Al-Jazeera Bribery Cases Reflected in the Independence Courts

The lands of the Ottoman Empire were occupied by the Entente army after the Armistice of Mondros. The people, who did not react sufficiently to these occupations at the beginning, blew away the cobwebs with the occupation of Izmir and uprisings were started in many parts of the country. In this process, Gazi Mustafa Kemal led those who started the uprising. However, the country was worn out by years of external and internal wars. Poverty, desertions and economic problems made it difficult for the National Struggle to succeed. The leaders of the National Struggle did not consider only hard power sufficient to overcome these problems. The number of deserters in the army, which was the means to use this hard power, had reached three hundred thousand. In order to find a solution to this problem in the first place, they established the Courts of Independence as a deterrent force. The Courts of Independence had two phases. In the first phase, the incidents of bribery to evade military service in the Independence Courts of Al-Jazeera, one of the fourteen Independence Courts, will be discussed. The aim of this study is to address the difficulties experienced during the National Struggle and to reveal the extent of the bribery incidents in the Al Jazeera Independence Court. Methodologically, this article was written by utilizing many academic publications and archival documents.