Mehmet Sherif Pasha, a founding member of Kurd Society for Cooperation and Progress and representative of the Society for the Elevation of Kurdistan to the Paris Peace Conference. He was a leading Kurdish nationalist. He was the son of Said Pasha Kurd, nephew of Kurd Ahmet Izzet Pasha and brother of Kurd Fuad Pasha. Sherif Pasha was an OttomanAmbassador to Stockholm and the second documented Kurd in Sweden and one of the delegates at the Paris Peace Conference on behalf of the Society for the Elevation of Kurdistan and as well at the Treaty of Sèvres. Sherif Pasha lived in Sweden for ten years. The first documented Kurd in Sweden was the physician Mirza Seid from east Kurdistan who came 1893. Before 1908 Sherif Pasha was a supporter of the Young Turk movement and provided economic support to Ahmed Riza, a young Turk leader in Paris. After the 1908 Revolution he returned to the Ottoman Empire and headed up the Committee of Union and Progress branch in the Istanbul district of Pangaltı. However, he soon fell out with the CUP. The reasons for this are debated. According to Sherif Pasha and his supporters, he was concerned with the role of the military in politics. However, his detractors claim that he had been angered by the fact that he had not been appointed the Porte's Representative London. In 1908, he co-founded the Kurd Society for Cooperation and Progress together with Emin Ali Bedir Khan and Abdulkadir Ubeydullah. He again left the Empire and helped to found a number of opposition parties. He also published an opposition newspaper in Paris entitled Meşrutiyet. Due to his oppositional stances, the CUP launched a failed assassination attempt on him in 1914. Sherif Pasha survived and remained in Monte Carlo throughout the Great War. In an article in The New York Times dated October 10, 1915, Şerif Pasha condemned the massacres on Armenians and declared that the Young Turk government had the intentions of "exterminating" the Armenians for a long time. After 1918 he rejoined Ottoman government service, however soon defected from the Ottoman side, joining the SAK. He reached an agreement with the Armenian delegation in Paris which involved the division of eastern Anatolia between a Kurdish and Armenian state. In this agreement Van and Bitlis both fell within Armenia, and so there was a hostile response from many Kurdish leaders in those region who had no wish to be a part of Armenia. Paris was subsequently bombarded with telegrams from the region condemning the accords. Emin Ali Bedir Khan demanded his resignation from his post as a representative of the Kurds to which he then also agreed to. After the Kurdish movement was suppressed, Sherif Pasha remained in exile. However, during the Second World War he was in contact with both British and German intelligence.
