Cemal Pasha

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Cemal Pasha

Ahmet Cemal (older transcription: Ahmed Djemal ), known as Cemal Pascha (born May 6, 1872 in Mytilini on Lesbos ; † July 21, 1922 in Tbilisi , Georgia), was a Young Turkish nationalist, general ( Pasha ) and a leading member of the government of the Ottoman Empire . Cemal Pasha was one of the main people responsible for the genocide of the Armenians , Assyrians and Arameans .

Origin and advancement

Cemal Pasha with his wife Seniha Hanım

Ahmet Cemal was born in Midilli on the island of Lesbos, the son of a military doctor. From childhood he was given a military or military medical career; he did his doctorate as a surgeon. As a young officer he joined the Young Turkish Movement and, together with Ziya Gökalp and Mehmet Talaat, was the founder of the Committee for Unity and Progress . The aim of this party was the takeover of the government by the Young Turks and the fundamental renewal of the Turkish state. As a leading member of the Committee for Unity and Progress, Ahmet Cemal took on the political task of strengthening the influence of the Young Turkish movement in the Turkish officer corps .

Young Turkish Revolution

In 1908, under the leadership of the charismatic Ismail Enver , there was an open military rebellion of the Young Turks in what was then the Turkish city of Thessaloniki . Ahmet Cemal played a major role in the fact that many officers and men joined the uprising, which was ultimately decisive for the success of the Young Turkish Revolution . The military superiority of the insurgent troops forced the previous absolutist government of the Sultan to give way. On July 24, 1908, Sultan Abdülhamid II had to reinstate the liberal constitution of the Grand Vizier Midhat Pasha from 1876, which he himself had suspended in 1878 (but never formally abolished), also to lift censorship , issue an amnesty and dismiss reactionary members of the government.

On April 13, 1909, reactionary forces attempted a coup against the participation of the Young Turks in government , which revolutionary troops under the leadership of Cemal and Enver crushed in a few days. The Young Turks then dethroned Sultan Abdülhamid II, whom they held responsible for the coup attempt, and replaced him with his brother and heir to the throne, Mehmed V , who were considered liberal, but in any case politically more docile .

Time as governor general and minister

Already a leading figure in the military network of this party during the Young Turk uprising of 1908, Cemal had successfully participated in the suppression of the conservative counter-coup in Istanbul in the spring of 1909.

Nevertheless, he initially only played a subordinate role in the "second row" within the Young Turkish government. Appointed civil governor (Wali) of a province in Asia Minor near Istanbul in early 1909, Cemal was appointed governor (Wali) of Adana Province in Cilicia in August 1909 , where serious Muslim massacres of the Armenian minority had taken place in the spring of 1909 . Cemal succeeded in calming the tense situation - he reinstated the state administration that had been shaken by the revolution and counter-coup and, as US Ambassador Henry Morgenthau senior admittedly in 1914, even founded an orphanage for Armenian children whose parents had been murdered .

In order to stabilize the military and political situation there in view of the threatened British expansion in Palestine , Syria , Arabia and Mesopotamia , Cemal Bey took over the post of Governor General of Baghdad in 1911 . However, due to the military defeat of the Ottoman Empire in the Italo-Turkish War , which led to significant territorial losses in North Africa and the Dodecanese in 1911/12 , and due to their increasing oppression of the numerous non-Turkish minorities, the Young Turks lost power for a short time in 1912. In July 1912 the Young Turkish government, which was blamed for the defeat against Italy and the disorganization in the army, was overthrown by the pro-British liberal party Freedom and Unity , which was also joined by representatives of the old government elite from the reign of Abdul Hamid II. In turn threatened by the Young Turks and their supporters in the officer corps that her hard pursued - - This government was from October 1912 in turn with a new war ( " First Balkan War ") against the Ottoman Empire attacking Balkans Montenegro , Serbia , Bulgaria and Greece faced - a war that the poorly organized and waged Ottoman army, which was politically divided in the officer corps , lost unexpectedly quickly and blatantly. By early 1913, almost the entire Ottoman Balkans (at that time still Albania , Kosovo , Macedonia and Thrace ) were lost to the attackers. The willingness of the liberal government to accept these territorial losses and even to cede the old sultan's residence Edirne in the immediate vicinity of the capital Istanbul led to violent public unrest and paved the way for the military coup of the Young Turks under Enver Bey in January 1913. Cemal Bey, who had lost his office in Baghdad with the change of power in July 1912 and had taken part in the Balkan War as a colonel, only rose to the closest leadership of the Young Turks after this 1913 coup. He was appointed lieutenant general (with the title “Pasha”) and at the same time military governor of the capital Istanbul - an office that also made him head of the local secret police to ensure the security of the new government.

