WHEN THE CUP came to power in the constitutional revolution of 1908, a mass was held in Istanbul at the Holy Trinity Armenian Church. It was attended by Ottoman officials and members of all religious communities, including the sheikhulislam, the supreme Muslim religious authority in the empire. After the ceremony, the crowd went to Taksim Garden, where thousands celebrated Turkish-Armenian brotherhood.1 One of the main hopes of the revolution was that it would bring about brotherhood and equal citizenship in the empire, uniting its diverse peoples behind Ottomanism, which transcended ethno-religious difference. But it failed.
A year later, the CUP faced a countercoup by mutinous soldiers and religious students, which caused its leaders to see hidden conspiracies everywhere, allowing them to justify their militarist rule and martial law. That same year witnessed the massacre of tens of thousands of Armenians in and around Adana, victims of opponents of the CUP who viewed Armenians as CUP supporters who benefited from newfound freedoms. Constitutionalism did not bring about equal rights, as the CUP and the leaders of the constituent peoples of the empire did not want to give up their place in the order of things; Ottoman Muslims did not intend to relinquish their position as the empire’s ruling element. The CUP’s leaders were not committed to constitutionalism but used it as a means to their end of centralising the empire behind their party’s rule, assimilating difference, privileging Ottoman Turks, and doing away with the rights granted to others by the former social and political order.
For their part, the leaders of the various ethno-religious communities were intent on preserving the privileges, power, and authority granted to them over the previous six centuries. Yet their constituents were intent on overthrowing the old leadership and embarking on more democratic, often secular, forms of internal communal rule, including national assemblies to elect their own leadership, administrative decentralisation, and multilingualism. The new freedoms, including freedom of the press, and political democratisation in the empire and within communities meant more, not less, emphasis on separate culture and nationalism. Politicians and community leaders exiled or jailed by Sultan Abdülhamid II had returned from abroad or were released.
Kurdish intellectuals who supported the CUP had begun producing journals in exile, and, after 1908, in the empire, such as Kurdistan. Yet at the same time, many of the Kurdish aghas (large landlords) and sheikhs opposed the CUP. From 1909 onward there were numerous rebellions in southeastern Anatolia, northern Syria, and northern Iraq promoting regional autonomy. Outlawed underground political groups became political parties, advocating for political autonomy for their ethno-national group. Armenian parties were among them.
As part of the Period of Reforms, since 1863, Ottoman Armenians had had a national constitution that defined the powers of the patriarch within the empire, as well as an Armenian National Assembly. Since the second half of the nineteenth century, they had witnessed the rise of an Armenian merchant class, an explosion in the number of Armenian periodicals, and new educational institutions that spread literacy and promoted Armenian cultural and national consciousness. At the turn of the twentieth century, they demanded either political autonomy for Armenian-majority regions or complete equality for Armenians.
Following the coup of 1913, with Sultan Abdülhamid II’s successor Sultan Mehmed V now irrelevant, the empire was in the hands of Enver Pasha as minister of war, Mehmed Talat Pasha as interior minister, and Cemal Pasha as minister of the navy, commander of the Fourth Army, and military governor of Syria. The path was opened to implement their ideology of social Darwinism, or survival of the fittest, for saving the empire. It included turning fully away from an empire that recognised and tolerated difference.
In 1913, these men established a single-party dictatorship, a militarist regime headed by a conspiratorial revolutionary committee. In the crucible of war, they would promote a Muslim empire that was to be achieved through violent demographic engineering.2 Ripping up the Ottoman social contract, they promoted the interests of Muslims and Turks at the expense of other elements of society, considering them no longer compatriots or citizens but enemies. This began during the Balkan Wars of 1912–1913 with anti-Christian boycotts and the ethnic cleansing tactic known as ‘population exchanges’, with which the Balkan countries expelled hundreds of thousands of Muslims and the Ottomans drove an equal number of Christians out of western Anatolia and their remaining European territories. Soon the regime turned to bloodshed.3
The ruling pashas adopted CUP central committee member Ziya Gökalp’s vision that ‘the people are the garden, we are the gardeners’, entrusted to enact ‘purifying’ social engineering of the homeland.4 From 1913 they implemented a strict state of emergency in the empire lasting five years—which they justified with the threat of domestic uprising and foreign invasion—and used violence, intimidation, coercion, corruption, and lawlessness. The parliament that was elected in winter 1913–1914 was controlled by the CUP. Acting like the secretive, irredentist Christian guerrilla armies (Bulgarian, Greek, Macedonian, Serbian) of Southeastern Europe they admired, yet with the reins of an empire at their command, the CUP leaders promoted perpetual war at home and abroad. They would stifle all dissent and kill all their enemies, real and imagined, including former allies, journalists, civilians, women, children, and lawmakers from 1913 to 1918.
