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Şerif Pasha

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Mehmed Şerif Pasha
President of the Kurd Delegation to the Paris Peace Conference
Born15 October 1865
Constantinople, Ottoman Empire
Died22 December 1951
Catanzaro, Italy
Burial
Catanzaro Cemetery
SpousePrincess Emine Halim of Egypt
FatherSaid Pasha Kurd
MotherSaded Hanim
ReligionSunni Muslim
OccupationDiplomat, soldier, journalist, politician

Mehmed Şerif Pasha (1865 – 22 December 1951), was a Ottoman-Kurdish Politician, Diplomat, Soldier, Journalist who first acted as an Ottoman statesman, but later as a Kurdish nationalist and a founding member of Kurd Society for Cooperation and Progress and representative of the Society for the Elevation of Kurdistan to the Paris Peace Conference (1919–1920). He was a leading Kurdish nationalist.[1]

Sherif Pasha was the Ottoman Ambassador to Stockholm between 1898 and 1908 and the second documented Kurd in Sweden, Sherif Pasha lived in Sweden for ten years. The first documented Kurd in Sweden was the physician Mirza Seid from Iranian Kurdistan who came 1893.[2]

Early career and origin

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Şerif was born in 1865 to Said Pasha the Kurd, who was a Ottoman Statesman and to his wife Saded Hanim in today‘s Istanbul, the family originating from Sulaymaniyah. His brother was Kurd Fuad Pasha.[3] After completing his primary education, he entered Galatasaray High School before dropping out.[4] Then he went to France and graduated from the Paris Saint-Cyr Military Academy in 1884.[5] While studying here, he started his career as the second secretary of the Paris Embassy in 1882.[6]

In 1888, he was appointed as the attaché of the Brussels Embassy. When he returned to Istanbul, he married Emine Halim Hanım, the sister of Grand Vizier Said Halim Pasha, in 1890.[7] He was promoted to the rank of ferik in 1896 and appointed as the secondary ambassador to Stockholm and the second documented Kurd in Sweden in 1898.[8][9] He gained support for the Young Turks in Europe. In 1908, Şerif returned back to Istanbul after the declaration of the Constitutional Monarchy.[10] Although he was well received by the Committee of Union and Progress, he was not given an important task; He did not accept the position of Istabl-ı Amire Manager that was offered to him.[10] He was the president of the Pangaltı Club of the Committee of Union and Progress.[10] He was among the founders of the Society for the Rise of Kurdistan. When his wish to become an ambassador to London or Paris did not come true, he left the Committee of Union and Progress and went to Paris in 1909.[10]

Family

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He was the son of Said Pasha Kurd, nephew of Kurd Ahmet Izzet Pasha and Mustafa Yamulki, brother of Kurd Fuad Pasha and brother in law of Said Halim Pasha, and cousin of Abdul Aziz Yamulki. He was descended from a noble Kurdish family of the Emirate of Baban.[8][11]

Political commitment

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Before 1908 Sherif Pasha was a supporter of the Young Turk movement and provided economic support to Ahmed Riza, a young Turk leader in Paris. After the 1908 Revolution he returned to the Ottoman Empire and headed up the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) branch in the Istanbul district of Pangaltı. However, he soon fell out with the CUP.[8] The reasons for this are debated. According to Sherif Pasha and his supporters, he was concerned with the role of the military in politics. However, his detractors claim that he had been angered by the fact that he had not been appointed the Porte's Representative London. He exposed and opposed the CUP's Turkist programme and its desire to mobilise all available means to assimilate or Turkify the empire's non Turkish nations.[citation needed]

Günter Behrendt states that he was a follower of Sultan Abdul Hamid II.[8] After the Young Turk Revolution in 1908, the CUP actually wanted to sentence to death for his opposition to their views, but Şerif Pasha was aware that the situation was difficult for him and he fled into exile abroad before he could be apprehended.[12]

Strivings for a Kurdish state

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In 1908, he co-founded the Kurd Society for Cooperation and Progress in Constantinople together with Emin Ali Bedir Khan and Abdulkadir Ubeydullah.[13] He again left the Empire and helped to found a number of reformist liberal opposition parties. He articulated strong opposition through a newspaper in Paris entitled Meşrutiyet (Constitutionalism).[14] Due to his oppositional stances, the CUP accused him of being involved into the murder of the former Ottoman Grand Vizier Mahmud Shevket Pasha. He was sentenced to death in absentia in June 1913.[14] failed assassination attempt on him in 1914.

