Kemal Eren was one of the administrators of the Republican era. Born in Amasya in 1910, he graduated from the School of Political Science, began his public service as a revenue assessment clerk in Istanbul's finance offices, went on to serve as district governor in remote districts of Anatolia, and in 1950 was elected deputy for his home province on the Democrat Party list. No memoir or full biography of him exists; his life is scattered across brief official records, election documents and parliamentary minutes. When these scattered traces are brought together, they show a man who had spent long years administering the provinces and who, once in parliament, went on dealing with the same problems: land disputes, village taxes, the authority of the village headman, the burdens of the district governor. The minutes, especially those of 1952 and 1953, give the most vivid picture of him.

Family and Education

Kemal Eren was born in Amasya in 1910 and died on 3 November 1993. According to the biographical entry in the second volume of the TBMM Albümü (1950-1980), the album of the Grand National Assembly, his father's name was Celalettin and his mother's İnayet. He was a graduate of the School of Political Science, also known as the "Mülkiye", the principal institution that trained provincial administrators such as district governors and provincial governors. The album entry also records that Eren knew French, was married and had three children. In the 1946 election lists, which are based on documents in the Republican Archives, his year of birth is given in the Rumi calendar as 1326; this corresponds to 1910-1911 and agrees with the other records.

The same 1946 list also contains the name of Celal Eren, a civil servant born in Amasya in 1888 and educated at an idadi (secondary school). The match between this name and the father's name Celalettin in the album suggests that Celal Eren may have been his father; this, however, is an inference, and the documents establish no family tie between the two. The accessible sources say nothing about his birthday, the neighbourhood where he was born, his family's livelihood or his childhood. The year he graduated from the School of Political Science is not recorded either. No firm documentation has been found on these points.

Years in the Civil Service

According to the sequence in the album entry, Eren's career began in Istanbul. He first served as assistant assessment clerk at Galatasaray under the Beyoğlu Revenue Directorate, then as assessment clerk at the Kule Kapı branch of the same directorate. Assessment clerks were finance officials responsible for recording tax and duty liabilities. After these posts he returned to his home town and worked on the provincial staff in Amasya as a governor's aide (maiyet memuru).

Then came his years as district governor (kaymakam). Eren served in turn in Suşehri, Çumra, Patnos, Kemah, Dörtyol and Vezirköprü. These six districts lie in very different parts of Turkey: Suşehri in the north-east of Sivas, Çumra on the edge of the Konya Plain, Patnos south of Ağrı on the uplands north of Lake Van, Kemah in the Euphrates valley in Erzincan, Dörtyol on the shore of the Gulf of İskenderun in Hatay, and Vezirköprü close to his home, in the interior of Samsun. For a Mülkiye graduate to come to know the east, south and north of Anatolia at intervals of a few years was a familiar course in the civil service of the time. The district governor was the government's representative in the district and the head of its administration; he was also the senior official in closest contact with villages, municipalities and the public.

The dates of only one of these posts can be documented. In the list of Suşehri district governors, Kemal Eren's name appears against the years 1940-1941. According to the list, his predecessor in 1939-1940 was A. Munip İlhan and his successor in 1941-1942 Hilmi Tunal. In April 1952, speaking from the rostrum, Eren introduced himself as someone who had "applied this law for 12 years", referring to the law on preventing encroachment on real property. The remark suggests that his career as an administrator covered a period from around 1938 to 1950; this date range is an inference drawn from his words. Because his terms in the other districts could not be verified in open sources, no years are given for them here.

The sources diverge on the last stage of his career. The TBMM Albümü lists only his district governorships. A master's thesis, however, which takes the personal data of the IX Term deputies for Amasya from Kâzım Öztürk's Türk Parlamento Tarihi, gives the profession of Eren on entering parliament in 1950 as "provincial governor" (vali). No record has been found of any province in which Eren served as governor; this contradiction remains unresolved. Where he was last posted before his election in 1950 is also unclear.

The 1946 and 1950 Elections

Eren's first step into politics was taken not with the Democrat Party but at the door of the ruling Republican People's Party (CHP). Before the 1946 general election, his name appears in the list of those who applied to the CHP's Amasya organisation for a parliamentary candidacy, recorded as "Kemal Eren, Amasya, 1326, civil servant, Mülkiye". The list shows a broad field of hopefuls, from former deputies and retired officers to a teacher and a farmer. From among them the party nominated the former deputies Ahmet Zeki Tarhan, Ahmet Esat Uras and Ali Kemal Yiğitoğlu, together with Ahmet Eymir, and all four were elected. Eren's candidacy went no further at this stage. His appearance four years later on the opposing side, on the Democrat Party list, resembles the change of course taken by many provincial civil servants of the period; no document has been found, however, that explains his reasons.

