Miralay Sadık Bey

Miralay Mehmet Sâdık Bey (1860–1941), was a soldier and politician in the late Ottoman Empire.

Mehmed Sadık Bey
Personal details
Born	1860 Istanbul, Ottoman Empire
Died	6 February 1941 Istanbul, Turkey
Nationality	Ottoman, Turkish
Political party	Freedom and Accord Party

Early life

His father was the well-known religious scholar Filibeli Abdullah Efendi, a high ranking Islamic teacher. His family was originally from Bursa, but eventually moved to Filibe (Plovdiv).

Rise to power

He graduated from the Military Academy in 1882 as a cavalry lieutenant. He served in Syria, Tripoli and Macedonia. In 1906, while he was a Miralay (colonel) and a cavalry regiment officer in Monastir, he joined the Committee of Union and Progress, upon the recommendation of Kâzım Karabekir. Sadık ran a secret Unionist newspaper called Neyyir-i Hakikat, recruited many officers into the committee, and became head of the organization's Monastir branch. He played an important role in the Young Turk Revolution, having an essential role in the assassination of Shemsi Pasha, and sent telegrams to the capital from Monastir demanding the reinstatement of the constitution.

Upon the declaration of the Second Constitutional Era, he participated in the CUP Congress held in Salonica as a Monastir delegate. He was quickly identified as problematic for the committee and sent to Istanbul after the congress to take charge of a cavalry unit, but the assignment was countermanded on the way, and instead he was appointed governor of Debar to take care of unrest in Albania. Sadık sent an appeal to the Interior Ministry to be dismissed, whereupon he returned to Istanbul in April 1909.

In the 1909 CUP Congress, Sadık Bey accused Talât, Cavid, and Hüseyin Cahit of being freemasons, and requested their expulsion from the committee. This demand was not put to discussion, and he was instead assigned to maintain relations between the CUP and the government, together with Ömer Naci Bey and Nafiz Bey. Despite his disagreements with prominent figures in the CUP, the Unionist leadership understood the weight he had within the military and kept him in.

The New Party

As tension increased between himself and leading members of the CUP he started a right-wing internal opposition movement called the New Party (Turkish: Hizb-i Cedit) within the CUP, together with Balıkesir Deputy Abdülaziz Mecdi Efendi in 1911. 110 out of 160 Union and Progress deputies supported the faction, and were opposed to the left-wing faction: the Progress Party (Turkish: Hizb-i Terraki). Sadık met with Talât, and stipulated that at minimum, the CUP had to withdraw from the government and the parliament. The New Party presented its views to the CUP in a 10-point program on April 23, 1911:

1. Deputies should not seek privileges and special interests
2. Deputies should be separated from civil servants
3. Deputies should become ministers by secret ballot and by obtaining a 2/3's majority in parliament
4. Laws should be obeyed and attention should be paid to the responsibilities of ministers
5. Efforts should be made to unite ethnic elements in the Ottoman country, and trade, agriculture, industry and education should be advanced in proportion to need
6. Religious and national morality and traditions should be protected, but they should be developed by taking the good aspects of Western civilization
7. Ottoman traditions should be maintained and kept in accordance with the Constitution
8. The appointment and dismissal of civil servants should be given a serious status
9. In order to strengthen the rights of the sultan, changes should be made in the relations between the legislative, executive and judicial powers in the Constitution
10. The actions of associations established for secret and special purposes should be prohibited

The crisis was resolved when some demands of the New Party were accepted at the 1911 CUP congress. Hüseyin Cahit in his memoirs described the influence of Sadık and the New Party: “If the faction issue prepared by Colonel Sadık Bey and his friends had succeeded as desired, Union and Progress would then have disintegrated and been destroyed.”

Sadık was then sent away to Salonica by the Minister of War Mahmut Şevket Pasha on 1 May, 1911. There he published a manifesto attacking the CUP and the military. In his declaration, he urged the military to withdraw from politics and that the CUP should either remain as a protector of the constitutional monarchy (nigâhbân-ı meşrutiyet) or become a full-fledged political party. Following this declaration, he was retired from the military on 24 May, 1911, with the rank of colonel, on the grounds that he was “not fit for military service.”

1911–1914

When Sadık returned to Istanbul he was among the founders of the Freedom and Accord Party (founded in 21 November 1911), which quickly absorbed most of the previously existing opposition parties. He was invited to join the party by a group of liberal politicians which soon became known as the Münevvers Group: Lütfi Fikri, Rıza Nur, Rıza Tevfik and Ahmet Reşit, as they recognized the need to have support in the army.

On 24 November, 1911, Damat Ferit Pasha was elected as the party president and Sadık Bey as the party vice president. However shortly after the party's establishment, Sadık started having disagreements with the Münevvers Group, especially the many decisions he made without consulting the authorized boards of the party. Even before the 1912 general election, it was expected that he and his supporters would defect and found a new party called Ottoman Union (İttihâd-ı Osmanî), but Sadık denied this. Following the CUP's victory in the 1912 election, which went down in history as the "election of clubs", he planned to overthrow the government with his officers and seize power with a coup d'état, but a military memorandum by pro-Freedom and Accord officers achieved this before he could. During the First Balkan War, Sadık met with Grand Vizier Kamil Pasha, following which he closed Freedom and Accord Party chapters without consulting the party's boards. The Münevvers Group separated from Freedom and Accord after this incident, and the party was completely taken over by Sadık and his supporters.

