Enver Pasha. 1881?-1922.

1881 - 1922

Ottoman general and strongman of the Committee for Union and Progress.

Enver Paşa was born in Constantinople (now Istanbul) 23 November 1881. When his father, a railway employee, was transferred to Macedonia, Enver attended the Monastir military junior high school. He was graduated from the War Academy (Mekteb-i Harbiye) as staff corporal in 1902 and was posted to the Third Army in Macedonia.

In 1906 Enver joined the Ottoman Liberty Society in Salonika, a constituent group of the reorganized Committee for Union and Progress (CUP). He led one of a series of revolts in Macedonia in 1908 that triggered the Young Turk Revolution of 23 July 1908. In Constantinople he was hailed as a revolutionary hero. His appointment to Berlin as military attaché at the end of 1908 failed to remove him from the political changes taking place in the capital. During the counterrevolutionary uprising of April 1909, he joined the Army of Deliverance, which marched to Constantinople to restore order, then returned to his post in Berlin. In 1911, after a brief assignment in Scutari at the time of the Albanian uprising, he transferred to Libya, where he commanded Ottoman forces in Benghazi against the Italians. His betrothal to the granddaughter of Sultan Abdülmecit II, Naciye Sultan, was concluded in his absence, presaging a more prominent public role for him in Constantinople.

Enver led the armed CUP coup against the Kamil government in January 1913. He fought for the recapture of Edirne from the Bulgarians during the Balkan War. Enver received multiple promotions and became minister of war in January 1914 and proceeded to reorganize the army by purging the senior officers. He set up a paramilitary intelligence and propaganda organ.

Enver Paşa was responsible for authorizing the passage of German dreadnoughts into the Black Sea in November 1914, effectively committing the Ottoman Empire to war on the side of Germany. As deputy commander in chief of Ottoman forces, he personally led the Russian campaign in Eastern Anatolia that resulted in the earliest and most devastating setback of the entire war for the empire. After Russia withdrew from the war, however, Enver delegated his uncle Halil and brother Nuri to lead the Ottoman armies into the Caucasus, seeking a pan-Turkish union. This strategy was aborted by Ottoman defeats on other fronts.

Following the Ottoman surrender at Mudros, Enver fled abroad with other prominent CUP leaders. In November 1918, he first went to Odessa and was arrested attempting to travel to the Caucasus, possibly to establish a resistance against Allied armies in occupation of Ottoman territories. He managed to flee to Germany. In August 1920, he returned to the Soviet Union. After an audience with the Bolshevik leaders in Moscow, Enver went to Baku and participated in the Congress of Eastern Nations. The Turkish nationalist government in Ankara prevented his entering Anatolia. The Bolsheviks allowed him to go to Turkistan to form an Islamic army to liberate India. Instead, in September 1921, Enver joined the Turkistan resistance movement in Bukhura, which he coordinated signing communiqués as "the son-in-law of the caliph." He was killed near Dushanbe, 4 August 1922, as he personally led attacks against the Bolshevik forces.

Enver's reputation as the "hero of liberty" and his notoriety as the dictator of the CUP, though both exaggerated, cast him in history as a controversial figure. A similar hyperbole is the occasional German reference to the Ottoman Empire as "Enverland." Enver personified the eclectic currents prevalent among the Ottoman political elite after 1908. He was sympathetic to the Turkish, and following the Ottoman loss of the Arab provinces, to pan-Turkish ideas. As a member of the royal household and a pious man, Enver was also deeply committed to Ottomanism and the Islamic principles that sustained the Ottomanist ideology.

Bibliography

Swanson, Glen W. "Enver Pasha: The Formative Years." Middle Eastern Studies 16 (1980): 193 - 199.

Yamauchi, Masayuki, comp. The Green Crescent under the RedStar: Enver Pasha in Soviet Russia, 1919 - 1922. Tokyo: Institute for the Study of Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa, 1991.