Ali Fuat Cebesoy

Ali Fuat Cebesoy in his early days

Ali Fuat was born in September 1882 to father Ismail Fazil Pasha and mother Zekiye Hanım.[1] He was of German[3]-Circassian[4][5] descent, and also his maternal grandfather Mehmet Ali Pasha was of Huguenot-French descent.[3] Ali Fuat was the grandson (on his mother's side) of Mushir Mehmet Ali Pasha[3] (Ludwig Karl Friedrich Detroit) who was the commander of the Danube Army (Tuna Şark Ordusu) during the Russo-Turkish war, participated in the Congress of Berlin as one of three representatives of the Ottoman Empire and was killed on September 7, 1878[6] in Gjakovë (Kosovo) by Albanian insurgents who were dissatisfied with the results of the Berlin Congress.[6][7][8]

Ali Fuat attended the Ottoman Military College together with Kemal Atatürk, Kazım Karabekir, and Fethi Okyar amongst other notables of the Turkish War of Independence.[9] Following he entered the War School in 1902, and graduated from the Ottoman War College in 1905 as a Staff Captain (Erkân-ı Harp Yüzbaşısı). Later he was assigned to the 3rd Rifle Battalion (Üçüncü Nişancı Taburu), the 28th Cavalry Regiment (Yirmi Sekizinci Süvari Alayı) based in Beirut under the command of Fifth Army based in Damascus, and later to 15th Artillery Regiment (On Beşinci Topçu Alayı) based in Thessalonica under the command of Third Army as an intern. He joined the Committee of Union and Progress (membership number was 191). On June 28, he was assigned to the staff officer of the Third Army. And then he was promoted to the rank of Senior Captain and appointed to the area commander of Karaferye (present day: Veria). On January 9, 1909, he was appointed to the military attaché in Rome, Italy. On October 1, 1911, he was appointed to the chief of the 1st department (chief of operations) of the Western Army.[10] On February 20, he was temporarily appointed to the chief of staff of the I Corps, VII Corps. And then he was appointed to the commander of a detachment that was formed to liberate İpek (present day: Peć) and Yakova (present day: Đakovica) from Albanian insurgents.[10]

Ali Fuat Pasha organized the resistance in Western Turkey against the Greek invasion and thus actually started the National Independence War. He contributed to the resistance forces against the Greek army that had begun to occupy Western Anatolia. He signed Amasya Protocol and at the end of the Sivas Congress in 1920, he was appointed as the general commander of the National Forces by the Board of Representatives. The presence of him and his army in Ankara is the reason behind Atatürk's choice of this city as the center of Turkish War of Independence.

The same year, he was elected as a deputy at the First Parliament. He was appointed ambassador to Moscow, Soviet Russia in 1921, as he had quarrels with İsmet İnönü, who was appointed by Atatürk as the Commander of the Western Front although İnönü had failed against Greek invasion at Kutahya-Altıntas in 1921. By personally negotiating with Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin in Moscow, he signed the Treaty of Moscow (1921), along the lines of the Brest-Litovsk Peace Treaty, as the representative of the Ankara government, which provided financial and military support from Russia to the Turkish Independence War, in exchange for ceding the right to Batum, then controlled by the Georgian Republic, to the Soviet government. After finishing his duty as an ambassador, he was elected as the second spokesman of the Grand National Assembly of Turkey.

After the declaration of the Turkish Republic, he became a deputy. In this new era of his political career, he joined the founders of the opposition party, the Progressive Republican Party, and he was elected as the general secretary of the party in 1924. During the rebellion of Shaikh Said, the Law on the Maintenance of Order was affected and the Progressive Republican Party was closed down. Ali Fuat Cebesoy was arrested with the accusations of participating in the attempt of assassination against Atatürk and was taken to İzmir. He was tried at the İzmir Independence Court and was acquitted in 1926.

He retired with the title of general. He stayed away from politics for four years between 1927 and 1931. In 1931, he returned to politics and was elected as a deputy representing Konya. He served as the deputy for Konya and Eskişehir until 1950. He also served as Minister of Public Works from 1939 to 1943, Minister of Transportation (1943–1946) and as the president of the Parliament in 1948. He was an independent candidate of the Democratic Party from Eskişehir in the first democratic elections of the Turkish history held on May 14, 1950, and he was elected with a landslide. In the following years, he was elected as a deputy from İstanbul and served in the parliament for ten more years between 1950 and 1960. After the military coup on May 27, 1960, he was initially arrested by the junta with the rest of the Democratic Party MPs but later set free. After this experience he quit politics for good.

In accordance with his will, he was buried in the backyard of a mosque near Geyve train station, where the first shots of the Turkish War of Independence were fired, when he died at the age of 86. However, his remains were moved to the Turkish State Cemetery in Ankara, after the military coup of 1980.

• 
  Mustafa Kemal is holding a meeting with Ali Fuat Cebesoy and Rauf Orbay during the Sivas Congress (September 1919)
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  Commanders of Turkish Army during the Turkish War of Independence
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  Founders of the Progressive Republican Party, 1924, in front of the Haydarpaşa Terminal

• List of high-ranking commanders of the Turkish War of Independence