Rıza Nur

Rıza Nur: The Surgeon Who Signed Lausanne and Never Forgave It

He put his name to the treaty that created the Republic of Turkey, and he spent much of the rest of his life attacking it. Rıza Nur was a military surgeon who wrote textbooks translated into German and French, a minister three times over, the second-ranking Turkish delegate at Lausanne, and then an exile in Paris and Alexandria writing a memoir designed as the counter-text to Atatürk's own account of the revolution. He was a perpetual oppositionist who opposed even the agreements he had signed. Almost nothing about him is comfortable, and very little of it is dull.

From Sinop to the Military Medical School

He was born on 30 August 1879 in Sinop, on the Black Sea coast, to a literate shoemaker and a mother from a prominent local family — an origin exactly on the boundary between the artisan class and the provincial notables, which may explain some of the chip he carried for sixty years.

He entered the Ottoman Military Medical School and graduated in 1901. His first postings included the wholly unglamorous work of inspecting imported flour for contamination on the Bulgarian frontier, the sort of public-health drudgery that later shows up in the priorities of a health minister.

Surgeon and Author

At Gülhane Military Hospital he trained as a surgeon under the German professors then remaking Ottoman medicine, and he turned out to be a natural writer of technical prose. He produced texts on circumcision and on orthopaedic surgery that were recognised by the Ottoman authorities and noticed abroad; his work was translated into German and French, which was not common for a young Turkish physician of that generation. In 1907 he published a work on protection from venereal disease, and returned to the Military Medical School as an academic.

Had the empire survived, this is probably the career he would have had: professor of surgery, prolific author, a name in a specialised field. It did not.

Against the Committee

The restoration of the constitution in 1908 pulled him into politics at around thirty, and he immediately did the thing he would do for the rest of his life: he joined the opposition. The Committee of Union and Progress was the dominant revolutionary force, and Rıza Nur set himself against it. He was imprisoned and exiled for his pains, and kept up the attack from abroad.

After the First World War, with the empire defeated and partitioned, he was among those who seriously considered an American mandate over Turkey — a position that later Turkish nationalism found almost unmentionable, and which he had to live down. He returned in 1919 and threw himself into the national movement.

Minister in Ankara

He was a founding member of the Grand National Assembly, the revolutionary parliament that Mustafa Kemal convened in Ankara against both the Sultan's government and the occupying powers. In 1920 he became Minister of National Education; in 1921, Minister of Health and Public Assistance. Over his career he held the health portfolio three times and served as acting foreign minister.

Diplomacy followed. He was an envoy for the Treaty of Moscow in 1921, which fixed relations with the new Soviet state, and then he was sent to Lausanne.

Lausanne

The conference of 1922–23 turned an insurgent movement into a recognised state, and Rıza Nur went as deputy to İsmet İnönü, the head of the Turkish delegation. He sat on the subcommittee dealing with minorities, which placed him at the exact point where the new Turkey's definition of itself was being negotiated.

His conduct there is the most consequential and most disturbing part of his record. He opposed any recognition of Kurds, Bosniaks or Circassians as minorities, holding that the Turkish state had to be ethnically singular and regarding Circassian identity in particular as a rival nationalism that threatened it. He clashed directly with the Greek former premier Eleftherios Venizelos over the fate of the Pontic Greeks. Allied delegates found him immovable on both the Armenian and the Greek questions. He also moved formally to have the conference recognise the Grand National Assembly's legitimacy and the end of the monarchy.

During the Greek–Turkish population exchange of 1923 he pressed for Albanians to be excluded, objected to their being resettled on good land near İzmit and Ankara, and accused the governor Abdülhalik Renda of encouraging Albanian settlement around İzmir. This was ethnic engineering pursued with the exactness of a man who had spent his youth inspecting flour shipments, and it is inseparable from any account of him.

Exile and the Memoirs

The break with Ankara came in 1926, after the assassination attempt on Atatürk at İzmir and the wave of executions that followed. Rıza Nur condemned the hangings of Mehmet Cavit Bey and the others as unjust, and left Turkey.

In Paris and Alexandria he built a second intellectual life. He founded and ran the *Revue de Turcologie* in French and Turkish from 1931 to 1937, and produced a fourteen-volume history of Turkey. And he wrote *Hayat ve Hatıratım* — "My Life and My Memoirs" — an enormous, furious autobiography composed in exile and conceived explicitly as the alternative to Atatürk's *Nutuk*, the official narrative of the revolution. It attacked Atatürk personally, including on his drinking, and spared few of his contemporaries. It was not published until 1968, decades after his death, and it remains both indispensable and unreliable: a first-hand account by a participant who was also a wounded and vengeful man.

He returned to Turkey and in 1942 founded *Tanrıdağı*, a nationalist literary journal advancing Turanism and pan-Turkism with a circle of young intellectuals. It ran eighteen issues before he died suddenly on 8 September 1942, at sixty-three.

Why Rıza Is Called a Genius

The case for the word rests on range, not depth, and it deserves scrutiny rather than applause. Rıza Nur was a genuinely accomplished surgeon whose textbooks were translated into two major European languages; a minister in three portfolios; a treaty negotiator at the table where a state was made; the author of a fourteen-volume national history, a scholarly Turcology review published in French, and one of the longest and most detailed memoirs in modern Turkish. He did all of this in sixty-three years, in a country that changed its script, its capital, its religion's legal status and its very name during his adult life. The underlying capacity is a formidable working rate combined with genuine intellectual seriousness in fields that share nothing — operative surgery, diplomacy, philology, historiography.

The counter-case is heavy, and honesty requires stating it. Nothing he wrote is now foundational; the fourteen-volume history is not read as scholarship; his medical texts were competent syntheses rather than discoveries. His memoirs, the work most likely to survive, are valued as testimony precisely to the degree that historians correct for their subjectivity. His political record is one of relentless negation — one Turkish scholar's assessment is that he opposed nearly every decision made, including treaties he had signed himself. And the positions he fought hardest for at Lausanne were arguments for denying whole peoples any recognition at all. Prodigious, tireless, wide-ranging, difficult: those words fit. "Genius," in the sense of a mind that changed how anything is understood, does not.

Legacy

Rıza Nur remains a contested figure in Turkey precisely because he cannot be filed. Nationalists claim him for his Turanism and his hostility to Lausanne's concessions; liberals note that his memoirs are among the earliest sustained challenges to a single official account of the Republic's founding, part of a small early-Republican literature arguing for plurality against one-party authority. His signature is on the treaty; his indictment of the men who made it fills volumes. He is the awkward witness at the birth of modern Turkey — present at everything, reconciled to nothing.

Achievements

• Medal of Independence with Red-Green Ribbon