On the eve of the 1950 elections the Democrat Party organisation in Amasya was still weak. According to archival documents, the provincial chairmanship was held by Celal Topala, a former sub-district head, while Faruk Çöl met the party's expenses from time to time; the resignation of the Gümüşhacıköy district chairman had shaken the organisation. Under the rule that four fifths of the Democrat Party's candidates were to be chosen by provincial and district boards, Amasya's candidates were selected locally. According to information based on the 24 April 1950 issue of the local newspaper Amasya Yeşilyurt, the Democrat Party put forward Hamit Koray, İsmet Olgaç, Kemal Eren and Cevdet Topçu in Amasya. The CHP stood with Ahmet Eymir, Ferdi Çağan, Nazım Poroy and Faik Yargıcı, and the Workers' and Peasants' Party with Basri Ergun.

The election of 14 May 1950 passed calmly in Amasya, without any notable incident. There were 68,287 registered voters, of whom 63,863 cast their ballots, a turnout of more than ninety per cent. All four Democrat Party candidates were elected, and Kemal Eren, with 34,177 votes, was the candidate with the highest vote on the list. He was followed by Ahmet Hamit Koray with 33,797, Mustafa İsmet Olgaç with 33,686 and Cevdet Topçu with 33,634 votes. That the gaps did not exceed a few hundred votes shows that the electorate largely voted for the list as a whole. According to the same source, Eren was forty years old when he entered parliament and was registered in the TBMM archive under record number 1547.

Deputy for Amasya (1950-1957)

Kemal Eren was elected deputy for Amasya on the Democrat Party list in the general elections of 1950, 1954 and 1957, and served in the IX, X and XI Terms of the Grand National Assembly. His tenure lasted from 1950 until 1 November 1957. The first of these elections was that of 14 May 1950, in which the Democrat Party ended twenty-seven years of rule by the Republican People's Party. Eren went to Ankara among the deputies of the new government.

The sources do not fully agree on the deputies who represented Amasya alongside Eren. Some lists give Hamit Koray and Ali Kemal Yiğitoğlu for the IX Term, Faruk Çöl and Hamit Koray for the X Term, and İsmet Olgaç and Faruk Çöl for the XI Term. The thesis based on the election results, however, gives the Amasya deputies of the IX Term as Eren, Koray, Olgaç and Topçu, while Ali Kemal Yiğitoğlu was a CHP deputy of the previous term. The appearance of İsmet Olgaç as deputy for Amasya in the minutes of 1953 also bears out the thesis. In a voting list of the X Term dated 23 March 1955, the names Faruk Çöl, Kemal Eren and Mustafa Zeren appear together under the heading Amasya. These lists have not been checked separately against the official election returns.

The parliamentary minutes show that Eren was not a silent deputy. The surviving traces cluster in 1952 and 1953, and all of them reveal how his background as an administrator carried over into his parliamentary work. His most sustained effort was a bill that bore his own name.

The Law on Repelling Encroachment on Real Property (1951-1952)

Together with Ankara deputy Salâhattin Benli, Eren drafted a new bill (2/191) intended to replace Law No. 2311, which governed the administrative prevention of encroachment on real property. The old law allowed a person whose field, vineyard or pasture had been seized by someone else to apply to the provincial or district governor without going to court, and the administrator would halt the encroachment and hand the property back to its possessor. Most land disputes in the villages were settled this way, in an attempt to head off violence without waiting for title suits in the courts, which could drag on for years. The bill was examined in the Interior and Justice committees and came before the General Assembly three times; on the first two occasions it was judged inadequate and sent back to committee.

