Founding the Republic

chapter 5 Founding the Republic

Ağaoğlu was arrested in Istanbul by the Ottoman police on January 15, 1919, and handed over to the British forces, being accused of crimes against the Armenians and other non-Muslims and his pro-German activities during the war.1 These he refuted repeatedly with the petitions he sent to the British High Commissioner.2 His wife Sitare Hanim, who was once described by a diplomat as a bluestocking, also wrote to the British, arguing that her husband was arrested purely as a consequence of intrigues worked out by personal hatred against him. “He had been given by General Thomson the permission to travel as Chief Delegate for the Azerbaijan Republic to the Paris Conference. On his return journey, he caught the Spanish fever and was lying down for two months in Constantinople. Before recovering from his illness he was imprisoned.”3 British authorities disregarded these petitions and considered Ağaoğlu to be “an extremely dangerous man” due to his pro-German and Pan-Islamist tendencies.4 According to British intelligence, he was of Jewish origin; he had been a member of Okhrana as agent provocateur at an early age and had studied in Moscow. He was also being accused of collaborating with Gökalp in arranging massacres in the Caucasus.5 No evidence I could find about any of these information on Ağaoğlu’s origins as put forward by the British intelligence, except, as shown previously, his pro-German and Pan- Islamist writings. After being kept in detention in Istanbul, Ağaoğlu was taken to Moudros and then to Malta where he spent about one and a half year in prison. After his arrival in Istanbul and during his detention, he kept a diary in which he took notes on day-to-day politics of the empire, often expressing his anger to the Istanbul government, the anti-Unionists and Greeks and Armenians who were collaborating with the Allies.6 Meanwhile, he studied English, but

1 Aghayef to Chancellor, April 16, 1919, TNA F0371/4174/296; Samet Ağaoğlu, Babamdan Hatıralar, p. 11. According to Ağaoğlu’s Malta diaries, he was arrested in March 1919; see, Ahmet Ağaoğlu, “Mütareke ve Malta Hatıraları,” Akın, May 29–August 19, 1933. 2 For more detailed account of his petitions see, TNA F0 371/4174. 3 Sitare Agaef to High Commissioner, July 7, 1919, F0 371/4174/307. 4 Memo on A. Aghayeff, August 26, 1919, F0 371/4174/292. 5 Memo on A. Aghayeff, no date, F0 371/4174/308. 6 Ahmet Ağaoğlu, “Mütareke ve Malta Hatıraları,” Akın, May 29–August 19, 1933.

Founding The Republic 121 never mastered the language, and taught Russian to Hüseyin Rauf (Orbay) (1881–1964).7 Ağaoğlu tells us that he wrote his Three Civilisations while he was imprisoned in Malta.8 He also exchanged ideas, in the abundance of free time, with other leading Unionists and Ottoman statesmen and writers such as Said Halim Paşa (1863–1921), Ali Fethi (Okyar) (1880–1943), another military officer, a close friend of Mustafa Kemal Paşa and Prime Minister of the republic in 1923 and in 1924–5; and Ziya Gökalp, who were also imprisoned in Malta.9 From his diaries we understand that Ağaoğlu was finding Gökalp’s sociologist thought which the latter was sharing with him and other prisoners interesting and important at the time, but not to the extent to employ and exploit theories of Durkheim, which would loom large in his writings in the republican period.10 This itself makes us question if he genuinely wrote Three Civilisations while in Malta, as he indeed draws upon Durkheim’s work in this book. While he was away, Ağaoğlu lost his position as professor at the Darülfünun at Ali Kemal’s command. This put the family in financial difficulty, which was why the National Assembly in Ankara would arrange a salary for them.11 Ağaoğlu was released from Malta again thanks to the Ankara government. He left Malta in May 1921 in an exchange of war captives with the British. Feeling indebted to Mustafa Kemal for these, he joined the National Liberation Movement led by the latter. Subsequently he found a place among the inner circle of the top echelon leaders of the Kemalists. In the 1920s, as the rpp government turned into an authoritarian one, there would be a gradual shift from his position as an enthusiastic liberal advocate of what has been called the Kemalist Revolution to a critical revolutionary, however. As Zürcher periodises, the Kemalist Revolution, like the preceding Young Turk Revolution (1908), consisted of three phases12: the first phase began with the National Liberation Movement (c. 1919–1922), during which “the ‘Kemalist’ movement sprang up as an illegal armed resistance movement, which fought

7 Süreyya to Ahmet Agaef, October 8, 1919, KEKBMV 28/25; Clerk to Henderson, January 31, 1931, FO 424/274/13; Ahmet Ağaoğlu, “Ne İdik, Ne Olduk? I,” Hayat Mecmuası, No. 6 (1978), p. 12. 8 Ahmet Ağaoğlu, Mütareke ve Sürgün Hatıraları, Istanbul: Doğu Kitabevi, 2013. 9 Osman Okyar, Atatürk and Turkey of republican era, Ankara: Union of Chambers of Commerce, Industry, Maritime Commerce and Commodity Exchanges of Turkey, 1981. 10 Ahmet Ağaoğlu, Mütareke ve Sürgün Hatıraları, Istanbul: Doğu Kitabevi, 2013, pp. 95–96, p. 118. 11 Ibid., p. 30. 12 Erik J. Zürcher, “The Ottoman Legacy of the Turkish Republic: An Attempt at a New Periodization,” Die Wet des Islams, New Series, Bd. 32, No. 2 (1992), p. 239.