Ali Fuat Cebesoy

Ali Fuat Cebesoy (23 September 1882 – 10 January 1968) was a Turkish general and politician, a military-college classmate of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, an organiser of the national resistance in western Anatolia, and the Ankara government's first ambassador to Moscow. He later co-founded the Republic's first opposition party and, after years in and out of politics, served as Speaker of the Parliament in 1948. ¹

He was born on 23 September 1882 at Salacak, Üsküdar, in Istanbul — the Turkish article gives the district, the English only the city — son of İsmail Fazıl Pasha and of Zekiye Hanım, whose father was Müşir Mehmed Ali Pasha, the Danube Army commander of the 1877–1878 war. At the Military College he sat in the same class as Mustafa Kemal, who lodged with the family in Istanbul, and as Kâzım Karabekir. A staff captain of 1905, he served in Beirut, Thessalonica and Rome, fought in the Balkan Wars — he was wounded at Bizani and surrendered with the Yanya Corps in 1913 — and in the First World War he fought at the Suez, at Gallipoli and in Palestine, ending the war in command of the XX Corps. After the armistice he moved the corps into Anatolia, organised the Kuva-yi Milliye of the west, signed the Amasya Protocol, and was made general commander of the National Forces. ^{1 2}

Sent to Moscow as ambassador after a quarrel with İsmet İnönü, he negotiated personally with Lenin and Stalin and signed the Treaty of Moscow of 16 March 1921, which brought Soviet support to the independence war. In 1924 he became general secretary of the Progressive Republican Party, the opposition party he co-founded with Karabekir; when it was closed he was tried in the İzmir assassination case and acquitted in 1926. Returning to parliament in 1931, he served as Minister of Public Works (1939–1943) and Minister of Transport (1943–1946), and succeeded Karabekir as Speaker on 30 January 1948, holding the chair until 1 November 1948. He sat as a Democrat deputy through the 1950s and left politics after the 1960 coup briefly arrested him with the other Democrat deputies. ¹

He died in Istanbul on 10 January 1968. In accordance with his will he was buried in the yard of the mosque at Alifuatpaşa near Geyve station, where some of the first shots of the independence war had been fired; the English article adds that his remains were later moved to the Turkish State Cemetery in Ankara, but flags that claim as needing a citation, and the Turkish article still gives Geyve as his resting place, so this record preserves both readings and writes no burial place as settled. ^{1 2}

No source consulted names a school for him: neither article states his religion, and Wikidata's generic Islam value is one structured-data family, so his faith is recorded as unknown. ³

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