In June 1915, Ottoman Armenian member of parliament Krikor Zohrab, once on close terms with Mehmed Talat Pasha—they used to play backgammon together—asked for an explanation for why the regime was targeting Armenians. After all, the CUP had made an alliance with the Armenian Revolutionary Federation while in opposition in Paris in 1907. The two groups had made another accord in Istanbul after the countercoup of 1909. The Armenian Revolutionary Federation had been a member of the CUP-led parliamentary bloc, and Zohrab had been a member of the CUP-led coalition in parliament. Nevertheless, he was arrested on orders of Interior Minister Talat Pasha and assassinated while being transferred to prison.5 In Talat Pasha’s view, Armenians stood in the way of the establishment of a secure empire based in Anatolia.
Other options for saving the empire were available. The CUP could have chosen peace, liberalism, constitutionalism, equality, parliamentarianism, reform, partnership, and cooperation with the Ottoman Liberal Party and Armenian political groups, especially the Armenian Revolutionary Federation. They could have strengthened the remaining, smaller territory in their control. But in attempting to maximise their territory, the regime leaders chose war, bloodshed, dictatorship, and genocide. They did not want Anatolia to be like Macedonia, their homeland, now lost to the empire.6 As a result, the CUP’s legacy is fearsome: military coups and states of emergency; an uncompromising nationalism, militarism, and quest for centralised control; and cycles of collective violence and denial of violence with no accountability for the perpetrators.7
When Serbian militants assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, in Sarajevo in June 1914, the Ottoman regime first sought an anti-Serbian alliance with England and France, which was rebuffed, and then with Germany, which was supported by Kaiser Wilhelm II (reigned 1888–1918). Germany and members of the Ottoman regime, including Enver Pasha and Mehmed Talat Pasha, signed a secret agreement in August in which the Ottomans pledged to join the war on Germany’s side against Russia. Germany promised to play a leading military role within the Ottoman Empire and defend its territory. Together with their German allies, Ottoman leaders believed, a call to jihad by the Ottoman sheikhulislam would help the war effort by inspiring insurrection among colonised Muslims around the world and incite Muslims in the empire to mobilise to fight. Britain, with its hundreds of millions of Muslim subjects, especially in South Asia, was one target, and France, which ruled over tens of millions of Muslims, mainly in Africa, was the other. But the CUP quickly moved to sideline the sheikhulislam, removing him from the cabinet in 1916 and limiting his jurisdiction, as well as bringing the Islamic law courts under the control of the Ministry of Justice and the Islamic colleges under the purview of the Ministry of Education.8 The call to jihad was nothing more than war propaganda.
Germany would help the Ottomans avenge their enemies. Following the losses in the Balkan Wars, a humiliated Enver Pasha wrote, ‘Our hatred is intensifying: revenge, revenge, revenge, there is nothing else’.9 Since the 1878 Treaty of Berlin, Germany and the Ottoman Empire had had close economic relations, of which the Berlin-Baghdad railway is most famous. Even closer were diplomatic and especially military relations. Kaiser Wilhelm II made official visits to Istanbul in 1889 and 1898, bestowing an ornate fountain on the Hippodrome two years later. Ottoman cadets were routinely sent to Potsdam to train at the German war academy, emerging as officers in the German army. The Ottoman military academy had been reformed and was run by German officers. Enver Pasha had served as military attaché at the Ottoman embassy in Berlin from 1909 to 1911, where he was a media star, the face of the renewed, post–Abdülhamid II Ottoman Empire. Enver Bey brand cigarettes were advertised ubiquitously in the German capital.10 More ominously, imperial Germany’s chancellor Otto von Bismarck had urged the Ottomans to avoid implementing reforms that would ameliorate the Armenians’ condition in the eastern provinces. Other German officials had justified the Ottoman massacres of Armenians from 1894 to 1896, blaming the victims for having provoked their punishment and giving full support to Sultan Abdülhamid II and his view that ‘the Armenians are rebels who attack with sword and dynamite’.11
Thanks to these ties, the Ottomans entered the First World War on the side of Germany in autumn 1914. Hundreds of German officers and tens of thousands of German soldiers aided the Ottoman war effort. Bronsart von Schellendorf was chief of general staff. Otto Liman von Sanders served as head of the German military mission from 1913 to the end of the war in 1918, as well as commander of the Ottoman Fifth Army. The seventy-year-old Colmar von der Goltz, who had taught the Young Turks about social Darwinism at the Ottoman Royal Military Academy, headed the Ottoman Sixth Army. The German chief of general staff, General Erich von Falkenhayn, was given command of the Palestine front. Rudolf Höss, future commandant of the Nazi death camp Auschwitz, killed men for the first time while fighting for the Ottomans on the Iraqi front.12
A key reason for the Ottomans joining the First World War allied with Germany was the opportunity to fight against archenemy Russia. Russia was long seen as having meddled in Ottoman affairs on behalf of the Armenians. That some Ottoman Armenians joined the Russians during the war was enough to confirm to the Ottoman regime that all Armenians were traitors. In fact, many more Ottoman Armenians enlisted in the Ottoman army and battled against Russia.13 In October 1914, the Ottoman navy began attacking the Russian fleet in the Black Sea. By November, the Ottomans were at war with Russia’s Triple Entente allies Britain and France as well.