The new Young Turkish government under Grand Vizier Marshal Mahmud Şevket Pasha also had to accept the loss of almost all of European Turkey, including Edirnes. In the summer of 1913, when the victorious Balkan states fought each other for territorial loot, the Ottoman Empire also took part in the war against isolated Bulgaria and was able to take Edirne away from it in the Second Balkan War .

Before that, the Young Turk coup government had survived several conspiracies (both from circles of the overthrown Liberal Party and opposition factions of the Young Turks themselves) and - admittedly at the cost of the murder of their Grand Vizier Shevket Pasha - even a counter coup in June 1913. Under the new Grand Vizier Prince Said Halim Pascha , Talaat Bey, Enver Pascha and Cemal Pascha then rose to a triumvirate with almost dictatorial powers within the government. Cemal Pascha entered the government at the end of 1913 as minister for public works and secured an important French loan for his state through his organizational talent, but also through his good diplomatic contacts with the French government.

In order - similar to what Minister of War Enver Pascha had already done for the army - to advance the structural and personnel renewal process in the Ottoman Navy, Cemal Pascha was appointed Minister of the Navy in February 1914. As such, he conducted secret alliance negotiations with France in July 1914, which, however, met with reluctance in Paris; After his return to Istanbul, Cemal found that another leadership group within the government - above all Said Halim, Talaat and Enver - had concluded a military alliance with Germany. Cemal submitted, especially since his own alliance option had failed, but after the beginning of World War I in August 1914 successfully pushed for the Ottoman Empire to be delayed on the part of Germany until mobilization was complete. Rumors that Cemal had fundamentally opposed this entry into the war without success were decidedly denied by himself after 1918. In autumn 1914, the Ottoman Empire finally provoked the Entente's declaration of war by attacking the Russian naval port of Sevastopol .

At the beginning of the war, Cemal Pasha saw himself effectively ousted from the government and the leadership circle of the Young Turks by taking over military leadership in the Middle East against the British at Enver's request, far from the capital . Formally, Cemal remained Minister of the Navy, but from now on this department was in fact co-administered by Enver.

As military commander and governor-general of Syria (Damascus), Cemal was jointly responsible for the genocide of the Armenians ordered by the Young Turkish government in 1915 in the form of the forced deportation of large parts of the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire from Asia Minor to the Syrian desert. What was disguised as a military-related “evacuation” of a politically unreliable minority from threatened war zones was in truth a “final solution” to this minority problem through genocide, centrally organized by the Young Turkish leadership around Talaat . Cemal does not appear to have been involved in this top management decision. According to German diplomats, he “personally did not want the extermination of the Armenians”, but was also “unable to stop” (Consul Rößler , Aleppo, to the Reich Chancellor, January 3, 1916). But not only on the transports, but also in the Syrian receiving area, for which he was responsible, many Armenians were killed as a result of hunger, illness or violent attacks. Many Armenians therefore regard Cemal as the “overseer of genocide” to this day. Precisely for this reason, from 1918 onwards, Cemal was wanted by the Entente as a war criminal, sentenced to death as such in the Ottoman Empire and finally murdered by a secret Armenian organization.

Enver Pascha (left) with Cemal Pascha on an inspection trip through Syria (1916)

Cemal took sharp action in Syria and Palestine against both Arab nationalists and Jewish-Zionist settlements. In 1915 and 1916, leaders of Arab secret societies were arrested in Damascus and Beirut, interrogated under torture and sentenced to death by military tribunals. Cemal justified his approach in 1916 in the book La verité sur la question syrienne . Cemal wanted to crack down on the Zionist settlement movement in Palestine. His plan to expel the "foreign" Jews who had immigrated to Egypt since the first Aliyah was halted by the government in Istanbul after the German Reich and the USA intervened diplomatically. Cemal's fear of what he believed to be powerful world Jewry is also used to explain his change of heart.

Cemal responded to the offer made by David Ben Gurion and Jizchak Ben Zwi to set up a Jewish volunteer corps to defend Ottoman rule in Palestine by expelling the two socialist-Zionist politicians. In the spring of 1917 he ordered the deportation of the collaboration with the approaching British troops of suspected Jewish settlers from Jaffa to the Syrian desert . In addition, he considered having the Jewish civilian population of Jerusalem deported. There were riots and murders by Ottoman soldiers. Last but not least, the veto of the German Foreign Office again prevented a tragedy comparable to the Armenian massacre. German support for the Zionists, supported by humanitarian aid to 1917 neutral United States was much the commitment of time in Istanbul for the World Zionist Organization active Richard Lichtheim owe.

Cemal's military record as Commander-in-Chief of the 4th Army in Syria was mixed. Ottoman attacks on British Egypt were unfortunate in 1915/16, Arabia and today's Iraq were lost to the British. Cemal achieved success in repelling British and Arab attacks on Palestine, which he threw back in March and April 1917 in the First and Second Battles for Gaza .

