Three Pashas ..
the Fathers of Ottoman Turkish Racism .. and its Loser Generals!
Anwar Pasha is described in history as the first one who established and legitimized the Turkish racism; however, it is true that it was a behavior that was running through all aspects of Ottoman life, and it was profoundly influencing the relationship between the ruling Turkish component and the other peoples that were oppressed under the Turkish occupation.
Anwar Pasha developed the laws and procedures of that Ottoman stratification which prohibits other national languages within the Sultanate, abolished Arabic alphabet, and prohibited communication and education in any language but the Turkish. That racism still lives among the Turks to this day. Anwar Pasha publicly revealed this in a famous speech of him about his belief in the superiority of the Turkish ethnicity, by saying: “Turks homeland is neither Turkey, nor even Turkestan, yet it is a vast eternal region; they own the whole world”. This theory was what led Anwar to later ally with the Germans, who also believed in their ethnicity superiority over their counterparts.
Ismail Anwar Pasha was born in Istanbul on November 1881) ,22 AD), to a simple father from the workers’ class and bridge guards. However, he was promoted in the military ranks until he reached a General and a Minister of War because of his excessive nationalism and of his joining to Committee of Union and Progress, which was an actual director for Ottoman policies inside and outside Turkey.
As a result of the alliance of the Ottoman Sultanate with the Germans based upon an advice from Anwar Pasha, the Minister of War. The “Pasha” undertook building an army of more than two and a half million soldiers; at least half of them were Arabs, and the other half were from the minorities living within the Sultanate. As usual, the leaders were Ottoman Turkish and the soldiers were mercenaries and conscripts under duress of the occupied peoples under their authority. The conscription was compulsory, and the Arab youth were forcibly taken from streets and squares to the battlefronts. The death toll was estimated at more than 700 thousand lives. It was a real massacre in which soldiers died due to misery in the military operations and the poor supplies and many of them died of starvation and disease. As well as more than 400 thousand soldiers were injured, and another 200 thousand were captured.
Anwar Pasha as the one who issued the decree of the so-called “War Costs”, that was a law by which the Arabs were coercively obliged to provide military, financial and food support to the Ottoman armies and their German allies. The Arab people were hungered to achieve the Ottoman ambitions and adventures, and the Arab youth died for the same reason. The death toll of Arab youth was estimated at more than 250 thousand and more than 50 thousand others were disabled, injured and missed. Moreover, tens of thousands of those who refused the military service or refrained from supplying the war effort were executed. That law, and what followed it, made Anwar Pasha’s reputation as an assassin and murderer spread throughout the Arab countries occupied by the Ottomans.
Anwar Pasha was not an extraordinary military commander, as he is propagated by The New-ottomans today, rather, he was an assassin who had a rank of a failed general. Many of the battles that he fought in ended with grave losses. Perhaps his defeat in the Battle of (Sarikamish) against Russians, which may have been later shaped the character of that serial killer. He thought himself to be an extraordinary military commander, but he failed in the battles one by one. Anwar Pasha was appointed as a commander for the Ottoman forces in the war that took place against the Russian soldiers in the Caucasian Front. As the rising Pasha wanted to expel Russians from the eastern regions and to restore the Ottoman control over the regions, which they ceded to the Russians after the Russians – Ottoman war that took place between the years (1878-1877 AD). But Anwar Pasha was defeated despite leading an army that consisted of ninety thousand soldiers. Tens of thousands of them were killed as he ignored the weather and terrain factors in Eastern Anatolia and Caucasus regions. Upon his return to Constantinople, as he was defeated, he found nothing but indictment of Armenian soldiers. He claimed that they were the reason of why his war against the Russians had failed. That accusation prompted him to try to eliminate the rest of the Armenians.
Anwar Pasha was one of the officers who ran the rule under the auspices of the “sick” Ottoman Sultanate, he was then a younger of a -35year-old and he was Lacking political and military experience; however, he had the most important feature of Ottoman ” i. e. he was from a pure Turkish” race. That was his passport for promotion and empowerment.