Seeing the Ottoman Empire as a European power changes the conventional narration of the war. The focus has generally been on Britain, France, and Germany, with less attention paid to the Ottomans and Russians. But rather than focusing on the trenches on the western front, we turn to the battles in the East, where major campaigns were fought from 1914 to 1918, revealing once again that the events and developments of European history are best depicted on a broad canvas stretching from London to Baghdad and beyond.
Thinking they would quickly defeat the Ottomans and thereby accelerate the war’s end, the leaders of the Triple Entente found instead that they were mired in costly campaigns in Ottoman territories that lengthened the war.14 Great Britain sent two and a half million troops to the Ottoman fronts; at one point, one quarter of its armed forces was deployed there. Twenty percent of Russian troops were engaged against the Ottomans in 1916, the year before the Bolshevik Revolution.15 Moreover, war gave the Ottoman regime the opportunity to annihilate the Armenians, whom they blamed for their failures.
The regime began to turn against the Armenians after the Battle of Sarıkamış, on the Caucasus frontier, against Russia (December 1914–January 1915). Enver Pasha took command of the one hundred thousand troops of the Ottoman Third Army to attack Russia on the mountainous eastern frontier. In late December 1914, he launched a surprise attack on the Russian Caucasus army, hoping to capture the town of Sarıkamış and retake the provinces in eastern Anatolia lost in the 1878 war. But it was the middle of winter, when the region is blanketed by freezing cold and heavy snow. Facing blizzards, lacking adequate provisions, tents, winter shoes, and cold-weather garments, and carrying only light weapons, the Ottoman Third Army was decimated, losing more than eighty thousand soldiers, most of whom froze to death. Enver Pasha’s chief of staff reported seeing a soldier by the side of the road stuffing handfuls of snow into his mouth as he screamed. He ‘had gone insane. In this way we left 10,000 men behind under the snow in just one day’.16 Thousands more were lost to friendly fire, as in thick fog one Ottoman regiment mistook another for Russians. Only one-fifth of the Third Army survived.17 The disaster left the eastern borderlands exposed to depredation, as Russian troops massacred Muslim villagers.
During the Sarıkamış campaign, some Ottoman Armenian soldiers had crossed over to the Russian side. Ottoman Muslim soldiers began to turn on the Armenians in their ranks, shooting their fellow soldiers, blaming them for giving information about their movements to the Russians. Their actions were reflected by views at the top, as Enver Pasha blamed the disaster on the Armenians, not on his own arrogance and terrible planning. Only months earlier the CUP had proposed an alliance with the two main Armenian political parties—the Social-Democratic Party of the Bell and the Armenian Revolutionary Federation—promising autonomy and Armenian administration in part of eastern Anatolia. Furious at Russian meddling in their empire, they had hypocritically urged Armenian anti-Russian activity across the border. When Ottoman Armenian political leaders refused to stir up trouble in Russia, the proposal was abandoned.
In the middle of January 1915, soon after the failed Ottoman attack on the Russians at Sarıkamış, Cemal Pasha led a campaign against the British in the Sinai at the Suez Canal. Like Enver Pasha, Cemal Pasha also believed in the impossible, that he could take the enemy by surprise and defeat it with inadequate numbers of men and insufficient matériel. The Sinai was as hostile for an army as the Caucasus. Cemal Pasha’s Fourth Army had only twenty-five thousand Arab, Bedouin, Druze, Kurdish, and Ottoman soldiers with which to defeat at least fifty thousand better-armed British, Egyptian, Indian, Australian, and New Zealander soldiers and their impressive arsenal, including warships defending the strategic canal.18 The Ottomans were repelled and unable to take the waterway. Cemal Pasha retreated. Unlike Enver Pasha, he managed not to lose most of his army.
Following these two defeats, the Ottomans faced the Gallipoli campaign. The British and the French sent their warships to take the Dardanelles, the strait that leads from the Aegean to the Sea of Marmara and Istanbul, with the aim of compelling the Ottomans to surrender and thereby hastening the end of the war. The first attacks caused panic in Istanbul and plans to relocate the dynasty, government, and gold reserves to Eskişehir in Anatolia.19 The regime sought a scapegoat for these setbacks, which they feared would lead to a Russian or British occupation of Istanbul. They found it in the Armenians. Deluded by conspiracy theories about the Armenians, they could not grasp that the most dangerous internal enemies conspiring with foreign powers were the Christian and Muslim Arabs who were plotting with the British and French to divide up the empire in a postwar settlement.
