Enver Pasha

Enver Pasha brought the Ottoman Empire into the First World War, destroyed an army in the Caucasus in the first winter of it, and was one of the three men principally responsible for the Armenian genocide. He was a Young Turk officer who made his name in the 1908 revolution that forced the sultan to restore the constitution, and by 1913 he had taken power in a coup, becoming minister of war at thirty-three as one of a ruling triumvirate with Talaat and Djemal. He negotiated the secret alliance with Germany in August 1914 and committed the empire to the war. That winter he took the Third Army into the mountains against the Russians at Sarikamish in December, without winter equipment, and lost the great majority of some ninety thousand men, mostly to cold. He blamed Armenians for the defeat, and the deportations and massacres of 1915 followed, killing roughly a million people. He fled to Germany in 1918 as the empire collapsed, was condemned to death in absentia by an Ottoman court, and went to Moscow to offer himself to the Bolsheviks as an organiser of Muslim revolution. Sent to Central Asia in 1921, he changed sides and led the Basmachi revolt against Soviet rule, and was killed in a cavalry charge in Tajikistan in August 1922. His body was recovered in 1996 and reburied in Istanbul with a state ceremony, which was itself an argument about how Turkey remembers him. The genocide remains officially denied by the Turkish state. Sarikamish is commemorated annually in Turkey as a tragedy of the cold rather than as a decision, which is the same evasion in a different form.

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