HISTORY - TURKISH HISTORY - 20TH CENTURY
FATE OF THE COMMITTEE OF PROGRESS AND UNION (CUP) LEADERS (the triumvirate+)
Although they were the ones who shaped the
Turkish political stance in the second decade of the 1900s, the later fate of the CUP
members is not very well known for majority of the people who study History of Turkish
Revolution. (the domestic reason for this may be the fact that the standard secondary
education books pass directly to Ataturk and his deeds without dealing much with the
unhappy end of CUP people).
The following text is an excerpt from a book by Ulrich Trumpener, called "Germany and
the Ottoman Empire 1914 – 1918". I had once sent
this file to Fretensis, as a reply to his query about the fate of CUP people.
Enver, who had
been officially advised by the new republican authorities in Berlin to stay away, was
apparently the last to slip into Germany. Since he (like several other fugitive Ittihad ve
Terakki leaders) was wanted both by the Porte and the Entente governments, Enver adopted
the name "Ali Bey" for camouflage. His subsequent moves are a matter of
scholarly controversy. It appears that in April 1919, possible with Gen. von Seeckt’s
assistance, he secured the services of a pilot and airplane for a trip to Moscow, but the
plane was forced down in Lithuania by mechanical trouble. After being detained there for
several weeks, Enver eventually returned to Germany. In August 1919 he visited the
Bolshevik leader, Karl Radek, in his Berlin prison cell, and was thus the first one to
establish this curious kind of contact with Moscow (which was subsequently used by a
variety of German political, military, and industrial figures). Early in 1920 Enver once
again set out for the Soviet capital and this time reached it safely. During the following
months he established contacts with the Narkomindel, Lenin himself, and eventually also
with Mustafa Kemal’s nationalist movement in Anatolia. In August 1920 he also
endeavored to arrange for a rapprochement between Germany and Soviet Russia (specifically
for talks between Seeckt and a group around Trotsky), but his mediatory efforts were
apparently futile. The next month Enver appeared in Baku at the Soviet-sponsored Congress
of the Peoples of the East as the "Delegate of the Revolutionaries of Libya, Tunisia,
Algeria, and Morocco," then moved back to Berlin. After prolonged and ultimately
futile efforts to secure a place in Mustafa Kemal’s regime, Enver concluded his
odyssey in the autumn of 1921 by going to Uzbekistan, where he joined some Moslem groups
in their fight against Soviet Russian infiltration. He was killed in August 1922 while
leading a cavalry charge on Red Army troops.
Cemal, who like Enver and Talat was sentenced to death in absentia by an Ottoman court-martial in July 1919, concluded his life in a similarly exotic fashion. After initial sojourns in Germany and Switzerland he took service with the Emir of Afghanistan and subsequently moved to Moscow, where he acted on several occasions as a kind of mediator between the Soviet government and the Turkish Kemalists. Upon serving for about a year as the inspector-general of the Afghan army, Cemal returned to the Soviet capital in September 1921 for further negotiations with the Bolsheviks, the Kemalists, and Enver (whom he tried to dissuade from going to Uzbekistan). According to a rather garbled account given by the German diplomat, Wipert von Blucher, Cemal seems to have paid a brief visit to Berlin as well, where he had a meeting with Ago von Maltzan, the head of the foreign office’s eastern division. On his way back to Afghanistan, in July 1922, Cemal was shot to death by two Armenians in Tiflis. He was eventually reburied on Turkish soil in Erzurum.
Talat, whom Sazonov later called the "most infamous figure of our time," lived at first semi-legally and then openly in Berlin, where he was assassinated in March 1921 by an Armenian student. At the height of World War II, in February 1943, Talat’s remains were moved from a Berlin cemetery to Istanbul and he was reburied there with full military honors on the "Hill of Liberty." Several of the other fugitive Ittihad ve Terakki leaders eventually returned to Turkey. Dr. Nazim, along with Cavid Bey, Halil Bey, and two other prominent wartime figures, was tried and executed there in 1926 for alleged conspirational activities against Mustafa Kemal’s regime. Prince Said Halim, the official signatory of the original alliance treaty with Germany, was arrested by the Turkish government in March 1919 and subsequently interned by the British. On his release he moved to Rome, where he too was assassinated by an Armenian nine months later.
Of those three, I was more attracted by the story of Enver Pasha. I was able to read 2 more histoires about him:
‘It is necessary to struggle for Turkestan. If you are afraid of the death that you deserve, you are doomed to live like a dog. You would be cursed by past and future generations. However, if we are ready to die for independence, we can provide those who are following us with free and happy lives.’
- Enver Pasa, 1922