Serving as governor-general of Syria and commander of the Fourth Army during the war, Cemal Pasha acted brutally towards any hint of disloyalty. He used the long-practised Ottoman policy of deportation, exiling tens of thousands of rebellious Arabs, and ordered the public hangings of scores of Arab separatists. The execution sites in Beirut and Damascus are still known as Martyrs’ Square. Cemal Pasha initiated a surprising shift in Ottoman policy, considering the overall close relations between the CUP regime and Ottoman Jewish leadership and the fact that the Jewish press in the Ottoman Empire and Central Europe continued to give the Ottomans positive coverage. He deported thousands of Jews from Jaffa, Palestine, perceiving them to be dangerous separatists, until ally Germany and Mehmed Talat Pasha intervened to stop him. But what Jews faced in Palestine from Cemal Pasha was nothing like Talat Pasha’s policies directed against the Armenians in Anatolia.20
In hindsight, the Ottomans should have paid more attention to the Arabs. The Arab Revolt of 1916 and 1917 and the British campaign in Sinai and Palestine in 1917 would end four hundred years of Ottoman rule of the Islamic holy cities of Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem. The loss of these regions would lead to the collapse of the Ottoman war effort and ultimately contribute to the downfall of the dynasty. It was not Armenians conspiring with Russians that posed the gravest threat to the empire, but Arabs plotting with the British.
Hussein, the sharif of Mecca, an Arab descendant of Muhammad, and thus a man with religious legitimacy among Muslims, and an opponent of the CUP’s centralising measures, had refused to back the Ottoman call for jihad. He decided instead to take advantage of the First World War and rebel, and he was strongly backed by the British. The rebellion began in summer 1916 in the Hijaz region of western Arabia, with the Arabs at war with the Ottomans. Shells from an Ottoman hilltop garrison in Mecca hit the Great Mosque, set fire to the canopy over the Ka’ba (the shrine that is Muslims’ holiest place), and destroyed the name of seventh-century caliph Uthman on the mosque’s façade. The defenders took the latter as an omen that the dynasty would fall: the Turkish equivalent of ‘Uthman’ is ‘Osman’.21
Although the Ottomans’ machine guns and cannons gave them a military advantage against Sharif Hussein’s Bedouin cavalry, British warships, airplanes, and artillery eventually tipped the balance in favour of the rebels and the Ottomans lost the Hijaz. It was when the Arab Revolt was placed under British command in 1917 that the Ottomans lost the Sinai, Baghdad, and Jerusalem—in short, the Middle East.22 After 401 years of Ottoman rule, Jerusalem became British prime minister David Lloyd George’s ‘Christmas present for the British nation’.23 The white bedsheet that the Ottomans used to signal their surrender of the city is now held in the Imperial War Museum London.24
Major campaigns on the Ottoman front in the Middle East played a critical role in the history of the First World War. But at a secret meeting in Istanbul in January 1915, seeing the Armenian bogeyman everywhere, Talat Pasha, Enver Pasha, Cemal Pasha, Dr. Nazım, and Dr. Bahaettin Şakir decided to annihilate the Armenian population. According to Dr. Nazım, the war gave them the opportunity to attack ‘blameless Armenian women, children and populace’. Even though this would be savagery, he asked, ‘Wasn’t war itself savagery?’25
In February and March 1915, after the Ottomans failed to take the Suez Canal from the British and just as the Triple Entente began its naval campaign in the Dardanelles, Enver Pasha ordered tens of thousands of Armenian men serving in the Ottoman military in central and eastern Anatolia to turn in their weapons. Put into labour battalions, they would suffer a high death rate. Those who were not worked to death or killed en masse in 1915 were murdered in 1916.26 These policies provoked rebellion by Armenians.
In March 1915, a minor rebellion served as an excuse to deport the entire Armenian population of the town of Zeytun in the southern Anatolian region of Cilicia, which had been an Armenian kingdom before the ancestors of the Ottomans had arrived in the region. Zeytun had seen an influx of Muslim refugees from the Balkans—some of whom were appointed governor, district governor, and police chief—contributing to tensions with Christians in the area. Britain, France, and Armenian organisations in Europe had considered an invasion of the Cilician coast in 1915 to open a new front in the war, but nothing came of these plans. Zeytun was made a conscription centre for the army, bringing more Muslims into the district and inciting Armenian men to flee to avoid recruitment into labour battalions. Armenian deserters and violent bandits caused further tension. In February, some young revolutionaries planned a rebellion, which was opposed by local church leaders and Armenian notables, who informed Muslim officials of their plans. Several dozen Armenians attacked Muslim soldiers and gendarmes and were joined by over a hundred supporters who took refuge in a local monastery at the beginning of March. They cut the telegraph wires, took several Muslim officials as hostages, and demanded that they be given the barracks and government building. Ottoman authorities used Armenian notables as go-betweens to secure the release of the hostages. The notables, merchants, landowners, church leaders, and majority of the Zeytun Armenian population opposed the rebellion and did not join.
