İlk TBMM’nin İlk Kanunu: Ağnam Resmi

Established on 23 April 1920, the Grand National Assembly of Turkey (GNAT) first enacted the Cattle Tax Law, which regulated the tax collected from sheep and goat farming. Indeed, this kind of tax had been in place in the Ottoman Empire as well as the former Turkic states and it was adapted to the newly established state with some modification. When the rumours spread across Anatolia that the cattle tax would have increased during the beginning of the new Assembly, Müfid Bey, the deputy of Kırşehir, requested clarification of rumors about the issue immediately. As a response, Celaleddin Arif, the deputy of Erzurum, submitted his proposal to the Assembly that the tax rate shall be applied quadruple as it used to be rather than eight-fold that had previously been proposed. The proposal was adopted with a majority in the plenary of 24 April 1920 and published on the Official Gazette numbered 1 and dated 7 February 1921. In this context, this study will enlighten why the enactment of the Law was priopritised by the Parliament, which was established under extraordinary circumstances, while there was an urgent need for adoption of many other important legislation.