At the debate of 28 January 1952 the bill drew heavy criticism. Yozgat deputy Yusuf Karslıoğlu argued that the text did not treat an application by one of several co-owners of shared property as sufficient; that it gave villagers no right of application when the headman kept silent in the face of a local strongman who drove onto the village pasture with machinery and ploughed thousands of dönüms in a few days; that it made the decisions of sub-district heads final; and that it placed the costs of investigation on poor villagers. Balıkesir deputy Esat Budakoğlu said the bill differed from the old law in no respect "of nature, basic system or mechanism", that it merely transferred the investigation from the gendarmerie post commander to the sub-district head, whereas the real problem was that twenty years of practice had failed to win the public's confidence. A motion to reject the bill and a motion to return it to committee were both voted down, and the house proceeded to the articles. In this sitting Eren submitted an amendment simplifying the wording of the first article. Under the amendment, when real property held by natural or legal persons was encroached upon or interfered with by another, the governor in the province, the district governor in the district and the sub-district head in the sub-district would repel the encroachment and hand the property to its possessor. The first article was sent back to the Interior and Justice committees together with the amendments submitted; the Justice Committee prepared its new report on 16 April 1952.

When the debate resumed at the end of March, Eren, as the bill's sponsor, answered the objections one by one. In the sitting of 31 March 1952 Karslıoğlu had argued that unless a decision was made about the crops the encroacher had sown on the field, the dispute would continue and order could not be secured. Eren replied that any dispute arising after the property had been returned to its owner would count as a fresh encroachment, and read out the bill's seventh article: a person whose encroachment had been repelled and who entered the same property again without a court order would be sentenced by the magistrates' court to between two and six months' imprisonment, and if the encroachment was committed by armed men or a crowd, the sentence would rise to between six months and two years. In his view this provision already placed the possibility of a new dispute under penalty.

In the sitting of 2 April 1952 the debate turned to the headman's authority and the time limit for applications. Some deputies wanted any villager to be given the right to apply if the headman abused his office and failed to report an encroachment. Eren reminded the house that the Village Law entrusted the headman with representing the village as a legal entity and defending its rights, and that he was responsible for the village's peace and order; to distrust in so simple a matter a man to whom the whole of the village's existence had been entrusted would, he said, amount to distrust of the powers given to him. A headman who abused his office would be committing an offence, he added, and the same possibility applied to the district governor. He also defended extending the period for applications from thirty to sixty days after the encroachment: the law in force contained no explicit time limit, the period having been set at thirty days by regulation; the committee had moved the provision into the law and lengthened the period in response to wishes voiced in the earlier debates.

Another question debated that day was who should bear the travel costs of the administrator's on-site inspection. Some deputies argued that most victims of encroachment were poor villagers and that the costs should first be paid by the Treasury and later recovered from the party found in the wrong. Here Eren drew on his own experience: speaking "as a colleague who has applied this law for 12 years", he said he had never seen a citizen whose application failed because he could not deposit the travel allowance; what citizens really wanted was a quick and sound decision, and even those without money found these five or ten liras from a neighbour. When Konya deputy Rifat Alabay asked what interest a person applying on behalf of a village pasture would have, Eren replied that the applicant was in any case a landholder and could not be considered so poor as to need legal aid. These words were greeted with cries of "bravo" from the benches; it should be noted, however, that the minutes also record the objections that viewed the matter from the poor villager's side.

The second reading of the bill was completed on 16 April 1952. Cezmi Türk set out the opposing view, saying the law would not cure the ill and would sooner or later have to be amended. Eren was the last to speak. He noted that the text he called "the remedy for a national affliction that we have brought before you" was about to become law, and acknowledged that his colleague's criticism might hold some truth; but the real remedy, he said, lay in equipping the courts with the staff to settle title cases quickly, and until such fundamental measures were taken the gap had to be filled by an administrative measure, or else the house would be standing by while citizens took one another's lives over land. The law as a whole was then put to the vote and adopted. The Assembly's index to the minutes of that period records the text as Law No. 5917 on Repelling Encroachment on Real Property (Gayrimenkule Tecavüzün Def'i Hakkında Kanun). This is the work by which Eren left his mark on parliament.

The 1952 Budget Debates

Eren's background as an administrator also shows in the budget debates. On 26 February 1952, during the debate on the Ministry of the Interior's budget, he took the floor and devoted his speech entirely to provincial administrators. When one speaks of the services of the Interior, he said, the first thing that comes to mind is the administrators at their head, under whose supervision all state functions other than judicial and military ones, beginning with internal security, were carried out. He described as a gain the fact that administrators, once held bound to keep the ruling party on its feet at any cost, were now increasingly regarded as officials answerable only to the law and their conscience. These words reflect the Democrat Party's criticism of the administrative outlook of the single-party era.

