Dr. Nâzım

The Rise of a Young Turk Revolutionary at the Turn of the Century

Mehmed Nazım (1870-1926) was born in 1872 in Salonica, the cosmopolitan center of Ottoman Macedonia. His father, Hacı Abdülhamid, a merchant who owned several shops in Salonica, died when Nazım was young, leaving him with a degree of financial independence through the family’s assets.¹

Nazım’s political coming of age took place against the backdrop of Sultan Abdülhamid II’s (1842-1918) despotism and heightened imperial rivalries around the fate of the Ottoman Empire. In 1889, the centennial of the French Revolution, Muslim cadets at the Imperial Military School of Medicine in Istanbul (Constantinople) secretly founded the Ottoman Union Society, the nucleus of the oppositional “Young Turk” movement. As a medical student, Nazım was among its first members. Due to the growing oppression of oppositional groups, Nazım volunteered for a study abroad program in Paris in 1893, where many leading members of the Young Turk exiles had taken refuge. In 1895, he became a founding member of the new Young Turk organisation, Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), playing active roles in its recruitment, organization, and publication activities.² While in Paris, he was sentenced to death by the Sultan. During this time, he formed a close alliance and friendship with Dr. Bahaeddin Şakir (1874-1922), forming a radical faction that championed imperial centralization, international sovereignty, and cultural Turkism, while advocating constitutionalist reforms as a means to save the empire.

After 1907, Nazım increasingly embraced revolutionary methods and took charge of the restructuring of the Young Turk movement as a revolutionary organization. Returning under cover to Salonica, he initiated the merger of the Parisian and Macedonian Young Turk secret societies to launch the revolutionary struggle.³ Operating clandestinely, he built a revolutionary network in Izmir (Smyrna) that included urban notables, military officials, and rural brigands.⁴ Owing to his efforts, when army reservists from Izmir were dispatched to suppress the Young Turk revolution in Macedonia, some refused to depart, while others joined the revolution upon arriving in Salonica.⁵ Dr. Nazım thus emerged as one of the prominent leaders of the CUP’s revolutionary vanguard during the 1908 constitutional revolution.

Nazım served on the central committee of the CUP until its formal closure in 1918 and was its secretary general from 1909 to 1910, a period during which the CUP suppressed a counterrevolution and deposed the Sultan. After the outbreak of the Balkan Wars in 1912, Nazım was appointed chief physician at the Red Crescent Hospital in Salonica, where he was taken prisoner and spent eleven months in captivity in Athens. Nazım was released following the CUP’s 1913 coup d’état, which established a single-party dictatorship. Upon his return, Nazım focused on promoting the economic interests of Ottoman Muslim merchants, often at the expense of the non-Muslim population through policies of exclusion and intimidation.

Dr. Nazım and his colleague Dr. Bahaeddin Şakir are often referred to as the éminences grises of the CUP, exerting considerable influence on Minister of Interior Talat Pasha (1874-1921) with their radical stance on centralization and Turkification.⁶ As a leading figure of the CUP’s shadow government until 1918, Nazım was involved in the shaping of demographic and nationalist policies, spreading the CUP’s influence in the provinces, and coordinating student recruitments.⁷

Complicity in the Armenian Genocide

During the initial phase of the First World War, Nazım was closely associated with the Special Organization (SO, Teşkilatı Mahsusa), the Ottoman Army’s special operations force responsible for unconventional warfare, covert action, and propaganda/intelligence work. Dr. Nazım was one of the three permanent members of its supervisory council, responsible for maintaining a connection with the CUP’s central committee.⁸

After the Ottoman entry into the war against Russia, the SO’s irregular bands were deployed as auxiliary forces on the Caucasus front for purposes of reconnaissance, hit-and-run raids, and revolutionary mobilization. While Bahaeddin Şakir coordinated the paramilitary operations against Armenian revolutionaries, which were accompanied by indiscriminate atrocities against the Armenian population, Nazım is said to have recruited volunteers and coordinated the formation of irregular bands. Following the defeat of Enver Pasha’s (1881-1922) armies in the Battle of Sarıkamış, the blame was placed on Armenians, leading to the decision to forcibly displace the Armenian population under the pretext of security measures. Before the Armenian deportations began, however, the Ottoman Army disbanded the SO’s irregular bands for their combat ineffectiveness, integrating them into regular units. The SO was officially dissolved and reconstituted as the Office of Eastern Affairs (Umur-i Şarkiye Dairesi), tasked with conducting foreign clandestine operations in Asia and Africa, mostly in connection with the Ottoman call for holy war. While there is no doubt that similar paramilitary forces systematically massacred nearly all Armenian deportees of military age and terrorized and killed women, children, and the elderly on their death marches, how these bands were coordinated and organized is still a matter of discussion.⁹

