Talat Pasha becomes grand vizier

On 4 February 1917 Sultan Mehmed V appointed the minister of the interior, Mehmed Talat, grand vizier, that is, head of the government of the Ottoman Empire. The day before, 3 February, Said Halim Pasha, who had headed the government since June 1913, had stepped down. Officially he resigned for reasons of health. Talat kept the Ministry of the Interior as well. With his new dignity he received the rank of vizier, and with it the title of pasha. Hitherto known as Talat Bey, he was from now on Talat Pasha. According to historians he was the first member of parliament in the history of the Ottoman state to become grand vizier.

The end of a figurehead’s rule

Said Halim, a grandson of Muhammad Ali, founder of the dynasty ruling Egypt, took office after the assassination of the grand vizier Mahmud Şevket Pasha in 1913, when the Committee of Union and Progress seized power in the state. It was he who in August 1914 signed the secret alliance with Germany, although together with some of the ministers he had long argued for neutrality. When in the autumn the Ottoman fleet attacked Russian ports without his knowledge, according to some accounts he wanted to resign, but remained in office at the Sultan’s request. In October 1915 he handed over the foreign ministry to Halil (Menteşe). As the war went on he was increasingly pushed aside by Talat and the minister of war, Enver Pasha, and his tenure was ended by constant disputes with the committee’s leadership. Real power had long lain elsewhere, and Said Halim’s resignation merely sanctioned this.

The new government consisted exclusively of committee men and was one of the smallest war cabinets of those years. Enver kept the Ministry of War and the post of chief of the general staff, Ahmed Nesimi became foreign minister, and Halil took over the Ministry of Justice. For the first few days Talat also ran the finances, which Mehmed Cavid took over on 10 February. Talat was at the same time chairman of the party, so the leadership of the government and of the committee came together in his hands. Historians describe the balance of power differently: the Swiss scholar Hans-Lukas Kieser considers that during the war years Talat was the de facto dictator of the empire, especially from the time he became grand vizier, while the Dutch historian Erik-Jan Zürcher sees rather a dual rule, in which Talat directed the civil administration and Enver the army.

Architect of the deportations

At the head of the government now stood the man whom historians call the chief architect of the Armenian genocide. As minister of the interior Talat had directed from the spring of 1915 the deportations that turned into mass murder. It was on his orders that the Armenian elite in Constantinople was arrested on 24 April 1915, and his ministry supervised the expulsions and later also the driving of the survivors through the camps on the Euphrates, where tens of thousands of them were murdered in 1916. He was also responsible for the expulsion of other groups of the population, including the Greeks of the Anatolian coast. His accession to the highest office in the state completed the construction of a system in which a single party held full power.

Talat Pasha remained grand vizier until October 1918, when he resigned in the face of defeat. At the beginning of November he fled the country together with other leaders of the committee. An Ottoman court martial sentenced him to death in absentia, among other things for organising massacres, and on 15 March 1921 he was shot dead in Berlin by the Armenian Soghomon Tehlirian.