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General elections were held in the Ottoman Empire in 1919 and were the last official elections held in the Empire. [1] [2] Due to the dearth of political parties, the elections were dominated by the Association for Defence of National Rights (A-RMHC), which consisted of nationalist local groups protesting against the Allied occupation of Turkey. [2]
Called on 22 October 1919 [1] under the Amasya Protocol agreement between the Ottoman government and the Turkish National Movement in Ankara, [3] the elections followed the end of World War I and the defeat of the Empire. The disbanding of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) led to the creation of several parties previously banned or repressed under the CUP regime, including the reformation of the Freedom and Accord Party. However, Freedom and Accord did not take a role in the elections [1] in the face of the Defence of Rights Association groups supporting resistance against the Allies. [2]
The newly elected Parliament convened in Istanbul (contrary to the Amasya Protocol, which had called for it to convene outside of Istanbul) on 12 January 1920. However, its approval of the Misak-ı Millî (National Pact) with the Turkish revolutionaries in Ankara led to Allied forces occupying Istanbul on 16 March. Several MPs were arrested and deported. Sultan Mehmed VI dissolved Parliament on 11 April. [1]
After this, the Allies did not allow new Ottoman governments to form in support of the Turkish revolutionaries in, which meant that Ottoman officials participating in government after 11 April 1920 were collaborating with the Allies against the Ankara government.
The Treaty of Sèvres was a 1920 treaty signed between the Allies of World War I and the Ottoman Empire. The treaty ceded large parts of Ottoman territory to France, the United Kingdom, Greece and Italy, as well as creating large occupation zones within the Ottoman Empire. It was one of a series of treaties that the Central Powers signed with the Allied Powers after their defeat in World War I. Hostilities had already ended with the Armistice of Mudros.
The Turkish War of Independence was a series of military campaigns and a revolution waged by the Turkish National Movement, after parts of the Ottoman Empire were occupied and partitioned following its defeat in World War I. It resulted in the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the abolition of the Turkish monarchy and of the Islamic Caliphate, and declaration of the Republic of Turkey in Anatolia and Eastern Thrace. The conflict was between the Turkish Nationalists against Allied and separatist forces over the application of Wilsonian principles in post-war Anatolia and Eastern Thrace. In addition, it resulted in a transfer of vested sovereignty from the sultan-caliph to the nation, setting the stage of Republican Turkey's period of radical reform.
Concluded on 30 October 1918 and taking effect at noon the next day, the Armistice of Mudros ended hostilities in the Middle Eastern theatre between the Ottoman Empire and the Allies of World War I. It was signed by the Ottoman Minister of Marine Affairs Rauf Bey and British Admiral Somerset Arthur Gough-Calthorpe, on board HMS Agamemnon in Moudros harbor on the Greek island of Lemnos.
The dissolution of the Ottoman Empire (1908–1922) was a period of history of the Ottoman Empire beginning with the Young Turk Revolution and ultimately ending with the empire's dissolution and the founding of the modern state of Turkey.
The Second Constitutional Era was the period of restored parliamentary rule in the Ottoman Empire between the 1908 Young Turk Revolution and the 1920 dissolution of the General Assembly, during the empire's twilight years.
The Turkish National Movement included political and military activities of the Turkish revolutionaries that resulted in the creation and shaping of the modern Republic of Turkey, as a consequence of the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in World War I and the subsequent occupation of Constantinople and partitioning of the Ottoman Empire by the Allies under the terms of the Armistice of Mudros. The Turkish revolutionaries rebelled against this partitioning and against the Treaty of Sèvres, signed in 1920 by the Ottoman government, which partitioned portions of Anatolia itself.
The Karakol society, was a Turkish clandestine intelligence organization that fought on the side of the Turkish National Movement during the Turkish War of Independence. Formed in November 1918, it refused to merge itself with Association for the Defense of the Rights of Anatolia and Rumelia under Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. Its leadership was decapitated in the aftermath of the 1920 Turkish Grand National Assembly election, leading to its eventual dissolution in 1926.
Damat Mehmed Adil Ferid Pasha, known simply as Damat Ferid Pasha, was an Ottoman liberal statesman, who held the office of Grand Vizier, the de facto prime minister of the Ottoman Empire, during two periods under the reign of the last Ottoman Sultan Mehmed VI, the first time between 4 March 1919 and 2 October 1919 and the second time between 5 April 1920 and 21 October 1920. Officially, he was brought to the office a total of five times, since his cabinets were recurrently dismissed under various pressures and he had to present new ones. Because of his involvement in the Treaty of Sèvres, his collaboration with the occupying Allied powers, and his readiness to acknowledge atrocities against the Armenians, he became an unpopular figure in Turkey and emigrated to Europe at the end of the Greco-Turkish War.
