the North Caucasus to the Ottoman Empire in 1865 after Bekir was born. Bekir attended Galatasaray High School in Istanbul and studied political science in Paris . He began his professional career as a secretary in the Ottoman embassy in St. Petersburg . Later he was governor ( Vali ) in Van , Trabzon , Bursa , Beirut and Aleppo .

During the Turkish War of Independence he was on the side of the nationalists around Mustafa Kemal Paşa (later Ataturk). It was founded in 1919 on the Erzurum Congress and on the Congress of Sivas in the Representative Committee ( Representative Committee i Temsiliye chosen), the highest body of the nationalist liberation movement. In 1920 he sat as a member of the last Ottoman parliament ( Meclis-i Mebusan ) for Amasya . After its dissolution after the occupation of Istanbul by the British in March 1920, he became a member of the Grand National Assembly ( Büyük Millet Meclisi ), which met for the first time on April 23, 1920. In their executive committee he held the position of commissioner for foreign affairs and was thus the first “foreign minister” of modern Turkey. When the results of his negotiations at the London Conference in February / March 1921, which concerned the Greek occupation of Western Anatolia, were not approved by the majority of the National Assembly, he resigned from this office on May 8, 1921.

Bekir Sami was one of the founding members of the first Turkish opposition party Progressive Republican Party ( "Progressive Republican Party"), which in November 1924 under the leadership among other Kâzım Karabekir and Hüseyin Rauf Orbay as moderate competition with the Republican People's Party launched, but already in June 1925 was banned. After a failed assassination attempt on Mustafa Kemal in İzmir on June 15, 1926 ( İzmir Suikastı ), like many other opposition members, he was arrested and accused of complicity, but was finally acquitted. After this event, he withdrew from active politics.

According to the Grand Lodge of Free and Accepted Masons of Turkey , Sami was a Freemason .

Bekir Sami Kunduh died in Istanbul in 1933.

See also

• List of Foreign Ministers of Turkey

literature

• Erik Jan Zürcher: Turkey. A Modern History. 3rd revised edition, New York 2004. ISBN 1-86064-958-0

Web links

Commons : Bekir Sami Kunduh  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Grand Lodge of the Free and Accepted Masons of Turkey: Famous Turkish Freemasons ( Memento of April 27, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) (Turkish)