Unlike his colleague Bahaeddin Şakir who left a paper trail documenting his on-the-ground involvement, there is scant research specifically tracing Dr. Nazım’s complicity in the Armenian Genocide after April 1915.¹⁰ Due to the secretive nature of the CUP and the disappearance of its archive—a loss for which Nazım is partly held responsible—scholars must rely on other kinds of evidence, some more reliable than others. The few authentic insights available suggest that Nazım’s ideas on the demographic engineering of Anatolia were heavily inspired by the national homogenization of Greece. In a closed meeting of the Central Committee of the CUP in 1916, Nazım stated that “Anatolia is the Turkish homeland. […] I would like to have the application of the method implemented by Greece to the Anatolian part [of the empire].”¹¹ An official who opposed the deportation orders testified in the post-war military tribunals that he received an oral message from Nazım assuring him that “this initiative,” namely the removal of Armenians, “will resolve the Eastern Question.”¹² Nazım’s complicity seems to have been an open secret, as many contemporaries—friends and foes—referred to Nazım in their recollections as one of the most extremist members of the CUP, accusing him of leading the state terror inflicted on Armenians.¹³ A British official report described him as follows:

Dr. Nazim is the Robespierre of the Young Turk Revolution, notorious as a moving spirit in the persecution of all non-Turkish elements in the Empire, and in Pan-Islamic and Pan-Turanian propaganda. In order to enforce his doctrines, he has declared that Turkey required ten years of a despotism ten times more severe than that of Abdul Hamid.¹⁴

Although clear documentation of Dr. Nazım’s direct complicity is lacking, and may never be fully reconstructed, he held a seat in the central executive bodies of the CUP regime, making him guilty by close association, if not active function, in the decision-making process that led to the Armenian Genocide.

Beyond his roles within the CUP’s central committee, Nazım maintained a public presence in the Ottoman capital. He served as the president of the Fenerbahçe Sports Club and was a leading member of the Anti-Profiteering Commission. In the final months of the war in 1918, Dr. Nazım even held the position of the Minister of Education.

The Fall of a Rogue Revolutionary after the First World War

Following the Ottoman defeat, the CUP resigned and dissolved itself. Immediately after the Armistice of Mudros of 30 October 1918, a group of the CUP’s leaders, including Nazım, secretly fled the country to escape looming military tribunals that sentenced them to death in absentia. They found extralegal asylum in the new German Republic, while the Ottoman and Allied officials demanded their extradition as war criminals, albeit unsuccessfully.

In 1919, the Young Turks regrouped in Berlin and decided to establish a pan-Islamic network of Muslim activists across Europe to oppose the ongoing peace settlement. Dr. Nazım was tasked with the setting up of press bureaus in The Hague and Berlin to distribute news about Turkey and the Muslim world to European newspapers. The Young Turks found supporters among Muslim anti-colonialists, German revanchists, and Russian Bolsheviks. Nazım served at the Berlin headquarters of Enver’s Union of Muslim Revolutionary Societies (İslam İhtilal Cemiyetleri İttihadı).

After the assassination of Talat Pasha in March 1921, Dr. Nazım managed anti-Armenian propaganda during the trial of Talat’s Armenian assassin. In the summer of 1921, Nazım accompanied Enver Pasha to Moscow, where they held a congress of the Union of Muslim Revolutionary Societies. Upon receiving negative news about the progress of the Turkish War of Independence, they travelled to Batumi, where Enver planned his return to Turkey to regain power. In a secret meeting, Enver, Nazım, and others reestablished the CUP. However, the Turkish National Fores were able to stop the Greek advance, intercepting Enver’s plans and rendering the CUP leaders as usurpers.

After Enver joined the anti-Soviet Basmachi insurgency in Turkestan, Nazım was interrogated by the Soviet secret police and forced to leave Soviet Russia. Back in Berlin, Nazım was devastated by the assassination of his close colleagues Bahaeddin Şakir and Jemal Azmi (1868-1922) by Armenian agents. Fearing for his own life and promising to abandon politics, Nazım was permitted to return to Turkey.

In 1926, Nazım was arrested for conspiring to assassinate Mustafa Kemal (1881-1938) and for attempting to revive the CUP to usurp the government. On 26 August 1926, Dr. Nazım was executed by hanging.¹⁵ While the Young Turk regime clearly paved the way for the Kemalist Republic, Nazım’s fate illustrates that the CUP’s secretive and oligarchic leadership could only survive by surrendering their drive for power and submitting to Mustafa Kemal’s authority.

Alp Yenen, Leiden University