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Dr. Mehmed Reshid (Template:Lang-tr; b. 8 February 1873 - 6 February 1919) was the governor (vali) of the Diyarbekir vilayet of the Ottoman Empire during World War I. He is known for organizing the wartime destruction of the Armenian, Assyrian and Greek communities of Diyarbekir.

Biography

Reshid was born to a Circassian family in Russian Caucasia. In 1874, he moved with his family to Constantinople.

He enrolled in Constantinople's Military School of Medicine and was one of the founders of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP). In 1894, Reshid was appointed as an assistant to the German professor Düring Pasha at the Haydarpaşa hospital. When his links to the CUP were discovered by police in 1897 he was exiled to Libya. He served as a doctor in Tripoli until 1908, when he returned to Constantinople following the Young Turk Revolution. He resigned from his position in the Ottoman military the following year, and pursued a career in state administration that took him from İstanköy to the Lebanon to Karesi and ultimately Diyarbekir.

Diyarbekir governorship

Over the years, Reshid became increasingly radicalized and by 1914 he was convinced that the Christians of the empire were to blame for its economic woes. During his tenure as district governor of Karesi, he had organized the forced deportation of the Ottoman Greeks (Rumlar) in the Aegean, whom he no longer considered to be faithful citizens of the empire. This policy was supported by the Ottoman Interior Minister Talat Pasha.

In 1914, the Ottoman Empire entered World War I on the side of the Central Powers and fighting erupted at the border against Russia. In the spring of 1915, the Russians advanced successfully into Ottoman territory and the quick march of their army toward Diyarbakir, according to historian Uğur Üngör, must have confirmed Reshid's "apocalyptic fear" of the Russians and their perceptions of all Armenians to be Russian spies. Before the war, the economic and political competition between the Muslim and Christian urban elite also played an important role in the violence.

His particularly strong hatred for the empire's Armenians was made manifest in the mass murders of Armenians and Assyrians he organized in the Diyarbekir province following his accession to the governorship on March 25, 1915, at the height of World War I. Reshid had persuaded himself that the native Armenian population was conspiring against the Ottoman state and he had accordingly drawn up plans for the "solution of the Armenian question." He recounted in his memoirs:

My appointment to Diyarbekir coincided with a very delicate period of the war. Large parts of Van and Bitlis had been invaded by the enemy , deserters were transgressing, pillaging and robbing everywhere. Yezidi and Nestorian uprisings in or at the border of the province required the application of drastic measures. The transgressional, offensive and impudent attitude of the Armenians was seriously endangering the honor of the government.

Over the next two months the Armenians and Assyrians of the province were targeted in a brutal campaign of extermination and were wiped out by way of wholesale massacres and deportations. According to the Venezuelan officer and mercenary Rafael de Nogales, who visited the region in June 1915, Reshid had recently received a three-worded telegram from Talat Pasha to "Burn-Destroy-Kill," an order cited as official government approval of his persecution of the Christian population. He is said to have burned 800 Syriac Christian children alive by himself after enclosing them in a building. Nesimi Bey and Sabit Bey, the governors of the districts of Lice and Sabit, respectively, are both suspected to have been assassinated under the express orders of Reshid for their opposition to the killings. Anywhere from 144,000 to 157,000 Armenians, Syriacs and other Christians were killed or driven away during Reshid tenure as governor of Diyarbekir.

When later asked by the CUP secretary general Mithat Şukru Bleda how he, as a doctor, had had the heart to kill so many people he replied:

Being a doctor could not cause me to forget my nationality! Reshid is a doctor. But he was born as a Turk....Either the Armenians were to eliminate the Turks, or the Turks were to eliminate the Armenians. I did not hesitate when I was confronted with this dilemma. My Turkishness prevailed over my profession. I figured, instead of wiping us out, we will wipe them out....On the question how I, as a doctor, could have murdered, I can answer as follows: the Armenians had become hazardous microbes in the body of this country. Well, isn’t it a doctor’s duty to kill microbes?

When asked by Bleda how history might remember him, Reshid simply responded, "Let other nations write about me whatever history they want, I couldn't care less."