At the end of March, the Ottoman army began its assault on the rebels in the monastery using German weapons including a Krupp cannon, but the rebels had fled to the mountains. The army seized the monastery and burned it to the ground. Over the next two weeks, they arrested all Armenians of military age in the vicinity and imprisoned the Zeytun notables who had helped them. They were later hanged. On the orders of Talat Pasha, by June the army had confiscated all the possessions of the Armenians of Zeytun and deported them without provision to an area in Konya known for its harsh climate. Of the twenty thousand Armenians sent to Konya, many died of starvation and disease. In August, the survivors were deported to Ras al-Ayn and Deir ez-Zor in the Syrian desert. Along the way many more died from lack of food and water. In these two Syrian locales, the Armenians were massacred. In Zeytun, their homes were given to Macedonian Muslims. The government renamed the town Süleymanlı in honour of a gendarme commander killed by Armenian rebels.27
Also in March 1915, Enver Pasha’s brother-in-law Cevdet Bey was appointed governor of the eastern Anatolian province of Van, which had the largest concentration of Armenians in the empire.28 Cevdet Bey’s Kurdish and Circassian irregulars had engaged in massacres of Armenians in Iranian Azerbaijan, and they began to do the same in the Armenian villages outside the city of Van. In April they attacked Aigestan, the Armenian quarter of Van, where thousands of armed Armenians had barricaded themselves. The walled city was reduced to rubble. In May, Ottoman forces ended their siege and fled westward as the Russian army approached from the east. The Russians estimated their path was littered with over fifty thousand Armenian corpses, half the Armenian population of the region. On 18 May a detachment of Armenian soldiers fighting for Russia entered Van first. The Russians took over the city and citadel and appointed as governor Aram Manukian from the Armenian Revolutionary Federation. It was the first time in over five hundred years that an Armenian had ruled Van. Armenians and Russians took revenge on the Muslims who remained, massacring Kurds. The Russian advance into Anatolia was stopped by Cevdet Bey at Bitlis in July and the Russians decided to withdraw from Van, taking tens of thousands of Armenians with them. But before reaching safety in the Caucasus, one-third were killed in attacks by Kurds. The Ottomans retook Van. Van had been the CUP leaders’ worst nightmare come true: Armenian rebellion leading to foreign occupation.29
In the midst of this event, on 24 April 1915, Interior Minister Mehmed Talat Pasha sent a telegram to twenty-five governors in Thrace, Anatolia, and Syria referring to what he perceived as the existential danger to the empire posed by the rebellions at Zeytun and especially Van, where ‘traitorous’ Ottoman Armenians conspired with Russian Armenians and the Russian army to attack the imperial domains, ‘stabbing the Ottoman army in the back’. He ordered the governors to immediately close all branches of the two major Armenian political parties, confiscate their documents, arrest their party leaders and officers and any other Armenians deemed traitorous, and send them to suitable locations where they would be prosecuted in courts-martial.30
That night, the day before the Allied landing at Gallipoli, Talat Pasha ordered up to three hundred Armenian political leaders, educators, writers, clergy, and dignitaries in Istanbul jailed and tortured in Ibrahim Pasha’s sixteenth-century palace on the Hippodrome. These men and at least one woman—the writer Zabel Yessayan, who managed to escape—were then taken to the Haydarpasha Train Station (a gift from Kaiser Wilhelm II, on the Asian side of the city), and shipped to Ankara and Kastamonu province, where they were hanged or shot.31
With German general Otto Liman von Sanders as commander in chief of the defence of the Dardanelles, the Ottomans were bogged down defending the straits over the ensuing eight and a half months. What had begun as a naval campaign had turned into a ground war. It became a squalid stalemate, waged by close-quarter trench warfare, just as on the western front. Thousands of men perished pointlessly for each hundred metres gained. Soldiers died by machine gun, artillery blast, exploding mines, bayonet blades, brush fire, and disease. The Gallipoli peninsula filled with corpses—on both sides the dead lay unburied, decomposing in the stifling heat. As one British soldier wrote,
The flies! Oh, God, the flies
That soiled the sacred dead.
To see them swarm from dead men’s eyes
And share the soldiers’ bread.
Nor think I now forget
The filth and stench of war,
The corpses on the parapet
The maggots on the floor.32
The Ottoman forces and their hero Colonel Mustafa Kemal defended the peninsula valiantly, managing to hold the high ground while suffering a staggering casualty rate, as did the attacking Allied forces. Divided evenly between the Allies (Australian, British, French, Indian, and New Zealander forces) and the Ottomans, more than five hundred thousand of the eight hundred thousand men who fought there between the Allied landing on 25 April 1915 and the Allies’ final evacuation on 9 January 1916 were killed, taken prisoner, or wounded.33 For the Ottomans, this costly victory was well worth the price, for they were able to prevent the conquest of Istanbul. For the Triple Entente powers, who thought they would quickly defeat the Ottomans and speed up the end of the war, the result was the opposite. The Ottomans and the Germans would continue to battle the British and French across the Middle East in Iraq and Syria.