The second part of the speech is a list of wishes and reads as though written from a district governor's point of view. Eren asked that appointments between districts, which differed greatly in their degree of hardship, be based solely on competence and merit, and that every district governor be made to serve in every kind of district. So that the ideal every district governor carried in his heart, that of becoming a provincial governor, could be realised, he proposed that governorships not be given to people from outside the profession unless unavoidable, and that the administrative divisions, which no longer matched the needs of the day, be reviewed. He called for gendarmerie recruits to be chosen from among middle-school or at least primary-school graduates, for the police to be equipped with motor vehicles as soon as possible, for the still very primitive gendarmerie telephones to be improved, and for the financial resources of the Bank of Provinces, which met the electricity and water needs of small towns, to be increased.

The next day, 27 February 1952, during the debate on the education budget, Eren asked a short question. When Minister Tevfik İleri said that they were engaged in a "struggle" with the provinces over opening high schools, Eren asked him to explain the nature of that struggle. The minister replied that the fifty-nine high schools they had inherited were far from being real high schools, that they were reluctant to open new ones without qualified teachers and laboratories, and that the year before, faced with the demands of twenty provinces, they had opened only three. The minutes draw no direct connection between the question and Amasya; that Eren may have asked it with his own province's demand for a high school in mind is an interpretation.

The Debate on the New Village Law (13 May 1953)

According to the record of the 81st Sitting in the IX Term Minutes, on Wednesday 13 May 1953 the Assembly was debating the bill for a new Village Law (1/185). As Hatay deputy Abdürrahman Melek explained, the government had aimed to consolidate into a single text the provisions of Village Law No. 442 of 1924, which had grown cumbersome through various amendments over the years. The Interior Committee had expanded the text with provisions reorganising the financial resources of villages. Melek said that the bill aimed both at village development and at consolidating the legislation and fully achieved neither, and proposed that it be examined by a joint committee made up of the Agriculture, National Education, Health and Social committees. Antalya deputy Burhanettin Onat criticised the twenty-day limit placed on imece (communal village labour), the leaving to villagers of sites containing ancient remains, and the planned increase in land tax.

Eren took the floor in the middle of this debate. Because his signature was on the Interior Committee's report on the bill, the Chair asked whether he would speak for or against it. Eren said he would speak "in my own name" and state his personal opinion of the bill. He opened by noting that almost all the colleagues who had spoken before him were virtually unanimous that the bill brought nothing new, and he objected to this view. In his opinion the new text brought the designation of settlement areas in villages, work programmes, the regulation of elections, the re-establishment of village councils, the placing on a statutory footing of village budgets that had formerly been run by instruction, new financial resources and the status of village endowments. Having listed these headings, he said he believed many deputies had not studied the bill with the seriousness it deserved.

The longest part of his speech concerns the "salma". Eren described this levy, left to the discretion of the village councils of elders and without any fixed tax base, as a practice the villagers called "salgın" (epidemic), one that had truly become an epidemic. He counted its abolition among the most important provisions of the bill and called it a revolution in itself. In its place he proposed that villages, like municipalities, be allotted shares of certain taxes. The shares envisaged were as follows: after a new land survey, a share of no less than thirty per cent of the land tax, twenty per cent of the tax on buildings, ten per cent of the duty on mines worked in villages and ten per cent of income tax. He said he believed these shares, together with government aid, would increase the financial strength of the villages.

Recalling that a land survey would take four or five years, that land values had risen by six hundred per cent since 1936 and that no new survey had been carried out, Eren explained that until the survey was made and the shares allotted, the salma would be replaced by a temporary two-hundred-per-cent increase in land tax. He answered the criticism that this increase would crush the villager with tax statistics. According to his figures, 7,517,178 land-tax payers paid a total of about 9 million liras. Of these, 4,512,847, more than half of all taxpayers, paid between 1 and 100 kuruş. The claim that the increase would ruin this group, he said, was unfounded. As for large landowners, some of them earned millions a year yet paid only twenty liras in tax, while a middling village family paid ten liras; he argued that the new arrangement would remove this imbalance.

