1 1 8 Honour and Shame: The Diaries of a Unionist and the 'Armenian Question"1 Ozan Ozavci On the morning of 8 March 1909, Mehmed Cavid Bey (1877-1926), a leading member of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) and a deputy in the new Ottoman parliament, received two telegrams from Salonika. The first informed him that his wife, Saniye Han?m, had arrived safely in the city. The second brought good news about her long struggle with tuberculosis. Her doctors were saying that her health was now improving. When Cavid received a third telegram later in the evening, asking him to go to Salonika urgently, he understood that something was wrong. He received the bad news at the Istanbul station, just before he boarded the evening train. With the shock and grief at his wife's sudden death, perhaps because he sought consolation in writing, that evening he started to keep a diary.2 The first pages of the diary suggest that Cavid Bey was seeking emotional relief. He complained about his loneliness, the absence of his friends to console him and the insincerity of the consolation messages. But as his political career rose rapidly after that sad day, the content of his diaries changed. They came to consist of his first-hand observations of the political, economic and financial affairs of the Ottoman Empire. Writing on an almost daily basis, he used the diaries mostly as a practical reminder for his own work, but often he noted his feelings and made personal remarks about the significant occurrences of his time - including the Armenian genocide of 1915. 1 The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP/2007-2013)/ ERC Grant Agreement n.615313. I would like to take this opportunity to thank Margaret L. Anderson, Hans-Lukas Kieser, Khatchig Mouradian and Maurus Reinkowski for reading and making comments on various versions of this chapter, which significantly improved it. Needless to say, the responsibility for any errors, factual or otherwise, is mine. 2 Hüseyin Cahit Yalç?n, 'Me?rutiyet Devrine Ait Cavit Bey'in Hat?ralar?', Tanin 1 (30 August 1943); diary entry for 8 March 1909, Tanin 1 (30 August 1943). 35632.indb 193 17/2/2018 141:15
1 1 194 End of the Ottomans Once described by Winston Churchill as a'skilful and incorruptible' man, Cavid was widely known among Western diplomats as the most capable man of finance in the CUP.3 He was also the first Unionist to hold a cabinet position, as minister of finance, in summer 1909, and was assigned the same post in 1913 and 1917. All along, he introduced important financial reforms, secured large external loans and made huge efforts on behalf of the Unionist struggle against opposition groups to control political power.ª When he became Ottoman minister of finance for the first time on 27 June 1909, Sir Gerard Lowther, the British ambassador to Istanbul, wrote: [C]avid belongs to the sect of Salonican Crypto-Jews known to the Turks as 'deunmeh' [dönme], which have