Final years

Most of the jewelry and possessions Reshid had confiscated from the Armenians were, in theory, to be forwarded to the central government's treasury. Talat Pasha's concern for these valuables resulted in an investigation into Reshid for embezzlement, which found that he had amassed a personal fortune from the killings. A doctor, Hyacinth Fardjalian, attested, "I myself saw Rechid Bey arrive at Aleppo by a train bound for Constantinople with 43 boxes of jewellery and two cases of precious stones." He was transferred to Ankara province, where he had been appointed the new governor. At this time he purchased a mansion on the Bosphorus. When Talat found out about this, he had Reshid removed from his post.

On November 5, 1918, a little less than a week after Ottoman capitulation to the Allies, Reshid was arrested and sent to Bekirağa prison in Constantinople. His role in the massacres was exposed in the Constantinople press, though he would go on to deny his actions and having ever committed any crime. Reshid managed to escape in January 1919, but when government authorities cornered him he committed suicide by shooting himself in the head.

Legacy

In Ankara, there is a boulevard named after him in his honor.

See also

• Armenian Genocide
• Assyrian Genocide

Notes

1. ^ Üngör 2005, p. 39.
2. ^ Üngör 2011, pp. 61–83, 88, 98, 106. Cite error: The named reference "ungor11" was defined multiple times with different content (see the help page).
3. ^ Kieser 2011, p. 126. Cite error: The named reference "Kieser" was defined multiple times with different content (see the help page).
4. Kieser 2011, pp. 130–33.
5. Kieser 2011, pp. 132–35.
6. Üngör 2011, pp. 63–64.
7. Üngör 2011, p. 63.
8. Üngör 2011, pp. 55–106.
9. De Nogales 1926, p. 147.
10. Üngör 2011, pp. 72–73.
11. Üngör 2005, p. 74.
12. Kieser 2011, p. 142.
13. Üngör and Polatel 2011, p. 149 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFÜngör_and_Polatel2011 (help)
14. Template:Tr icon Salâhattin Güngör, "Bir Canlı Tarih Konuşuyor" , Resimli Tarih Mecmuası, part 3, vol.4, no. 43, July 1953, pp. 2444-45, cited in Gaunt 2006, p. 359.
15. Üngör and Polatel 2011, p. 151 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFÜngör_and_Polatel2011 (help)
16. Üngör and Polatel 2011, p. 147 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFÜngör_and_Polatel2011 (help)
17. Akçam 2012, pp. 211–12.
18. Üngör 2011, p. 62.
19. Anderson, Perry (2011). The New Old World. London: Verso. p. 459. ISBN 9781844677214.

Bibliography

• Akçam, Taner (2012), The Young Turks' Crime Against Humanity: The Armenian Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing in the Ottoman Empire, Princeton: Princeton University Press, ISBN 0-6911-5333-7.
• Gaunt, David (2006), "Death's End, 1915: The General Massacres of Christians in Diarbekir", in Richard G. Hovannisian (ed.), Armenian Tigranakert/Diarbekir and Edessa/Urfa, UCLA Armenian History and Culture Series: Historic Armenian Cities and Provinces, 6, Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda Publishers.
• Kieser, Hans-Lukas (2011), "From 'Patriotism' to Mass Murder: Dr. Mehmed Reşid (1873-1919)", in Ronald Grigor Suny and Fatma Müge Göçek (ed.), A Question of Genocide: Armenians and Turks at the End of the Ottoman Empire, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• De Nogales, Rafael (1926), Four Years Beneath the Crescent, New York, London: C. Scribner's Sons.
• Üngör, Uğur (2005), CUP Rule in Diyarbekir Province, 1913-1923 (PDF), University of Amsterdam, Master's Thesis.
• Üngör, Uğur (2011), The Making of Modern Turkey: Nation and State in Eastern Anatolia, 1913-1950, Oxford: Oxford University Press, ISBN 0-19-960360-X.
• Üngör, Uğur; Polatel, Mehmet (2011), Confiscation and Destruction: The Young Turk Seizure of Armenian Property, London: Continuum International.

Template:Persondata

• 1873 births
• 1919 deaths
• Armenian Genocide perpetrators
• Ottoman political people
• Ottoman people of World War I
• Ottoman people of Circassian descent
• Suicides in Turkey