Background
Hafız Mehmet was born in the Ottoman Empire in the village of Sürmene located near Trabzon in 1874. He was the son of Hacı Yakubzâde Ahmed Ağa.
Hafız Mehmet was born in the Ottoman Empire in the village of Sürmene located near Trabzon in 1874. He was the son of Hacı Yakubzâde Ahmed Ağa.
While serving as a deputy in Trabzon, he was a witness to the Armenian Genocide. His testimony of the event is considered by genocide scholar Vahakn Dadrian as one of the "rarest corroborations of the fact of the complicity of governmental officials in the organization of the mass murder of Armenians". He was sentenced to death after the Izmir trials of 1926, charged with attempting to assassinate Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.
He received his early education in local schools near Trabzon.
He served as a lawyer throughout the Ottoman Empire. In the 1912 and 1914 Young Turk elections, Hafız Mehmet was elected as a deputy who represented Trabzon.
As a practicing lawyer, Mehmet was nicknamed "hukukcu" or lawyer Hafız Mehmet served as a deputy in Trabzon, where an estimated 50,000 Armenians were killed during the Armenian Genocide.
Since Trabzon was a coastal city of the Black Sea, the method employed to kill was mainly mass drowning.
Hafız Mehmet witnessed such drownings of Armenians off the coast of Ordu, near Trabzon, and provided testimony of his eyewitness accounts during a 21 December 1918 parliamentary session of the Chamber of Deputies:
God will punish us for what we did ..the matter is too obvious to be denied. I personally witnessed this Armenian occurrence in the port city of Ordu. Under the pretext of sending off to Samsun, another port city on the Black Sea, the district"s governor loaded the Armenians into barges and had them thrown overboard.
I have heard that the governor-general applied this procedure.
Even though I reported this at the Interior Ministry immediately upon my return to Istanbul..I was unable to initiate any action against the latter. I tried for some three years to get such action instituted but in vain.
Hafız Mehmet stated that he and other deputies knew beforehand that the Young Turk government had an underlying aim to exterminate the Armenian population. Mehmet testified that he attempted to stop the massacres by trying to speak with Interior Minister Talat Pasha directly but that Talat never responded to his inquiries and never questioned the actions of the politicians in Trabzon.
Hafız Mehmet was sentenced to death after the Izmir trials of 1926.
The trials condemned thirty-six individuals for attempting to assassinate Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.
He also said that those tasked to carry out the responsibility were members of the Special Organization, a special task force under the auspices of the imperial Ottoman government, but that these individuals received orders directly from Cemal Azmi, the governor of the Trabzon province.