Mehmet Reshid

The early years

Born February 8, 1873 in a Circassian family in the North Caucasus, but moved with his family to Turkey due to persecution ^[7] .

He studied at the Imperial Military Medical School in the capital Constantinople , in 1894 he became an assistant to the German professor Düring Pasha in the Haydarpasha hospital.

In 1889 he became one of the founders of the "Society of Ottoman Unity" - the organization of Young Turks . In 1897, the police became aware of his connections with the "Society", which led to exile in Libya ^[8] .

Reshid served as a doctor in Tripoli until 1908, and after the Young Turks revolution he returned to Constantinople. Having left the army, he began an administrative career, which eventually led him to the post of governor (wali) of Diyarbekir ^[9] .

Governor Diyarbekir

Over the years, Mehmet Reshid became radicalized and already by 1914 held Christians accountable for the economic problems of the empire ^[2] . Even when he was in Karesi, he organized the deportation of “unreliable” Greeks , which was supported by Talaat Pasha ^[10] .

In 1914, the Ottoman Empire entered World War I. Military operations unfolded on the border with Russia and already in 1915 the Russian offensive led to a threat to Diyarbekir. The historian Ugur Unger believes that these events should have spurred the apocalyptic fears of Reshid, who began to perceive all Armenians as enemy spies ^[11] . The pre-war economic competition between the Muslim and Christian communities also played a role in the violence that unfolded soon ^[12] .

On March 25, 1915, he became governor of Diyarbekir province, where he organized the massacres of Armenians and Assyrians. At the same time, the former doctor spoke of a “final solution of the Armenian question” ^[13] .

For two months in the province there was a mass extermination of Armenians and Assyrians through killings and deportations ^[14] . According to the testimony of the Venezuelan mercenary Rafael de Nogales , who visited the region in June 1915, Reshid just received a telegram from Talaat Pasha in just three words: “Burn-destroy-kill” - an order to destroy the Christian population ^{[15] [16]} . It is reported that he personally burned 800 Assyrian children locked in one of the buildings ^[17] . Nesimi Bey and Sabit Bey , the leaders of the Lys and Sabit districts, who were in opposition to the atrocities, were probably killed on his orders ^[18] . One way or another, from 144 to 157 thousand Armenians, Assyrians and other Christians, that is, from 87 to 95% of the total Christian population of the province were killed during the governorship of Reshid in Diyarbekir ^[19] .

Later, when the general secretary of Unity and Progress, Mithat юкukru Bleda, asked how he, as a doctor, could have killed so many people, Reshid replied:

Just because I am a doctor does not mean that I forgot about my nationality! Reshid doctor. But he was born a Turk ... Or the Armenians would have destroyed the Turks, or the Turks of the Armenians. I did not hesitate to face this dilemma. My Turkishness prevailed over my profession. I decided that instead of being erased by them, we will erase them ... To the question of how I, as a doctor, could kill, I will answer this way: Armenians have become dangerous microbes in the body of our country. Isn't it the doctor’s duty to destroy the germs? ^[twenty]

When asked how history remembers him, Reshid answered: “Let other nations write about me whatever they want, I don’t care” ^[21] .

Recent years

Talaat Pasha conducted an investigation and established that Reshid appropriated values ​​that were selected from Christians and should have been transferred to the treasury. The arrested doctor Hyacinth Fardjalian testified: “I personally saw how Resid Bay arrived in Aleppo on a train in Constantinople with 43 boxes of jewelry and two boxes of precious stones.” ^[22] . Because of this investigation, Talaat Pasha removed Resid from the post of governor of the province of Ankara, where he had just been transferred with the provision of the estate on the banks of the Bosphorus ^[23] .

November 5, 1918, a few days after the end of the First World War, Reshid was arrested and sent to prison in Constantinople. His role in the massacres became known to the press, but Mehmet denied it. In January 1919, he was able to escape from prison, but was surrounded and shot himself ^[24] .

Despite its role in the genocide, Reshid was very positively perceived in Turkey at the time of Ataturk . In Ankara, a boulevard was named after him ^[25] . To meet the needs of his widow and family, the Turkish government in the 1920s and 1930s gave them two houses and proceeds from shops previously owned by the Armenians ^[26] .

• Akçam, Taner (2012), The Young Turks' Crime Against Humanity: The Armenian Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing in the Ottoman Empire , Princeton: Princeton University Press, ISBN 0-6911-5333-7   .
• Gaunt, David (2006), "Death's End, 1915: The General Massacres of Christians in Diarbekir", in Richard G. Hovannisian , Armenian Tigranakert / Diarbekir and Edessa / Urfa , UCLA Armenian History and Culture Series: Historic Armenian Cities and Provinces, 6, Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda Publishers   .
• Kieser, Hans-Lukas (2011), "From 'Patriotism' to Mass Murder: Dr. Mehmed Reşid (1873-1919)", in Ronald Grigor Suny and Fatma Müge Göçek, A Question of Genocide: Armenians and Turks at the End of the Ottoman Empire , Oxford: Oxford University Press   .
• De Nogales, Rafael (1926), Four Years Beneath the Crescent , New York, London: C. Scribner's Sons   .
• Üngör, Uğur (2005), CUP Rule in Diyarbekir Province, 1913-1923 , University of Amsterdam, Master's Thesis , < http://www.ermenisoykirimi.net/thesis.pdf > . Retrieved January 17, 2016.   Archived March 21, 2012 to Wayback Machine .
• Üngör, Uğur (2011), The Making of Modern Turkey: Nation and State in Eastern Anatolia, 1913-1950 , Oxford: Oxford University Press, ISBN 0-19-960360-X   .
• Üngör, Uğur & Polatel, Mehmet (2011), Confiscation and Destruction: The Young Turk Seizure of Armenian Property , London: Continuum International   .