Talaat Paşa

Mehmed Talât Pasha (1 September 1874 – 15 March 1921), commonly known as Talaat Pasha or Talat Pasha, was a Turkish activist, revolutionary, politician, and convicted war criminal who served as the de facto leader of the Ottoman Empire from 1913 to 1918. He was chairman of the Union and Progress Party, which operated a one-party dictatorship in the Empire; during World War I he became Grand Vizier (prime minister). He has been called the architect of the Armenian genocide, and was responsible for other ethnic cleansings during his time as Minister of Interior Affairs.

Talaat was an early member of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), eventually leading its Salonica chapter during the Hamidian era. After the CUP succeeded in restoring the constitution and parliament in the 1908 Young Turk Revolution, he was elected as a deputy from Adrianople to the Chamber of Deputies and later became Minister of the Interior. He played an important role in the downfall of Sultan Abdul Hamid II the next year during the 31 March Incident by organizing a counter government. Multiple crises in the Empire including the 31 March Incident, attacks on Rumelian Muslims in the Balkan Wars, and the power struggle with the Freedom and Accord Party made Talaat and the Unionists disillusioned with multicultural Ottomanism and political pluralism, turning them into hard-line authoritarian Turkish nationalists.

In 1913, Talaat and Ismail Enver carried out a coup d'état with Mahmud Şevket Pasha as a reluctant partner. With the latter's assassination, an autocratic triumvirate of CUP Central Committee members lead the Ottoman Empire, consisting of himself, Enver, and Ahmed Cemal (known as the Three Pashas) of whom Talaat was its civilian leader. Talaat and Enver were influential in bringing the Ottoman Empire into the First World War. During World War I, he ordered on 24 April 1915 the arrest and deportation of Armenian intellectuals in Constantinople (now Istanbul), most of them being ultimately murdered, and on 30 May 1915 promulgated the Temporary Law of Deportation; these events initiated the Armenian genocide. He is widely considered the main perpetrator of the genocide, and is thus held responsible for the death of around 1 million Armenians.