Mehmet Serif Pasha

New York Times headline on October 10, 1915: Sherif Pasha says the Young Turks had long planned to annihilate the Armenians .

Şerif pasha or short Şerif Pasha (* 1865 , Üsküdar , Istanbul , † 22. December 1951 in Catanzaro / Italy ) was a high-ranking Ottoman officer and politician of Kurdish ethnicity.

Career and political career

Mehmet Serif's family descends from a branch of the Kurdish Baban from Sulaimaniyya in what is now Iraq . His father Said Pasha was twice Ottoman foreign minister and his son also aspired to a political career. Mehmet Serif graduated from the Royal School ( Mekteb-i Sultani , today's Galatasaray High School ) in Istanbul. He then attended the French military school Saint-Cyr . He began his political career in the Foreign Ministry. Then he rose to military attaché for Berlin and Paris . Between 1898 and 1908 he was the Ottoman ambassador to Sweden . For a time he was the chairman of the Ottoman State Council ( Şûrâ-yı Devlet ). Mehmet Serif has received many international medals such as from Romania , Iran and Spain . Among other things, he also received an award from the Pope and the badge of the French Legion of Honor .

In 1895 Serif became a member of the Committee for Unity and Progress ( İttihat ve Terakki Cemiyeti ). When this came to power in 1908 and had largely ousted the Sultan, Mehmet Serif resigned from the party. He accused her of abuse of power and repression. He also opposed officers getting involved in politics as party members. As he agitated more and more against the committee, he was described as an opponent of the government and a revolutionary and suspected of being involved in the murder of the Ottoman Grand Vizier Mahmud Şevket Pasha . On June 12, 1913, he was sentenced to death. He was assassinated on January 14, 1914 in Paris. The death sentence was overturned by the successor government under Ahmed Tevfik Pasha in 1918.

Kurdish politics

After 1918, Mehmet Serif turned to the Kurdish national movement. The defeat of the Ottomans in World War I , the emergence of Turkish nationalism and the fact that Mehmet Serif did not receive an office in the new Ottoman government led him to distance himself from the government. In 1918 he became a member of the Kürdistan Teali Cemiyeti , in which his brother Fuat Pascha was a member before. Since he was well known abroad, he appeared abroad as a representative of the Kürdistan Teali Cemiyeti. But unlike other leading members of the Bedirxan Begs family and the Sheikh Ubeydallahs family , Mehmet Serif did not speak Kurdish . Apart from a few stays in his homeland as a child, he had no relation to his origins.

Treaty of Sèvres

During the peace negotiations between the Ottomans and the Triple Entente in Sèvres near Paris in 1919 , Mehmet Serif appeared as a Kurdish delegate. He demanded a Kurdish state, at whose head he saw himself as king, and wanted to enforce this in the treaty. Also present at the negotiations was the Armenian envoy Boghos Nubar Pasha , who advocated the creation of an Armenian state , with both sides partially claiming the same land. On November 20, 1919 they came to an agreement. But the agreement led to protests by the Kurds in Eastern Anatolia, who did not want to cede their land to the Armenians. They did not recognize Mehmet Serif as their representative. Mehmet Serif then withdrew from the negotiations. In April 1920, under pressure from the government in Istanbul, he had to express his loyalty to the Sultan and the Reich and to withdraw completely from Kurdish politics. After the founding of the Republic of Turkey in 1923, he decided not to return to Turkey and from then on lived in Cairo . Mehmet Serif died in the Italian city of Catanzaro in late 1951 . His body was buried in Egypt.

marriage

Mehmet Serif was married twice. His first wife Emine came from the Egyptian Kavali family and was the sister of the Ottoman Grand Vizier Said Halim Pasha . They married in 1890. Since she supported her husband's activities against the Committee for Unity and Progress, she was not allowed to enter the Ottoman Empire for several years. Although she was not a Kurd, she was heavily involved in the Kurdistan Teali Cemiyeti.

Not much is known about his second wife, Melle Edwige Pairani.

literature

• Rohat Alakom : Serif Paşa – Bir. Kürt Diplomatının Fırtınalı Yılları . 2. baskı. Avesta, Beyoğlu - İstanbul 1998, ISBN 975-7112-56-9 (Şerif Pasha. The stormy years of a Kurdish diplomat).

swell

• Hakan Özoğlu: Kurdish Notables and the Ottoman State. Evolving identities, competing loyalties, and shifting boundaries . State University of New York Press, Albany NY 2004, ISBN 0-7914-5993-4 ( SUNY series in Middle Eastern studies ).