The Ottomans went on to defeat a British-Indian expeditionary force at Kut in Iraq in April 1916, after which they employed the prisoners of war in forced labour, but this was the last Ottoman victory. After that battle, the Ottoman army could barely hold its own in the Middle East. The army was devastated by hunger and disease, including cholera, malaria, and typhus. Its soldiers were poorly equipped and dressed in rags. It suffered a high desertion rate—jihad or not—and lacked in transportation. Yet in 1915 it was used to annihilate its fellow citizens.
Having cut off the head of the Armenian nation by murdering the top three hundred intellectual, religious, and cultural leaders arrested on 24 April, the CUP regime went for the body under the cover of war. Interior Minister Mehmed Talat Pasha authored the provisional Deportation Law of 27 May, issued by the cabinet and signed by Minister of War Enver Pasha, Grand Vizier Said Halim Pasha (who resigned in 1917 and was replaced by Talat Pasha), and Sultan Mehmed V. Chilling for the latitude given to the military, the law authorised the army to ‘deport individually or collectively, and to resettle elsewhere, the inhabitants of villages and towns suspected of treason or espionage, or according to military necessity’. The army was ‘permitted and compelled to immediately punish in the most severe manner, or attack and annihilate in the event of [armed] resistance, those who in any manner opposed the carrying out of government decrees, or acts for the defense of the homeland and the establishment of public order’.34
From May until the end of summer, Talat Pasha issued further written orders, usually sent as telegrams from his personal telegraph machine in his home.35 These telegrams sent to provincial governors in central and eastern Anatolia ordered them to use the army to deport Armenian men, women, and children to Ras al-Ayn and Deir ez-Zor in the Syrian desert and other camps along the Euphrates, under the oversight of the Interior Ministry.
At the same time, acting on secret, oral orders from CUP central committee members including Dr. Nazım, Dr. Bahaettin Şakir—the son of refugees from Bulgaria and head of the Special Organisation, formed from self-sacrificing CUP volunteers—outfitted, paid, and commanded armed gangs made up of Southeastern European and Caucasian migrants, Turks, and Kurds to annihilate the caravans as they moved out of the towns.36 According to the memoir of a former CUP central committee member, the gendarmerie received orders to turn deported Armenians over to bands of Special Organisation irregulars who were waiting for them at prearranged locations ‘like vultures’. These caravans ‘were dispatched like herds of sheep to the slaughterhouse’.37
The Armenian woman Pailadzo Captanian of the Black Sea port of Samsun survived the deportation. Her three- and five-year-old sons also lived because she gave them to a Greek family for safekeeping at the beginning of the forced journey. Her husband, however, did not survive, because at the beginning of the forced marches, men were separated from women and children, tied together with ropes in small groups, taken to the outskirts of their towns, and shot dead, axed, or bayoneted. Pailadzo Captanian kept a diary recording the gruesome events that unfolded.38
At the beginning of July 1915, the Armenians of Samsun began their thousand-kilometre forced march by way of Aleppo to Deir ez-Zor in the Syrian desert, a wasteland not suitable for sustaining the lives of thousands of survivors weakened by a harrowing journey. As the convoy passed through Armenian villages, Captanian saw houses with broken windows and open doors, the furniture scattered outside, and a church treated likewise, its Bibles torn to shreds and ritual objects thrown on the floor.39 When the convoy reached the village of Tonuz (today Şarkışla), five hours from Sivas, the men, including her husband, were separated from the rest of the caravan and forced into a stable.40 The women screamed at the gendarmes to release their men. Despite the women’s cries of despair, the soldiers forced them to continue their journey without the men.
When the convoy reached the village of Hasançelebi in Malatya province to rest, Captanian witnessed how deported young men and old Armenian men from Amasya, Sivas, and other places were crammed into a large building guarded by soldiers and farmers armed with axes.41 She and the other women and children were then forced to march out of the village. Two hours later, the soldiers and villagers returned without their captives. Many were carrying the clothes of the missing men and youths.42 One of the Turks confided to them that he had witnessed how all were shot. But his news was not even necessary, as there was no doubt about what had happened.
