Cemal Pasha

Ahmed Cemal Pasha (6 May 1872 – 21 July 1922), on English Wikipedia "Djemal Pasha", was an Ottoman military commander and politician, one of the "Three Pashas" who led the Committee of Union and Progress and effectively ran the empire from 1913 to 1918. He was Minister of the Navy and commander of the Fourth Army in Syria and Palestine. ¹

He was born at Mytilene on Lesbos, the son of the military pharmacist Mehmed Nesib Efendi and Binnaz Hanım, and educated at Kuleli and the War College, graduating as a staff captain in 1895. In Salonica he joined the then-secret Committee of Union and Progress and organised its military wing. After the 1908 revolution he was sent to suppress the Armenian revolt at Adana in 1909, appointed governor of Baghdad in August 1911, and after the 1913 Raid on the Sublime Porte became Istanbul's military governor. In March 1914 he became Minister of the Navy, a post he held until October 1918. ^{1 2}

In November 1914 he took command of the Fourth Army for the Suez Canal expeditions and then governed Syria and Palestine. There he ordered courts-martial that hanged Arab nationalists in Beirut on 21 August 1915 and in Damascus and Beirut on 6 May 1916 — 34 executed in 1915–1916 in all — and Syrians and Lebanese knew him as as-Saffāḥ, "the Bloodshedder"; 6 May is still Martyrs' Day in Syria and Lebanon. He also ordered the 1917 deportation of the Jews of Jaffa, and the Tafas massacre is listed among his battles. On the Armenian genocide his role is contested by historians: the English article reports Wolfgang Gust's assessment that he preserved the lives of perhaps 150,000 Armenians in terrible conditions while helping to kill another 150,000, and Ümit Kurt's argument that he favoured forced conversion and assimilation over killing, which does not exempt him from the label génocidaire; the Turkish article calls him one of the architects of the Tehcir deportation law. ^{1 2}

After the Ottoman defeat he fled with Enver and Talaat in November 1918. A Turkish military court accused him of massacring Arab subjects and sentenced him to death in absentia. He worked as a military adviser modernising the Afghan army, then went to Tbilisi as a liaison to the Soviets. There, on 21 July 1922, Armenian Revolutionary Federation members assassinated him, as part of Operation Nemesis. His body was brought to Erzurum and buried at the Karskapı Martyrs' Cemetery. ^{1 2}

The English article states no religion for him. The Turkish article's infobox gives Islam generically, and Wikidata gives Islam with a reference that is an import from a Wikimedia project — the same family as the infobox value, not a second independent attestation, and no source names any school for him. Under the museum's two-source rule his faith is therefore recorded as unknown. ^{1 2 3}

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