Tevfik Rüştü Macaws

Tevfik Rüştü Aras (left) with the State Secretary of the Weimar Republic Carl von Schubert

Tevfik Rüştü Aras (born 1883 in Çanakkale ; died January 5, 1972 in Istanbul ) was a Turkish doctor and foreign minister under Mustafa Kemal Ataturk . He was previously a founding member of the Communist Party of Turkey . In 1937 he became President of the League of Nations .

Life

Tevfik Rüştü Aras was the brother-in-law of Doctor Nazim , one of the main organizers of the genocide of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire . Tevfik graduated from Beirut Medical Faculty and later served as a doctor in Izmir , Istanbul and Thessaloniki . He became a member of the secret committee for unity and progress . During this membership he met Mustafa Kemal Pascha , the later founder of the Republic of Turkey.

Tevfik Rüştü later became the general inspector of the health services and was tasked with destroying the bodies of the victims of the Armenian genocide . He organized the removal of the Armenian corpses with thousands of kilos of lime over a period of six months. The corpses were stuffed into wells, which in turn were filled with lime and sealed with earth. Tevfik Rüştü was given six months to complete the task. Then he returned to Istanbul . HW Glockner, a British prisoner of war, wrote in his memoir that he saw the bodies of murdered Armenians in Urfa , which were thrown into large pits and coated with lime. In 1918 Tevfik Rüştü became a member of the High Health Commission. At that time he married the journalist Evliyazade Makbule , the daughter of a wealthy family from Izmir.

At the opening of the Turkish Grand National Assembly in 1920, Tevfik Rüştü Aras was elected MP for the Muğla constituency. In his first term as a Member of Parliament, he was a member of the Independence Court of Kastamonu appointed. In the autumn of 1920 he became one of the founders of the Communist Party of Turkey (TKP). Tevfik Rüştü Aras was visiting Soviet Russia when Ali Fuat Bey was appointed ambassador to Moscow . In the second, third, fourth and fifth legislative periods, Tevfik Rüştü Aras was a member of parliament for the constituency of Izmir as a member of the Republican People's Party (CHP).

When the law to ensure public calm came into force on March 4, 1925 , Tevfik Rüştü Aras was appointed Minister of Foreign Affairs in the third cabinet of İsmet İnönü . He held this post in all governments until the death of Ataturk, the founder of the state . He implemented Ataturk's foreign policy by maintaining good neighborly relations with neighboring countries, as well as maintaining a distance from the hegemonic powers. He visited Russia three times at the invitation of the Russian Foreign Minister Maxim Litvinov - in 1926 in Odessa and in 1936 and 1937 in Moscow.

On May 26, 1937, Tevfik Rüştü Aras was elected President of the League of Nations Assembly. In 1939 he was appointed Ambassador to the United Kingdom and stayed in London for the next three and a half years. He retired in 1943 and published some articles in the Istanbul press (especially in the Tan newspaper ). He supported the establishment of the Democratic Party . He later became chairman of the board of directors of Türkiye İş Bankası .

The speeches he gave during his time as minister were collected in the book ( Lozan'ın izlerinde 10 yıl ) by Numan Menemencioğlu in 1937. He also collected his articles published in the daily press in 1945-63 in the book Görüşlerim .

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

He died on January 5, 1972 in Istanbul and was buried in the Aşiyan Asri Cemetery.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} Taner Akçam : A shameful act: the Armenian genocide and the question of Turkish responsibility . 1. Get pbk. Edition. Metropolitan Books / Holt, New York, NY 2007, ISBN 978-0-8050-8665-2 , pp. 363 .
2. ^ His Presidency session. Indiana University, accessed December 17, 2008 . 
3. ↑ whoever. Who is Who, Retrieved December 17, 2008 (Turkish). 
4. ↑ Documentation on the Internet site of the Grand Lodge ( Memento from December 13, 2005 in the Internet Archive )