In an article in The New York Times dated 10 October 1915, Şerif Pasha condemned the massacres on Armenians and declared that the Young Turk government had the intentions of "exterminating" the Armenians for a long time.[15] Sherif Pasha remained in Monte Carlo throughout the Great War. In 1918, death sentence he was issued in June 1913, was overturned by the Government of Tevfik Pasha.[14]

The article title in The New York Times where Şerif Pasha denounced atrocities against the Armenians by the Young Turks during World War I

It is understood that his relations with the leaders of the Committee of Union and Progress improved in the last year of World War I. The pasha, who communicated especially with Cavid Bey, attended the congress in Geneva, including Mehmed Sabahaddin, Ahmet Reşit Rey, Djemal Pasha and further some Turkish officers, journalists, civil servants and students.[16] The Congress took some decisions to be submitted to the Paris Peace Conference held on January 12, 1919, and gave full authority to Şerif Pasha to take initiatives on this issue.[17] In these decisions, it was requested that Turkey's independence and law be protected, that the law of the Turkish minorities remaining in other countries be observed along with the law of the minorities in Turkey, that the Turkish prisoners be returned and that the Turks who had to live in foreign countries be allowed to return to their country.[17] Returning to Paris, Şerif Pasha published a fourteen-page text called Memorandum on the Demands of the Kurdish People (Mémorandum sur les revendications du peuple kurde, Paris, 22 March 1919).[18] In this memorandum, the borders of the regions where Kurds lived densely were drawn based on population statistics.[17] Şerif Pasha named sanjak’s and provinces such as the region of Urfa to Divriği, the area of Diyarbakır and Tunceli, the surroundings of Lake Van, and the Iraqi lands further north, Maku and Khoy until Kermanshah as Kurdistan. The pasha, who was elected as a delegate by the Kurdistan Teali Society to defend the rights of the Kurds at the conference, also agreed with the Armenian representative Boghos Nubar to separate the borders with Armenia, which was wanted to be established in the same region.[17][19]

Sherif officially defected from the Ottoman side, and was elected president of the Kurdish delegation at the Paris Peace Conference by the Society for the Elevation of Kurdistan[20] (Kürdistan Teali Cemiyeti) and as well at the Treaty of Sèvres.[21] He reached an agreement with the Armenian delegation headed by Boghos Nubar in Paris which involved the division of eastern Anatolia between a Kurdish and Armenian state.[20] In this agreement Van and Bitlis both fell within Armenia, and so there was a hostile response from many Kurdish leaders in those region who had no wish to be a part of Armenia. Paris was subsequently bombarded with telegrams from the region condemning the accords. Emin Ali Bedir Khan demanded his resignation from his post as a representative of the Kurds to which he then also agreed to.[22]

1920 completed foreseen entities in Anatolia

Also, Şerif Pasha was saying that if the provinces where the Kurds lived remained under Ottoman rule, they would not make any claims and that he would not have any initiative in this regard, but he was trying to explain to the European political circles that if these provinces were given to Armenia, the Kurds would also have to establish an independent Kurdistan.[23] He published a sixteen-page memorandum called Turks and Greek Demands (Les turcs et les revendications grecques, Paris 1919).[23] Here, he claimed that regions and cities such as Istanbul, Eastern Thrace, İzmir, the Aegean Islands, Trabzon and Adana, which were claimed by the Greeks, belonged to the Turks, in which he based on various historical evidence. He also defended Turkish rights in the letters he wrote to Pierre Loti.[24] Although Şerif Pasha was the only one who signed the Kurdish memorandum that he submitted to the Paris Conference, the Turkish memorandum was also signed by present Turkish diplomats such as Nihat Reşat, Refik Nevzat, Ali Galib, Diran Edouard, Albert Fua, Süleyman Midhat, Mehmed Galib and Abdurrahman Polar.[24] His claim to be the Kurdish delegate and his submission of a memorandum to the conference with his own signature was also met with reaction among the Kurds.[25][26] The branches of the Society for the Advancement of Kurdistan and the Society for the Defense of National Rights in Eastern Provinces did not accept the pasha's Kurdish delegation.[25]

