Adnan Menderes (; 1899 – 17 September 1961) was a Turkish politician who served as Prime Minister of Turkey between 1950 and 1960. He was one of the founders of the Democrat Party (DP) in 1946, the fourth legal opposition party of Turkey. He was tried and hanged under the military junta after the 1960 coup d'état, along with two other cabinet members, Fatin Rüştü Zorlu and Hasan Polatkan. One of the accusations brought against him was of him ordering the Istanbul pogrom against citizens of Greek ethnicity. He was the last Turkish political leader to be executed after a military coup and is also one of the four political leaders of the Turkish Republic (along with Kemal Atatürk, Süleyman Demirel and Turgut Özal) to have had a mausoleum built in his honour.
Early life and career
Adnan Menderes was born in 1899 in Koçarlı, Aydın Province, as a son of a wealthy landowner of Crimean Tatar origin. After primary school, Menderes attended the American College in İzmir. He fought against the invading Greek army during the Turkish War of Independence and was awarded a medal of honour. He graduated from the Law School of Ankara University. In 1930, Adnan Menderes organized a branch of the short-lived Liberal Republican Party (Serbest Cumhuriyet Fırkası) in Aydın. After the party dissolved itself, he was invited by Atatürk himself to join the ruling Republican People's Party and was selected by the party leaders as a deputy of Aydın in 1931. In 1945, he was expelled from the party with two other colleagues due to inner-party opposition to the nationalization policies of İsmet İnönü.
Rise to power
In June 1945, Menderes, together with Celâl Bayar, Fuat Köprülü and Refik Koraltan demanded more political and democratic freedom in their Motion with four signatures. The motion was not approved by any member of the Turkish parliament except for the four who brought the motion to parliament, and by September 1945, Menderes, Köprülü and Koraltan were all stripped of their membership of the CHP due to their opposition to the Turkish government. Bayar then resigned from parliament and later also the party. On 7 January 1946, the four formed the Democratic Party (DP) and in the 1946 elections Menderes was elected deputy of the Democratic Party representing Kütahya. When the DP won 52% of the votes in the first free elections in Turkish history on 14 May 1950 (in which votes were cast in secret and counted openly), Menderes became prime minister, and in 1955 he also assumed the duties of foreign minister. He later won two more free elections, one in 1954 and the other in 1957.
During the 10 years of his term as prime minister, the Turkish economy was growing at a rate of 9% per annum. He supported an eventual Military alliance with the Western Bloc and during his tenure, Turkey was admitted to the NATO in 1952. With the economic support of the United States via the Marshall Plan, agriculture was mechanized; and transport, energy, education, health care, insurance and banking progressed.
Other historical accounts highlight the economic crisis in the mid-1950s, during Menderes's term, which saw Turkey's economy contract (with an 11% GDP/capita decrease in 1954), as one of the reasons for the government's orchestration of the Istanbul pogrom against the Greek ethnic minority (see below).
Istanbul pogrom
In 1955, the Menderes government is believed to have orchestrated the Istanbul pogrom, which targeted the city's substantial Greek ethnic minority. In September 1955 a bomb exploded close to the Turkish consulate in Greece's second-largest city, Thessaloniki, also damaging the Atatürk Museum, site of Atatürk's birthplace. The damage to the house was minimal, with some broken windows. In retaliation, in Istanbul thousands of shops, houses, churches and even graves belonging to members of the ethnic Greek minority were destroyed within a few hours, over a dozen people were killed and many more injured.