One evening, Captanian’s convoy rested in Hekimhan. As they slept, many of the young women were taken away and raped, or they were kidnapped, never to return.43 The others gathered money to bribe the guards to protect them. They also were attacked by Kurds who stole their luggage, clothing, mattresses, and bedcovers.44 From then on, the nightly attacks were repeated. Over the following days the remaining refugees rested in Kırkgöz along with thousands of other Armenian deportees from every social class. In the whole area there was only one well, near which many ill and dying people lay. Corpses began to putrefy, ‘which befouled the air and poisoned the living’.45 The next morning the journey continued on foot. The first thing Captanian saw was a wagon full of children, rounded up by the municipality of Malatya. Thousands of orphans were gathered in the city, without care, emaciated.46 They died like flies.47
A month after having left Samsun, Captanian’s marching column reached the mountainous Fırıncılar region south of Malatya. It would take it two months to go through the mountains to Suruç. As the refugees climbed through the Taurus Mountains, they felt like they were walking through a desecrated cemetery because, with every step, they trod on decayed corpses. The ghoulish situation making the deportees into living corpses, she recalled: ‘How terrifying the victims looked! Wide open mouths gaping in emaciated faces’.48
The women from Tokat and Sivas were part of a caravan that followed the same path Captanian’s caravan took, but rather than halting in Suruç it went by way of Urfa to Ras al-Ayn. Of seven hundred women, hardly sixty reached the final destination.49 The women were stripped by their Kurdish guards and forced to march naked. Nude, they walked for days in the burning sun. With one hand they protected their heads from the heat, with the other they tried to protect their modesty, as the local people they passed mocked them. They were burned, covered with blisters, beaten by their guards. The humiliated caravan was called ‘the column of the naked’.50 It was turned into a slave market. According to Captanian, ‘They were sold off like cows, some for a fixed price, others auctioned off to men’.51
Worse, if it can be imagined, was the situation of mothers in her caravan, who carried their children in sacks on their backs. None of the mothers reached the final station, dying along the way of exhaustion, hunger, and thirst.52 Only some of the children survived. Captanian recalls the numerous children left by the wayside. One of them she could not forget—a five-year-old boy. Next to him lay the still-warm corpse of his mother. As he saw Captanian’s caravan, the boy stood up, stretched out his arms, and begged to be taken. When asked where his mother was, he responded by pointing to the corpse, telling them he did not know why she did not wake up.53
Captanian describes thirst as being crueller than hunger. Despite her thirst, she kept herself from drinking from any suspicious bodies of standing water, as there were usually corpses in them. Most drank regardless. Thirst made her drink from the Euphrates, although dozens of bodies floated before her very eyes.54 Captanian also recalled the monotonous sound of the caravan—like a swarm of bees, it was made up of the weeping, sobbing, and wailing of the deported.55 It was the terrible sound of her dying people, echoing in the valleys and mountains.
Captanian asked one of the Turkish donkey drovers why they drove them from one place to another. To where were they being led? He responded, ‘Your journey will end where you croak. That is the truth’.56 Captanian agreed with the drover: ‘The authorities led the deportees on the longest possible journey to systematically decimate them through exhaustion, hunger, thirst, murder and [sexual] assault’ before they even reached their destination.57
After three months, the deportees reached Aleppo in Syria. By the end of the summer of 1915, eastern Anatolia had been cleared of Armenians. Then, over the next year, Mehmed Talat Pasha ordered the deportation of Armenians from western Anatolia, including areas that were not a theatre of war. Talat Pasha was a fastidious recordkeeper. In his private notebook compiled at the end of 1916 or beginning of 1917, he calculated that he had deported 924,158 of the one and a half million Ottoman Armenians living in the empire in 1914.58 According to his figures, Captanian was but one of 34,500 Armenians deported from the province of Trabzon from a prewar population of 37,549. Talat Pasha determined that only 350,000 to 400,000 Armenians remained alive in the empire in 1916.59 He listed no Armenians in Trabzon, nor in the other eastern provinces of Erzurum, Bitlis, Van, Diyar Bakir, and Elazığ (previously called Mamüretülaziz). Those who survived the deportations and reached the camps suffered a very high death rate there. The inmates wasted away from disease, thirst, and starvation, and were raped and murdered by their own guards.
A German soldier, posted to the ambulance service of the Ottoman Sixth Army, led by Field Marshall Colmar von der Goltz, reported from Ras al-Ayn in November 1915 how the camp was filled with hunger, death, illness, and despair, the smell of excrement and putrefaction.60 All of this misery was surpassed by the awful sight of the ever increasing number of orphaned children, who sat on the ground, neglected, starving, bereft of the slightest amount of human concern, freezing in the cold of the desert night, their faces caked with dirt and dried tears.61
The horror was not just in Ras al-Ayn and Deir ez-Zor, but in the valleys and on the banks of rivers there were, in the words of the same German soldier and eyewitness, such ‘camps of misery’.62 The ‘mighty stream of an exiled nation, the hundreds of thousands of the damned’ that diminished in the mountains finally petered out in the desert. Deportation was ‘a journey of no return’.63
Those who had not succumbed to the policy of death on the marches or to deliberate starvation and death in the camps by summer 1916 were burned alive, drowned, or massacred in a final rampage east of Deir ez-Zor.64 To understand the utter destruction of the Armenians, it is useful to look at the motivations of some of the major perpetrators.
