Mehmed Talaat, commonly known as Talaat Pasha was one of the triumvirate known as the Three Pashas that de facto ruled the Ottoman Empire during the First World War. He was one of the leaders of Young Turks.
Background
Mehmed Talaat was born in 1874 in Kırcaali town of Edirne Vilayet into a family of Pomak and Turkish descent. His father was a junior civil servant working for the government of the Ottoman Empire and was from a village in the mountainous southeastern corner of present-day Bulgaria. Mehmed Talaat had a powerful build and a dark complexion.
Education
His manners were gruff, which caused him to leave the civil preparatory school without a certificate after a conflict with his teacher. Without earning a degree, he joined the staff of the telegraph company as a postal clerk in Edirne. His salary was not high, so he worked after hours as a Turkish language teacher in the Alliance Israelite School which served the Jewish community of Edirne.
Career
Talät became one of the first members of the Young Turk revolutionary organization. His modest position in the postal system made him a useful cog in the revolutionary machine. His native intelligence and determination many diplomats came to see him as "the most astute of the Young Turks" led him quickly to the party's inner circle, a domain of officers where civilians were rarely welcomed.
Along with the young Major Enver, Talät played a large part in the Revolution of 1908. Unlike Enver, Talät immediately undertook a substantial political role in Ottoman affairs. In the revolution's aftermath he was elected to represent Adrianople in the Parliament at Constantinople. He served as minister of the interior, 1909-1911. When the Young Turk policy of centralizing control over outlying provinces aroused a storm in Parliament, Talät stepped down to ease the crisis. In early 1913, however, the Young Turks began to establish their dictatorship. In 1914 Talat returned to his old Cabinet post, and it remained his main power base until the close of his career.
The precise lines of authority in the Young Turk party remain a source of controversy. The view that Talat, Enver, along with Cemal Pasha, formed a dictatorial triumvirate has been replaced by a picture of power more widely diffused. Nonetheless, by the outbreak of World War I, Talat and Enver appeared to most observers to be the key figures in the party. Ruthless men, out to create a secular and modern state, they were not likely to be docile allies in international affairs. They found the memory of the empire's nineteenth-century subservience to the great powers and its still impaired sovereignty to be intolerable.
Enver took the lead in drawing close to the Central Powers after July 1914, but Talat's support was essential to make Turkey a belligerent. He vacillated well into October. Finally, his support for Enver's pro-German policy at the close of October decisively undercut pro-Entente leaders like Finance Minister Cavid Bey. In Talat and Cemal, Enver found his indispensable allies.
To keep internal order was Talat's first and most controversial wartime role. In April 1915, anti-Turkish rioting broke out in the Armenian city of Van. Less than four months earlier, Russian forces had crippled Enver's effort to lead a bold Turkish advance in the nearby Caucasus. The government in Constantinople made the decision to deport Armenians en masse from Van and the rest of eastern Anatolia. Both contemporary observers and present-day historians place the burden of the ensuing hor-rors on Talat and Enver. Trumpener calls the Van fighting a mere pretext for a preplanned policy of genocide. In the face of international protests, including criticism from the German ambassador, Talat pleaded first military necessity, then he pointed to the savagery of uncontrollable subordinates on the scene in Armenia. With the notable exception of Stanford Shaw, western historians have rejected these alibis.
Talat also emerged as one of Turkey's spokesmen in dealing with its allies. Germany found him, like the other Young Turks, a difficult comrade in arms. In September 1916, for example, Talat claimed that Turkey's willingness to accept Berlin's military leadership deserved suitable reward. At the peace conferences ahead, Talat expected Germany to barter away gains in Europe, if need be, to help the Porte recover Turkish losses. Parts of Flanders and Poland might have to be sacrificed to restore Iraq and Syria to the Turks.