Eren also addressed the position of the headman (muhtar). Collecting money in the village, he said, was not the headman's job; the headman should see to the village's public services. He argued that leaving the assessment and collection of taxes to the finance service and tax collectors would relieve both villager and headman of this burden. He also recalled that the salma was assessed by the councils of elders and that the district governor's decision on the matter was final. That Eren, who a year earlier had argued that the headman should be trusted when defending the real property law, here wished to relieve him of the burden of collecting taxes suggests that he saw the headmanship as the village's representative and the executor of its public services; this is an interpretation, and the minutes draw no such link between the two speeches.

On boundary disputes he drew directly on his own experience. Some deputies had argued that the bill did not resolve boundary disputes between villages. Saying "I was involved in applying it for years", Eren explained that these disputes arose from two causes. The first was that boundaries had never been firmly fixed; even the courts could not untangle them. The second was that, as agricultural produce gained in value, common pastures between villages had begun to be ploughed. He said there were summer pastures and coppices between one village and another, and that when you settled a dispute in favour of one village, the other rose up. He described how the administrative councils sent rapporteurs and inspectors, heard expert witnesses and gave weight to the old documents held by villagers, yet when a boundary was fixed the villagers were not satisfied because they had not got what they wanted. Pointing out that the courts could not quickly resolve the boundary disputes of forty thousand villages, he called the matter "an eternal affliction, without beginning or end".

He closed by saying that the bill's shortcomings could be made good in the debate on the articles and that he believed a better law would emerge. The Chair announced that no one else had asked to speak on the bill as a whole; noting that the committee spokesman's explanation would take a long time and that the hour was late, he adjourned the sitting to Thursday 14 May 1953. In what form the bill was finally enacted cannot be determined from these sources and is not claimed here.

Written Question on Vocational and Technical School Teachers

The same minutes contain a written question (6/946) signed by Eren together with his fellow Amasya deputies Hamit Koray and İsmet Olgaç, and its answer. The subject was the first provisional article of Law No. 5965. Under this provision, those who had earlier been appointed as temporary teachers to vocational and workshop teaching posts in vocational and technical schools under Article 11 of Law No. 4644, and who had served five years or more, were to be made permanent teachers on condition that their merit was established by their teaching record, inspection reports and an examination. According to the question, in practice the teaching record and inspection reports were accepted retrospectively, but the merit examination was not; teachers who had already passed an examination were being made to sit one again. The three deputies considered this contrary to the spirit and purpose of the law, and asked that the misinterpretation be corrected and that those who had already passed an examination and had five or more years of service be made permanent without being examined again.

The written answer of the Minister of National Education, Rıfkı Salim Burçak, dated 12 May 1953, argued the opposite. In the Ministry's view, the examination in Law No. 5965 was a forward-looking condition establishing merit for the right and status to be acquired under the new law; it supported this with the wording of the Budget Committee's report on the bill. Burçak explained that temporary teachers had previously been placed on a short summer course at the boys' technical teachers' school, and that those who passed the examination at the end of the course were kept in service while the others were dismissed. This earlier examination, he stated, had been an assessment of merit for continued temporary service and bore no relation, in nature or purpose, to the examination in Law No. 5965. At the end of the answer it was also reported that a suit brought by teachers before the Council of State on the same matter had been rejected on its merits by the Council's Fifth Chamber in a decision dated 16 March 1953. The Ministry, in other words, had not accepted Eren's objection, and the matter had also gone against the teachers in the courts. The referral letter cited in the answer dates from early 1953; the exact day on which the question was submitted could not be determined from the illegible entry in the minutes.

Read together, these files show that Eren's interests were not confined to a single subject. The real property law concerns land disputes; the Village Law covers taxation, the headmanship and boundary questions; the budget speech concerns the position of administrators; and the written question the legal status of a group of civil servants. In all of them he can be said to have addressed concrete problems encountered in practice.

Committee Work

In the IX Term Eren took part in the work of the Interior Committee, where the real property bill had also been examined. In the minutes of the 42nd Sitting of 12 February 1953 and in some related reports, the signature "Amasya K. Eren" appears beneath Interior Committee reports. One of these reports deals with a dispute over the promotion of senior gendarmerie officers, another with a proposal that municipalities should set the opening and closing hours of premises such as shops and stores; the committee decided to reject the second proposal. Because of the column layout of the pages, it cannot be read with certainty from the text whether the signature indicates membership, the role of rapporteur or some other capacity. It can only be said that he took part in the committee's work.