The Society of Elevation for Kurdistan, which was protested by the public, became a narrow Kurdish intellectual movement. Articles against Şerif Pasha and pro-Kurdish organisation appeared every day in Istanbul newspapers, and Kurdish notables declared their loyalty to the Ottoman Empire through newspapers.[27] The most famous Kurdish dynasties, such as the Babanidz, also cut off their relations with the Society of Elevation for Kurdistan, which gave delegate authority to Şerif Pasha.[27][28][29] The Society of Elevation for Kurdistan on the other hand accused the publications against it of insincerity.[30] Şerif Pasha sent a short telegram to Turkish newspapers from Monte Carlo on April 21, 1920, while the discussions were intensifying.[30] In his telegram, Pasha stated that, due to his commitment to the caliphate and the sultanate, he rejected harmful ideas and separatist thoughts and resigned from the head of the Kurdish delegate at the peace conference, and that, as a Muslim, he would spend all his efforts and efforts on the protection of the law of the caliphate, without being influenced and influenced by any political party.[30][31][32] This telegram, published in Istanbul newspapers on April 24, 1920, marked the end of the pasha's political struggle.[33] Thus, Şerif Pasha's political life, which started with the Committee of Union and Progress, turned into opposition in less than a year, and under special circumstances, he switched from opposition to separatism, and this lasted only two years.[33]

Life in exile, death and legacy

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After the failure of the Kurdish movement to achieve autonomy or independence for Kurdistan, Sherif Pasha remained in exile until his death. He moved to Cairo, where he had a property, which he received through the marriage with a member of the Khedivian family,[34] Emine Halim, an aunt to King Faruk.[35] In 1927 his daughter Melek Hanim was born in Monticiano, Siena.[35] In the mid-1930s he lived in Monte Carlo, from where he attempted to gain support for the Kurdish cause from Benito Mussolini.[35] He continued to lobby for an independent Kurdistan, during World War II he was in contact with British, Italian and German governments.[36]

Sherif died of a heart attack on 22 December 1951 in his last place of exile Catanzaro, Calabria, Italy. He is known as the father of the Kurdish nation and his hand drawn map of Kurdistan presented to the Paris Peace Conference (1919–1920) adorns walls in Kurdish homes and is studied in textbooks by Kurd across the world.