In February 1917, Said Halim Pa§a, who had played a largely ornamental role as wartime grand vizier, stepped down. Talat took over as head of the government. The war was going badly. While British columns pushed into Palestine and Mesopotamia, the United States stood on the verge of joining Turkey's opponents. Food shortages in the empire's cities were provoking unrest. Only the disintegration of Russia's war effort provided cause for optimism. There, Talat's career reached its zenith. In April he succeeded in maintaining the facade of unity over the issue of breaking relations with the Americans. In fact, the question had badly divided the Young Turks. That same month, Talat visited Berlin. He returned with the strongest German pledges to date for Turkish territorial gains, and even for additional military aid to Turkey, after the war had been won. Meanwhile, Talat promoted peace feelers to the beleaguered Russian provisional government.
Within a few months, Talat's power and prestige began a terminal decline. The peace initiatives to Petrograd failed. To meet a growing domestic crisis, Talat assumed direct control over his country's food supply, only to find he could no longer manage to improve conditions. Unrest swelled, with Talat the leading target for public fury.
In the final year of the war, Talat's work centered on reshaping Turkey's explosive relationship with Germany. The main issue was the clash of rival interests over Russian Transcaucasia. With Russian military power sinking, Enver took the initiative in calling for Turkish expansion eastward. Talat followed Enver's lead, and by mid-1918 the German- Turkish alliance threatened to dissolve. In August the grand vizier hinted that continued German advances into Transcaucasia might lead Turkey to open the Straits and the Black Sea to Allied warships. An ugly side issue arose. As Enver's armies thrust into Russian Armenia, the Turks once again began the mass murder of Armenians.
By late September Talat returned from Berlin defeated. The collapse of Bulgaria, the British advance through Palestine, and the deepening food crisis at home made compromise with the Germans inevitable. Talat pledged a Turkish pullback, leaving the Germans in effective control of such vital prizes as the Baku oil fields. But had the war not ended so quickly, a renewal of the quarrel seemed assured.
The Young Turk government led by Talat resigned on October 14, 1918. The former interior minister escaped with most of the other leaders of the wartime government early the next month. A German ship spirited him away to the Ukraine; from there he made his way to Germany.
Like many of his colleagues, Talat tried to play the role of diplomatic middleman in the postwar years, forming diplomatic connections between Turkey and the Soviet Union. In interviews and in his writings, he disclaimed responsibility for the Armenian massacres with which he was identified in the public mind. Despite these disclaimers and his efforts to conceal his whereabouts, he died at the hand of an Armenian assassin in a Berlin suburb, March 16, 1921. The young Armenian was charged by a German court, tried, and then acquitted. Evidence introduced at the trial indicated that Talat had indeed directed the 1915 massacres. On that basis, his assassin went free.
Politics
According to various sources, Talaat Pasha had developed plans to eliminate the Armenians as early as 1910. Danish philologist Johannes Østrup wrote in his memoirs that in the autumn of 1910, Talaat talked openly about his plans to "exterminate" the Armenians with him. According to Østrup, Talaat stated: "If I ever come to power in this country, I will use all my might to exterminate the Armenians." In November of that year, a decision to carry out such a plan was made in Thessaloniki where a secret conference was held by prominent members of the CUP. The conference concluded that the Ottoman Empire, which promoted equality among Muslims and non-Muslims alike, was not ideologically compatible anymore, and that the Ottoman Empire should adopt a policy of Turkification. Talaat, who attended the conference, was a leading advocate of this policy shift and stated in a speech that: "there can be no question of equality, until we have succeeded in our task of ottomanizing the Empire." Such a decision ultimately required the assimilation of non-Turkish elements within the empire and if necessary, it could be done through force. British ambassador Gerard Lowther concluded after the conference that the: "committee have given up any idea of Ottomanizing all the non-Turkish elements by sympathetic and Constitutional ways has long been manifest. To them 'Ottoman' evidently means 'Turk' and their present policy of 'Ottomanization' is one of pounding the non-Turkish elements in a Turkish mortar."