Anwar Pasha failed to deal with Arab peoples and they called him an Assassin; in Egypt, Palestine, the Levant and Libya. He also failed to play on the political side. As this was revealed in his alliance with the Germans, and his engaging in a failed war without being prepared or armed; he has only a crowd of untrained people who were victims in the holocaust of battles in front of the Allies.
Anwar Pasha was not alone, as he led with the so-called the three Pashas those crimes and massacres against the peoples and nations occupied by the Ottomans. When they tried to leave the occupation cordon toward freedom, they were faced with genocide and mass murder. Those three Pashas were (Talaat Pasha, Minister of the Interior, Anwar Pasha, Minister of War, and Djemal Pasha, Minister of the Navy). As a result of those crimes; Millions of Arab, Greek and Bulgarian victims were killed, displaced and abandoned. In addition to Armenians that many sources estimate that they were more than 1.5 million killed.
The massacres against the Armenians did not begin in the reign of the three Pashas, but they began two and a half decades earlier. This confirms that the policy of genocide was not an approach of the Committee of Union and Progress only, as some romantics who are defending the Ottoman era are trying to market it, but it is a systematic Ottoman policy. The suffering of Armenians began with the end of the Ottoman Russian War in (1878) in which the Ottoman army was severely defeated by the Russians. This prompted the arrogance of the Ottomans to search for a victim to bear the burden of their failure, where they found only the innocent Armenians, they pointed fingers at them and held them responsible for their severe loss.
The Armenian population living in the Ottoman territories was accused of conspiring against the state and supporting the Russian empire. Accordingly, the Armenian genocide operations began and reached its climax between (1894 and 1896 AD), among the so-called “Al-Hamidiyah” massacres that were named after the Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid II, which resulted at its first phase in murdering about 250,000 Armenians, and that was followed by a number of massacres, deportations, starvation and destruction in Levant desert over the subsequent years.
Residents of Levant and Iraq also faced another kind of violence that was committed by Djemal Pasha, the minister of the Ottoman Navy, the ruler of Iraq and Levant and the second Pasha of the Assassin Pashas. Who imposed a sea siege that began in the year (1915 AD), in addition to encircling the Levant with the borders of Anatolia. Djemal Pasha was not satisfied with that, but rather he confiscated the remaining crops, food and funds to support the war effort. That siege led to a famine that resulted in 200 thousand people died. Furthermore, the Ottoman despotism did not stop at that point. As Djemal Pasha decided to raze the civil society in the Levant from its leaderships and the Arab nationalists or the notables of those who have opinion and leadership. He ordered to erect impalements and gallows, and executed many of them from various cities of Levant. The charges were, of course, ready from separation claims to the communication with English and French. Death sentences were carried out between the years (1916-1915) in Burj Square in Beirut, therefore it was called Martyrs’ Square, as well as in Damascus.
The third of the Pashas was the Minister of Interior Talaat Pasha, who reached the rank of “Grand Vizir” the greatest position in the Sultanate more than once. There was no crime or massacre committed against the peoples of the countries that were occupied by the Ottomans, only this assassin and his comrades had a hand, a direction or a farman.
The end of the Three Pashas was nothing but the culmination of their long history of criminality. Anwar Pasha had nothing in front of him due to his terrible failure in all the military missions entrusted to him, Other than engaging in another war against the Russian Bolsheviks. He established the so-called Ottoman Army of Islam by which he aimed to restore the Ottoman Empire to what it was, after the warning of disintegration and dissolution loomed on its horizon, even it reached many of its parts. And finally he was assassinated in Bukhara during his fabricated war against the Bolshevik government in (1922 AD). As for Talaat Pasha, he fled from his crimes to Germany to be assassinated there in Berlin (1921 AD) by an Armenian activist. Finally, the end of Djemal Pasha was not better than his two comrades, as he was also assassinated in the city of Tbilisi in (1922 AD) by an Armenian refugee, as a punishment to him for his crimes against Armenians.