The Suluca District Bill (1957)

One initiative of Eren's that touched his constituency directly dates from the end of the X Term. Together with four colleagues he had submitted a bill providing for the establishment of a district (kaza) named "Suluca" in the Suluca sub-district of Amasya. According to the summary of the previous sitting in the minutes of the 80th Sitting of 12 June 1957, the bill was withdrawn at its sponsor's request. Suluca had become a sub-district in 1902 and a municipality under the name "Suluova" in 1946, and according to some sources it gained district status in 1957. Why the bill was withdrawn and by which law the district was created cannot be determined from the minutes; it may be supposed that district status was granted by a separate piece of legislation, but this could not be verified.

Beyond these, no verifiable source has been found on Eren's other parliamentary work, on any further concrete investment initiatives for Amasya, or on his life after 1957 (his political position after 1960, his professional activity). No firm documentation has been found on these points.

Legacy

In the political memory of Republican Amasya, Kemal Eren is one of the deputies who represented the city in Ankara during the first seven years of Democrat Party rule; in 1950 he was the province's deputy with the highest vote. His path from assessment clerk to district governor, and from district governor to the parliamentary rostrum, is a familiar route followed by Mülkiye-trained administrators. His most lasting mark in parliament is Law No. 5917, which replaced a law he had applied for years as a district governor. The sources do not say whether any building or street in Amasya bears his name. More information could emerge only from documents not yet examined, such as a memoir, family papers, the provincial records of Amasya, party files in the Republican Archives, or collections of local newspapers of the period such as Amasya Yeşilyurt.

Chronology

1910: Born in Amasya (Rumi 1326).

1940-1941: District governor of Suşehri (list of Suşehri district governors).

1946: Among those who applied to the CHP's Amasya organisation for a parliamentary candidacy; not nominated.

1950: Elected deputy for Amasya on the DP list in the election of 14 May with 34,177 votes (IX Term).

1952: The bill on repelling encroachment on real property, drafted with Salâhattin Benli, was debated on 28 January, 31 March and 2 April and adopted on 16 April (Law No. 5917); spoke on the Interior budget on 26 February.

1953: Spoke on the bill for a new Village Law on 13 May; the Minister of National Education gave a written answer dated 12 May to his question 6/946, submitted the same year.

1954: Re-elected deputy for Amasya (X Term).

1957: In June his bill for a Suluca district was withdrawn at his own request; elected for the third time (XI Term); his service lasted until 1 November 1957.

1993: Died on 3 November.

Bibliography

Academic studies

  • Ceyda Çavuş, Çok Partili Siyasî Hayata Geçiş Döneminde Amasya'da Seçimler ve Siyaset (1945-1950), master's thesis, Ondokuz Mayıs University Institute of Social Sciences, 2019, pp. 92-93, 103-106.
  • T.B.M.M. Tutanak Dergisi, Dönem IX, Cilt 12, 32. Birleşim, 28 January 1952 (bill on repelling encroachment on real property, 2/191).
  • T.B.M.M. Tutanak Dergisi, Dönem IX, Cilt 13, 48. Birleşim, 26 February 1952 (Ministry of the Interior budget) and 49. Birleşim, 27 February 1952 (Ministry of National Education budget).
  • T.B.M.M. Tutanak Dergisi, Dönem IX, Cilt 14, 55. Birleşim, 31 March 1952; 56. Birleşim, 2 April 1952; 62. Birleşim, 16 April 1952; index to Cilt 14 (Law No. 5917).
  • T.B.M.M. Tutanak Dergisi, Dönem IX, Cilt 22, 81. Birleşim, 13 May 1953 (Village Law debate; question 6/946 and the Minister of National Education's answer).
  • T.B.M.M. Tutanak Dergisi, Dönem IX, Cilt 20, 42. Birleşim, 12 February 1953 (Interior Committee reports).
  • T.B.M.M. Tutanak Dergisi, Dönem X, Cilt 6, 54. Birleşim, 23 March 1955 (voting list).

Other sources

  • TBMM Albümü, 2. Cilt, 1950-1980, TBMM, 2010 (record transmitted through Biyografya). biyografya.com
  • Biyografya, "Kemal Eren (Amasya Milletvekili)" entry.
  • Vikipedi, "Kemal Eren" entry and list of Suşehri district governors.
  • Vikipedi, "Amasya milletvekilleri listesi".
  • T.B.M.M. Zabıt Ceridesi, Devre X, Cilt 20, 80. İnikat, 12 June 1957 (summary of the previous sitting, Suluca district bill).

Online sources