İzzet Pasha becomes grand vizier

On 14 October 1918 Sultan Mehmed VI handed the seal of the grand vizier to General Ahmed İzzet Pasha, who was promoted to marshal on the occasion. This brought to an end more than five years of rule by the Committee of Union and Progress. The handing over of the seal was the formal act of appointment, and according to Turkish accounts his cabinet’s term of office is counted from that day. A British chronology of the war gives the date as 13 October, while the British official histories say in general terms that İzzet was appointed a week before 20 October.

The fall of Talat

After Bulgaria’s capitulation the Ottoman Empire was cut off from Germany by land, and the road to Constantinople through Thrace lay open to the Allies. In the south, British and Arab forces, after their victory at Megiddo, had taken Damascus. The grand vizier, Talat Pasha, who had returned from Berlin and Sofia in September convinced that the war could not be won, concluded that the government responsible for entering the war would not obtain tolerable terms from the victors. His cabinet decided to ask President Wilson to mediate, and according to Turkish sources on 8 October (according to some accounts a day earlier) Mehmed Talat resigned. The Minister of War, Enver Pasha, left with him.

The Sultan, who since his accession to the throne in July had wanted to free himself from the Committee’s influence, asked the former grand vizier and ambassador in London Ahmed Tevfik Pasha to form a government. News of his appointment reached the British as early as 8 October. Tevfik, however, could not assemble a cabinet free of Committee men, since the Committee still had a majority in parliament. For several days Constantinople had no government, until the Sultan turned to İzzet, a candidate acceptable to both sides. He was also supported by General Mustafa Kemal, who wrote letters to the Sultan from the Syrian front proposing the make-up of a new government.

A soldier at the head of the government

Ahmed İzzet, born in 1864 near Monastir (today Bitola) into an Albanian family, was one of the most respected Ottoman officers. He had been educated in Germany, before the war he had been Chief of the General Staff, and in 1913–1914 Minister of War, until Enver replaced him. During the war he commanded in the Caucasus, where in the summer of 1916 his Second Army retook Muş and Bitlis, but soon lost Muş again and failed to push the Russians back. Although he came from the Committee’s circle, he was not regarded as sharing responsibility for its wartime policy.

In the new cabinet İzzet himself took the Ministry of War, although the press had expected it to go to Mustafa Kemal. It also included men from the moderate wing of the Committee who were not associated with the gravest crimes of the war years: the Minister of the Navy, Hüseyin Rauf (Orbay), the Minister of the Interior, Ali Fethi (Okyar), and the Minister of Finance, Mehmed Cavid. On 19 October parliament gave the government a vote of confidence. The cabinet’s programme announced acceptance of the principle of national self-determination, autonomy for the Arab provinces and the return of deportees to their homes, but it spoke of the deportations of the Armenians only guardedly, as a matter forced by “the necessities of war”.

The armistice government

The new government’s most urgent task was to get out of the war as quickly as possible. İzzet released General Charles Townshend, the defender of Kut, from captivity and sent him to the British with the message that Turkey was ready to make peace. Less than two weeks later this led to negotiations in which the Ottoman delegation was led by Rauf. İzzet himself was ill with Spanish flu for most of his short term of office.

The cabinet lasted less than four weeks. At the beginning of November Talat, Enver and Djemal fled the country at night on a German torpedo boat, and İzzet was accused of having let them go. On 8 November he resigned, and he was succeeded by Ahmed Tevfik Pasha.