Kâzım Karabekir

Musa Kâzım Karabekir (1882 – 26 January 1948) was a Turkish general and politician, commander of the Eastern Front in the Turkish War of Independence — remembered in Turkish as Şark Fatihi, "Conqueror of the East" — and founder of the Republic's first opposition party. He ended his career as Speaker of the Grand National Assembly, dying in office. ¹

He was born in 1882 in the Kocamustafapaşa quarter of Istanbul, son of the Ottoman general Mehmet Emin Pasha; the Turkish article and one Wikidata value give the full date as 23 July 1882, which this record follows, while the English article gives the year only. After his father's death the family settled in the Zeyrek quarter — he was known as Kâzım Zeyrek until 1911, when he took the ancestral name Karabekir. He graduated from the Military College at the top of his class in 1902, fought in Macedonia and in the Balkan Wars, where he was taken prisoner at Edirne, and in the First World War he served at Gallipoli, shared in the victory at Kut, and rose to command corps on the Caucasus front before taking the XV Corps at Erzurum in May 1918. ^{1 2}

Refusing the Sultan's order to surrender and the Allied demand to demobilise, Karabekir kept the east's only intact army in being, secured Erzurum for the congress that launched the national movement, and in the autumn of 1920 commanded the campaign that retook Sarıkamış, Kars and Alexandropol; he signed the Treaty of Alexandropol with Armenia and, in October 1921, the Treaty of Kars with Soviet Russia, which fixed Turkey's eastern frontier. The English article also records, citing modern historians, that his army's campaign displaced and killed very large numbers of Armenian civilians, with conservative estimates of those killed at about 60,000. In the same years he took thousands of war orphans under his protection in the east, schooling and training them in the organisation remembered as the Gürbüz Çocuklar Ordusu, the "Sturdy Children's Army". ¹

Karabekir differed with Mustafa Kemal over the pace of the reforms, including the timing of the caliphate's abolition. On 17 November 1924 he and Ali Fuat Cebesoy founded the Progressive Republican Party, the Republic's first opposition party; after the Sheikh Said rebellion the party was closed, and Karabekir was tried by an Independence Tribunal and acquitted. He withdrew to write his memoirs until Atatürk's death, returned to parliament in 1939, and was elected Speaker on 5 August 1946. He died of a heart attack in Ankara on 26 January 1948, still in office; his remains were later moved to the Turkish State Cemetery there. ¹

No source consulted names a school for him: the English article's text discusses only his political position on the caliphate question, the Turkish infobox's generic Islam value carries its own "citation needed" tag, and Wikidata's generic value is one structured-data family, so his faith is recorded as unknown. ^{2 3}

• The defined source entities cited above, recorded in data/source/.
• Revisions of this article must be dated, and must name the source that changed each fact.