When the desperate military situation in Eastern Anatolia, where the Russians had gained greater territorial gains over the Ottomans, surprisingly turned for the better as a result of the February Revolution and especially the October Revolution of 1917 and the subsequent failure of Russia as an enemy of the war, Cemal effectively took over again in Istanbul at the end of 1917 Office of the Minister of the Navy, which he held until the defeat of the war in autumn 1918.

In the wake of the German victories, the Young Turks were able to celebrate the regain of the Kars , Ardahan and Batumi districts ceded to Russia in 1878 with the peace treaty of Brest-Litovsk of March 3, 1918 . In the summer of 1918, the Ottoman general staff concentrated on conquering the previously Russian Azerbaijan and thus on the establishment of a "pan-Turkish empire" as far as Uzbekistan and Turkestan, but neglected the defensive struggle against the British. Shortly after the successful entry of the Ottoman troops into Baku on the Caspian Sea , the Ottoman front collapsed in Palestine. When the armies of the allies Austria-Hungary and Bulgaria disbanded at the end of October 1918 and Germany's defeat in the war was determined, the First World War was suddenly lost for the Ottoman Empire. Then the Young Turkish regime collapsed like a house of cards.

After the armistice was signed in Mudros on October 30, 1918, Cemal (like Talaat and Enver) had to flee Istanbul to avoid arrest and condemnation by the new liberal government, which worked with the victorious powers of the Entente and also the genocide of the Tried to punish the Armenians rudimentarily. Cemal was also sentenced to death in absentia for war crimes in 1919.

On November 2, 1918, the disempowered triumvirate came to Berlin with German help , where Cemal (unlike Talaat, who stayed there and was murdered in 1921) only lived for a short time. Cemal wanted - like Enver - to continue the war against Great Britain in Central Asia. To this end, he cooperated with the Bolsheviks in Russia, who let him travel via Moscow to Afghanistan in 1919 , where he supported the successful war of independence against Great Britain as a military advisor to the Afghan army . Cemal also helped to initiate military-economic cooperation between Soviet Russia and the Turkish national movement around Mustafa Kemal , in which many former young Turks gathered. Through these widely ramified activities, Cemal came into the focus of Armenian persecutors, who wanted to take revenge on the former Young Turkish rulers for the deaths of so many members of their people. On July 21, 1922, Cemal was shot dead in the Georgian capital Tbilisi by the secret Armenian command Operation Nemesis by Stepan Dzaghigian and Artashes Kevorkian.

In the year of his death, Cemals' memoirs "Memories of a Turkish Statesman" appeared in Germany, in which he denied his own responsibility for the genocide of the Armenians and at the same time tried to relativize it by attempting to put the genocide in perspective as a reaction to a division allegedly planned by Western powers of the Ottoman Empire.

Fonts

  • As editor: Theodor Wiegand : Old monuments from Syria, Palestine and Western Arabia: 100 plates with descriptive text . Georg Reimer Verlag, Berlin 1918 ( digitized version ).
  • Memories of a Turkish statesman . Drei Masken Verlag, Munich 1922 ( digitized version ).

literature

  • Friedrich Karl Kienitz: Cemal Pascha, Ahmed , in: Biographical Lexicon for the History of Southeast Europe . Vol. 1. Munich 1974, p. 297 f.
  • Jeremy Salt: The last Ottoman wars: the human cost, 1877-1923 . The University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City 2019, ISBN 978-1-60781-704-8 .
  • M. Talha Çiçek: War and state formation in Syria: Cemal Pasha's governorate during World War I, 1914–17 . Routledge, London 2014, ISBN 978-0-415-72818-8 .
  • Yücel Güclü: Armenian Events of Adana in 1909: Cemal Pasa and Beyond . Rowman & Littlefield Publ., Maryland 2018, ISBN 978-0-7618-6993-1 .

Web links

Commons : Cemal Pascha  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. Wolfgang Benz : Prejudice and Genocide. Ideological premises of genocide. Böhlau Verlag, 2010. p. 54
  2. Michael Schwartz: Ethnic "cleansing" in the modern age. Global interactions between nationalist and racist politics of violence in the 19th and 20th centuries . Oldenbourg, Munich 2013, ISBN 978-3-486-70425-9 , p. 120 f. (accessed via De Gruyter Online).
  3. Michael Schwartz: Ethnic "cleansing" in the modern age. Global interactions between nationalist and racist politics of violence in the 19th and 20th centuries . Oldenbourg, Munich 2013, ISBN 978-3-486-70425-9 , p. 125 f. (accessed via De Gruyter Online).
  4. Boris Barth : Genocide. Genocide in the 20th Century. History, theories, controversies. Beck, Munich 2006, ISBN 978-3-406-52865-1 , p. 75.