The Sivas Congress was an assembly of the Turkish National Movement held for one week from 4 to 11 September 1919 in the city of Sivas, in central-eastern Turkey, which united delegates from all Anatolian provinces of the Ottoman Empire, defunct at the time in practical terms. At the time of the convention, the state capital (Constantinople) as well as many provincial cities and regions were under occupation by the Allied powers preparing for the partition of the Ottoman Empire. This was part of the wider conflict of the Turkish War of Independence.
Erzurum Congress was an assembly of Turkish Revolutionaries held from 23 July to 4 August 1919 in the city of Erzurum, in eastern Turkey, in accordance with the previously issued Amasya Circular. The congress united delegates from six eastern provinces (vilayets) of the Ottoman Empire, many parts of which were under Allied occupation at the time.
Amasya Protocol was a memorandum of understanding signed on 22 October 1919 in Amasya, Turkey between the Ottoman imperial government in Istanbul and the Turkish revolutionaries aimed at seeking ways to preserve national independence and unity through joint efforts. It also signified a recognition by the Ottoman government of the rising Turkish revolutionary forces in Anatolia.
The occupation of Istanbul or Constantinople, the capital of the Ottoman Empire, by British, French, Italian, and Greek forces, took place in accordance with the Armistice of Mudros, which ended Ottoman participation in the First World War. The first French troops entered the city on 12 November 1918, followed by British troops the next day. The Italian troops landed in Galata on 7 February 1919.
The Malta exiles were the purges of Ottoman intellectuals by the Allied forces. The exile to Malta occurred between March 1919 and October 1920 of politicians, high ranking soldiers (mainly), administrators and intellectuals of the Ottoman Empire after the armistice of Mudros during the Occupation of Istanbul by the Allied forces. The Malta exiles became inmates in a British prison where various Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) officials were held in the hopes that trials will be held at the Malta Tribunals at a future date.
The Istanbul trials of 1919–1920 were courts-martial of the Ottoman Empire that occurred soon after the Armistice of Mudros, in the aftermath of World War I. The leadership of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) and selected former officials were charged with several charges including subversion of the constitution, wartime profiteering, and the massacres of both Armenians and Greeks. The court reached a verdict which sentenced the organizers of the massacres – Talat, Enver, and Cemal – and others to death.
Bekir Sami Bey was a Turkish politician of Ossetian origin. He served as the first Minister of Foreign Affairs of Turkey during 1920–1921.
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk was a field marshal, revolutionary statesman, and founder of the Republic of Turkey as well as its first president. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk's military career explains his life between graduation from Ottoman War College in Istanbul as a lieutenant in 1905 to his resignation from the Ottoman Army on 8 July 1919, as well as his military leadership throughout the subsequent Turkish War of Independence.
The Freedom and Accord Party was a liberal Ottoman political party active between 1911 and 1913, during the Second Constitutional Era. It was the most significant opposition to Union and Progress in the Chamber of Deputies. The political programme of the party advocated for Ottomanism, government decentralisation, the rights of ethnic minorities, and close relations with Britain. In the post-1918 Ottoman Empire, the party became known for its attempts to suppress and prosecute the CUP.
General elections were held in the Ottoman Empire in 1920 in order to select delegates to the new Grand National Assembly. The elections were dominated by the Association for the Defense of the Rights of Anatolia and Rumelia, which consisted of nationalist local groups protesting against the Allied occupation of Turkey.
The Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), later the Union and Progress Party, was a revolutionary organization and political party active between 1889 and 1926 in the Ottoman Empire and the Republic of Turkey. The foremost faction within the Young Turk movement, it instigated the 1908 Young Turk Revolution, which ended absolute monarchy and began the Second Constitutional Era. From 1913 to 1918, the CUP ruled the empire as an authoritarian one-party state and committed genocides against the Armenian, Greek, and Assyrian peoples as part of a broader policy of ethnic erasure during the late Ottoman period. The CUP was associated with the wider Young Turk movement, and its members have often been referred to as Young Turks, although the movement produced other political parties as well. Within the Ottoman Empire its members were known as İttihadcılar ('Unionists') or Komiteciler ('Committeemen').