After the CUP came back in power following the Raid on the Sublime Porte in 23 January 1913, Sadık first fled to Athens and then to Paris when he learned that there was an arrest warrant for him. In Paris, in July 1913, it was announced that Şerif Pasha’s Ottoman Reform Party and the Freedom and Accord Party had merged, and Sadık became the party’s second leader. He quickly fell out with Şerif Pasha, and from Paris fled to Egypt, where he lived in Heliopolis, nearby Cairo, and stayed there between 1913 and 1919. While in Egypt, he was put on trial by the Martial Law Court (Divan-ı Harb-i Örfi) for his alleged role in the assassination of Mahmut Şevket Pasha and was sentenced to death in absentia on 11 February 1914, on the grounds that he was “one of the instigators and promoters of the revolutionary society, both internally and externally, that organized the murder of the late Mahmut Şevket Pasha.”

Activities during the Turkish War of Independence

Over the course of World War I, he maintained close relations with the British. Following the Armistice of Mudros and the liquidation of the CUP he requested to Damat Ferid Pasha to allow for his return to the Ottoman Empire; abroad he was experiencing serious financial difficulties and debts. He returned to Istanbul in 8 May 1919. The Freedom and Entente Party was re-established in early 1919 under the leadership of Müşir Nuri Pasha. As soon as Sadık returned to Istanbul, he took over the party leadership with the confidence he received from party branches without holding any party congress. After the occupation of Izmir, he participated in the Sultanat Council that convened in Istanbul on 26 May 1919, as the president of the Freedom and Accord Party. He advocated for the Ottoman Empire to become a British Mandate. In a 3 June 1919 telegram by Mustafa Kemal Pasha, he specifically stated that of those who participated in the Sultanat Council, the only delegate there that advocated for a British Mandate was Sadık Bey. Sadık denounced the Damat Ferid Pasha government in his speech, saying that while the government initially acted within the framework of the Freedom and Accord Party program, the cabinet significantly deviated from the party program over time.

In order to resolve the differences, Sadık appointment to the Council of Ministers or the Senate was considered. Immediately after Damat Ferit Pasha went to the Paris Peace Conference to represent the Ottoman Empire, during the period when Şeyhülislam Mustafa Sabri Efendi was acting Grand Vizier, Sadık was appointed to the Council of Ministers on 14 June 1919. However, due to some objections from the Freedom and Accord, he was not appointed to the Senate. Thereupon, Sadık resigned from the Council of Ministers on four days later. Sadık explained that he was dissatisfied with the government’s failure to carry out purges among civil servants. Meanwhile, Damat Ferit Pasha, who was in Paris, accused Sadık of being a sympathizer of France which strained the ties between the government and the Freedom and Accord Party. As a result, on June 25 Sadık Bey announced that Damat Ferit Pasha’s Cabinet had no relationship with his party and urged his ministers in the cabinet to or else their ties with the party were cut. This ultimatum resulted in the disintegration of the party. At the end of May 1920, after Sadık announced a new Central Committee without holding a congress, party dissidents founded the Moderate Freedom and Accord Party, with Mustafa Sabri Efendi as its president. Ferit Pasha and Sultan Mehmed VI supported this new party.

Sadık also seized the administration of the Friends of England Association, originally founded by Said Molla, with a congress coup in 1921, but lost the control the organization to Sait Molla after a counter-congress coup. Thus, he was in conflict with both the Damat Ferit Pasha government in Istanbul and to the nationalist Ankara government that fought the Turkish War of Independence. The Ankara Government filed legal proceedings against him on 8 June 1920 for treason, and he was sentenced to death in absentia (for the second time) by the Ankara Criminal Court on 3 July. After Ankara Forces under the command of Refet Pasha entered Istanbul, he took refuge in the British Embassy with other collaborators for a couple of days and then escaped to Romania on 8 November 1922, on a British ship. After the Treaty of Lausanne, he was included in the List of 150 personae non gratae issued by the Grand National Assembly in 1924. The Grand National Assembly voted to strip him of his Turkish citizenship 28 May, 1927.

Exile

Sadık stayed in Romania for 19 years between 1922 and 1941. He lived in Constanța until 1926, and in the Hârșova village of Dobruja after 1926, where he was under financial stress. His son Muhittin, who first worked as a driver and then as a whitewasher, supported him. When news emerged of an amnesty to be announced in 1933 would include the 150s, letters of him expressing remorse were published in the 13 August 1933 issue of the Vahdet newspaper published in Syria. However, Sadık Bey denied writing these letters. The 150s were not included in the amnesty issued in 1933. The 150s were issued amnesty with the law issued on 29 June 1938. However, Sadık Bey refused to return to Turkey. His daughter Leman Hanım stated in an interview with the Vatan newspaper that her father still did not want to return because he was waiting for his innocence to be recognized.

In 1940, Sadık wrote a letter to the new president of Turkey İsmet İnönü through his nephew Alaattin Gövsa, who was an MP in parliament, stating that he did not want to return to his homeland “like a pardoned criminal” and asked him to help erase the stain of treason from his forehead before he died. İnönü relented, and allowed him to return.

Sadık became excited and ill when the Romanian steamer Büyükdere arrived to take him back to Turkey. He landed in Istanbul at 12:30 on Tuesday, 4 February 1941, and was welcomed by his nephews Alaattin and Salahattin Gövsa and taken to their home in Kadıköy, Istanbul. However, as his condition worsened, he was taken to Numune Hospital at 15:00 and died at 21:30 of heart failure.

Personal life

Sadık died at the age of 81, and was buried in the Karacaahmet Cemetery. He was married, and had two daughters and a son. His wife and one daughter died while in Dobruja. He spoke Arabic and French, was good at painting, and was interested in Sufism; he was a member of the Melami Order. Although his daughter Leman Hanım stated that she wrote his memoirs, they have not been found yet.

References

Sources

• Gazel, Ahmet Ali (17 October 2022). "Miralay Sadık Bey (1860-1941)". Atatürk Ansiklopedisi.