Djevdet Bey

Jevdet Bey or Djevdet Tahir Belbez[1] (1878 – January 15, 1955)[2] was an Ottoman Albanian governor of the Van vilayet of the Ottoman Empire during World War I and the Siege of Van. He is considered responsible for the massacres of Armenians in and around Van.[3] Clarence Ussher, a witness to these events, reported that 55,000 Armenians were subsequently killed.[4][5] He is also considered responsible for massacres of Assyrians in the same region.[6]

Not to be confused with the (unrelated) novel Cevdet Bey ve Oğulları by Orhan Pamuk - Note Bey is a title and not a family name.

He was born in Shkodra, Ottoman Empire, as the son of Tahir Pashë Krajani, who was a vali of Van, Bitlis, and Mosul.[7] He also became the brother-in-law of Enver Pasha.[1] In 1914, as the Kaymakam of the Sanjak of Hakkari, Djevdet worked closely together with the Ottoman Secret Service to coordinate the defense against the Russians and possible offensives against the region around Lake Urmia.[8] He wrote to Talaat Pasha that Urmia could have been captured with some more support of his superiors.[9] He succeeded Hasan Tahsin Bey as Governor of the Vilayet of Van in 1914.[10] As such, he allied with the Kurdish chieftain Simko Shikak and ordered a massacre of about 800 Assyrians in Salmas in March 1915.[11] In July 1915, he led the massacre of the 15,000 Armenians of Bitlis.[12]

Djevdet was a leader of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP)[13] and the brother-in-law of Enver Pasha.[11]

He was portrayed by Elias Koteas in the 2002 film Ararat,[14] which received 2 Oscar nominations.

See also

Further reading
  • Arnold Toynbee (1916). The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire: Documents Presented to Viscount Grey of Fallodon. Hodder and Stoughton.

References
  1. Sait Çetinoğlu, "Bir Osmanlı Komutanının Soykırım Güncesi" Archived 2014-02-24 at the Wayback Machine, Birikim, 09.04.2009. (in Turkish)
  2. Selcuk Uzun, "1915 „Van İsyanı“ ve Vali Cevdet (Belbez) Bey", Küyerel, 30.12.2011. (in Turkish)
  3. Kévorkian, Raymond H. (2010). The Armenian genocide : a complete history (Reprinted. ed.). London: I. B. Tauris. p. 321. ISBN 978-1848855618.
  4. Steven Leonard Jacobs, ed. (2009). Confronting genocide Judaism, Christianity, Islam. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. p. 130. ISBN 978-0739135907.
  5. Rubenstein, Richard L. (2010). Jihad and genocide (1st pbk. ed.). Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. p. 51. ISBN 978-0742562028.
  6. Travis, Hannibal (December 2006). ""Native Christians Massacred": The Ottoman Genocide of the Assyrians during World War I". International Association of Genocide Scholars. 1 (3): 343.
  7. Sukran Vahide (16 February 2012). Islam in Modern Turkey: An Intellectual Biography of Bediuzzaman Said Nursi. SUNY Press. pp. 27, 37. ISBN 978-0-7914-8297-1.
  8. Kaiser, Hilmar (2019). Kieser, Hans-Lukas Dieser; Anderson, Margaret Lavinia; Bayraktar, Seyhan; Schmutz, Thomas (eds.). The End of the Ottomans: The Genocide of 1915 and the Politics of Turkish Nationalism. Bloomsbury Academic. p. 74. ISBN 978-1-78831-241-7.
  9. Kaiser, Hilmar (2019). Kieser, Hans-Lukas Dieser; Anderson, Margaret Lavinia; Bayraktar, Seyhan; Schmutz, Thomas (eds.), p.77
  10. Kaiser, Hilmar (2019). Kieser, Hans-Lukas Dieser; Anderson, Margaret Lavinia; Bayraktar, Seyhan; Schmutz, Thomas (eds.).pp.102–103
  11. Yuhanon, B. Beth. "The Methods of Killing in the Assyrian Genocide". Sayfo 1915. p. 183. doi:10.31826/9781463239961-013. S2CID 198820452.
  12. "Kaza Bitlis / Բաղեշ - Baghesh / ܒܝܬ ܕܠܝܣ Beṯ Dlis". Virtual Genocide Memorial. Retrieved 2023-09-17.
  13. Sukran Vahide (16 February 2012). Islam in Modern Turkey: An Intellectual Biography of Bediuzzaman Said Nursi. SUNY Press. p. 30. ISBN 978-0-7914-8297-1.
  14. "Elias Koteas". IMDb.
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