See also

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References

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  1. ^ Özoğlu, Hakan (2004). Kurdish Notables and the Ottoman State. SUNY Press. p. 111. ISBN 978-0-7914-5993-5.
  2. ^ [Rohat Alakom - Kurderna, fyrtio år i Sverige s.98]
  3. ^ Bruinessen, Martin van (1992). Agha, Shaikh, and State: The Social and Political Structures of Kurdistan. Zed Books. p. 301. ISBN 1856490181.
  4. ^ Tunaya, Tarık Zafer (2002). Türkiye'de siyasal gelişmeler, 1876-1938, Volume 2. İstanbul Bilgi Üniversitesi Yayınları. p. 20. ISBN 9756857285.
  5. ^ Özgürel, Avni (2006). Ayrılıkçı hareketler: Ziya Gökalp'in Kürt Dosyası ekiyle. Altın Kitaplar. p. 200. ISBN 9752107257.
  6. ^ Chaliand, Gérard (1993). A People Without a Country: The Kurds and Kurdistan. Zed Books. p. 32. ISBN 1856491943.
  7. ^ Çalislar, Ipek (2013). Madam Atatürk: The First Lady of Modern Turkey. Saqi. p. 89. ISBN 978-0863568473.
  8. ^ a b c d Behrendt, Günter (1993). Nationalismus in Kurdistan: Vorgeschichte, Entstehungsbedingungen und erste Manifestationen bis 1925 (in German). Hamburg: Deutsches Orient-Institut. p. 275. ISBN 3-89173-029-2.
  9. ^ Criss, Nur Bilge; Yavuz Tura Cetiner (2000). "Terrorism and the Issue of International Cooperation". Journal of Conflict Studies. 20 (1).
  10. ^ a b c d Küçük, Hülya (2002). The Role of the Bektās̲h̲īs in Turkey's National Struggle. BRILL. p. 82. ISBN 9004124438.
  11. ^ Henning, Barbara (2018). Narratives of the History of the Ottoman-Kurdish Bedirhani Family in Imperial and Post-Imperial Contexts: Continuities and Changes. University of Bamberg Press. p. 258. ISBN 978-3863095512.
  12. ^ Behrendt, Günter (1993), 275–276
  13. ^ Strohmeier, Martin (2003). Crucial Images in the Presentation of a Kurdish National Identity. Leiden: Brill. pp. 36. ISBN 90-04-125841.
  14. ^ a b c Özoğlu, Hakan (2012). Kurdish Notables and the Ottoman State: Evolving Identities, Competing Loyalties, and Shifting Boundaries. SUNY Press. pp. 110–113. ISBN 978-0791485569.
  15. ^ "TURKISH STATESMAN DENOUNCES ATROCITIES: Cherif Pasha Says Young Turks Long Planned to Exterminate the Armenian" (PDF). The New York Times. 10 October 1915. II-19:3,4
  16. ^ Henning, Barbara (2018). Narratives of the History of the Ottoman-Kurdish Bedirhani Family in Imperial and Post-Imperial Contexts: Continuities and Changes. University of Bamberg Press. p. 416. ISBN 978-3863095512.
  17. ^ a b c d Ozoglu, Hakan (2004). Kurdish Notables and the Ottoman State: Evolving Identities, Competing Loyalties, and Shifting Boundaries. SUNY Press. p. 147. ISBN 0791459934.
  18. ^ Mouton, Jean-Denis (2015). "La revendication nationale kurde et le principe d'autodétermination". Civitas Europa (in French). 34 (1): 155–167. doi:10.3917/civit.034.0155. ISSN 1290-9653.
  19. ^ "Kurds", E.J. Brill's First Encyclopaedia of Islam, 1913–1936, p. 1133, By M. Th Houtsma Published by BRILL, ISBN 90-04-08265-4, ISBN 978-90-04-08265-6
  20. ^ a b Özoğlu, Hasan (2004). Kurdish notables in the Ottoman Empire. State University of New York Press. pp. 39–40.
  21. ^ Özok, Tijen Yalgın (1990). Southeastern Anatolian Tribes During the Turkish National Struggle. Boğaziçi University. p. 63. OCLC 27365602.
  22. ^ Phillips, David L. (2017-07-05). The Kurdish Spring: A New Map of the Middle East. Routledge. ISBN 978-1-351-48036-9.
  23. ^ a b Güneş, Murat Tezcür (2020). A Century of Kurdish Politics: Citizenship, Statehood and Diplomacy. Routledge. p. 16. ISBN 978-1000008449.
  24. ^ a b Theolin, Sture (2000). The Swedish Palace in Istanbul: A Thousand Years of Cooperation Between Turkey and Sweden. YKY. p. 114. ISBN 9750802586.
  25. ^ a b The Kurdish nationalist movement: opportunity, mobilization, and identity, by David Romano, p.28.
  26. ^ Olson, Robert W. (1989). The emergence of Kurdish nationalism and the Sheikh Said Rebellion, 1880-1925. University of Texas Press. pp. 53–54. ISBN 978-0-292-77619-7.
  27. ^ a b Özoğlu, Hakan (2004-01-01). Kurdish Notables and the Ottoman State: Evolving Identities, Competing Loyalties, and Shifting Boundaries. SUNY Press. pp. 88–89. ISBN 978-0-7914-5994-2.
  28. ^ Özoğlu, Hakan (2004), p.81
  29. ^ Özoğlu, Hasan (2004), pp. 95–97
  30. ^ a b c Özoğlu, Hakan (2004), pp.91–92
  31. ^ Özoğlu, Hasan (2004), p.113
  32. ^ Özoğlu, Hasan (2004), p. 98
  33. ^ a b Üngör, Umut. "Young Turk social engineering : mass violence and the nation state in eastern Turkey, 1913- 1950" (PDF). University of Amsterdam. p. 241. Retrieved 9 April 2020.
  34. ^ Özoğlu, Hakan (2012). Kurdish Notables and the Ottoman State: Evolving Identities, Competing Loyalties, and Shifting Boundaries. SUNY Press. pp. 110–113. ISBN 978-0791485569.
  35. ^ a b c Galletti, Mirella (2018-01-18), Bozarslan, Hamit; Scalbert-Yücel, Clémence (eds.), "Traces of the Kurds and Kurdistan in Italy and Rome", Joyce Blau l'éternelle chez les Kurdes, Bibliothèque (électronique) de l'IFEA, Istanbul: Institut français d'études anatoliennes, pp. 63–79, ISBN 978-2-36245-068-6, retrieved 2021-05-27
  36. ^ Pacha, Cherif. "Chérif Pacha". Chérif Pacha. Retrieved 2020-08-11.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
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