Dr. Mehmed Reşid was governor of Diyar Bakir in 1915 and 1916. Reşid was a Circassian refugee from the Caucasus and Bulgaria, a graduate of the Royal Military Medical Academy, and a founder of the CUP. He had been governor of Karesi in the Marmara region, from which he had expelled Ottoman Greeks in 1913 and 1914. Obsessed with modern scientific ideas, social Darwinism, and conspiracy theories, he believed it was necessary ‘to liquidate’ the Armenians before they ‘eliminated’ the Ottoman Muslims. Furiously scribbling his defence at the end of the war and before he committed suicide in 1919, he declared, ‘The fatherland was about to be lost, therefore, I proceeded eyes closed and without consideration, convinced that I was acting for the welfare of the nation’. In his view, ‘the Armenian bandits were a load of harmful microbes that had afflicted the body of the fatherland. Was it not the duty of the doctor to kill the microbes?’65 He was responsible for the death of 120,000 Armenians and Assyrians, along with four Ottoman governors or district governors whom he ordered murdered for opposing his genocidal plans.66
Interior Minister Mehmed Talat Pasha sent a telegram to Governor Mehmed Reşid dated 12 July 1915 concerning the governor’s unauthorised organisation of massacres of Armenians and Christians ‘without distinction as to sect’ within the province he governed. In Mardin, for example, ‘seven hundred people from among the Armenians and other Christian inhabitants were recently taken outside of the city at night and with due authorisation, slaughtered like sheep’, and that ‘the total of those killed to date in these massacres is estimated at two thousand persons’.67 Alarmed by the indiscriminate killing of Christians, Talat Pasha scolded Reşid for applying to Assyrian Christians the same measures ‘intended for the Armenians’. The governor had been ordered to target only Armenians. Talat Pasha sent telegrams in August to governors of the eastern provinces commanding them not to deport Armenian Catholics and Protestants.68 Members of the Armenian national church were the sole group Talat Pasha intended to destroy. In his eyes, they were the Armenians making common cause with their scheming Christian brethren in Russia.
Some Armenians managed to escape murder and deportation. A couple hundred thousand fled abroad to Russia and elsewhere. An estimated one hundred thousand Armenians, in situations of duress, converted to Islam to save their lives. Tens of thousands of Armenian girls and women were raped and subjected to sexual violence, taken into Muslim families as daughters or brides, and converted to Islam and taught Kurdish or Turkish, thereby escaping deportation. While in becoming Muslim some managed to physically survive, in doing so they were stripped of their Armenian identity, language, and religion. Although some Armenians deemed useful to the army and railway escaped in 1915, many were deported to their deaths within a year. The same was true of men who converted to Islam—for many, the change of faith saved their lives only temporarily. Armenians in the major western cities, especially Istanbul, also survived. So did those with personal relations with people in a position to save them, those who could offer artisanal skills or bribes, those from denominations other than the national Armenian church, and those protected by foreigners. The Armenians of the eastern province of Dersim found shelter among their Alevi Kurd neighbours, with whom they shared an affinity.69 We can estimate that out of a population of one and a half million Armenians in the Ottoman Empire in 1914, 650,000 to 800,000 had been annihilated by 1916.70
Referring to the sporadic massacres of hundreds of thousands of Armenians during the reign of Abdülhamid II (1894–1896 and 1909), in July 1915 Mehmed Talat Pasha boasted that he had ‘accomplished more in three months about crushing the Armenians than Abdülhamid II could do in thirty-seven years’.71 At the end of August 1915, he told the German ambassador that ‘the Armenian question no longer exists’.72 At the same time he wrote in a telegraph to authorities in Ankara that because ‘the Armenian question’ had been resolved, ‘there’s no need to sully the nation and the government with further atrocities’.
Cabinet minister Mehmed Cavid recorded in his diary in summer 1915 that he was horrified by the most ‘monstrous murder and enormous dimension of brutality that Ottoman history had ever known’. He accused the central committee of the CUP of having managed ‘to destroy not only the political existence, but the life itself of a whole people [the Armenians]’. In committing these acts, they ‘put an inextinguishable stain’ on the administration.73
Sheikh Faiz al-Hussein, former district governor of Mamüretülaziz in southeast Anatolia (present-day Elazığ, Turkey), asked whether it was right that the CUP, which proclaimed itself the defender of Islam, the caliphate, and of Muslims, ‘should transgress the command of God, transgress the Qur’an, the traditions of the Prophet, and humanity?’ For they committed acts ‘at which Islam is revolted, as well as all Muslims and all peoples of the earth, be they Muslims, Christians, Jews, or idolaters’.74
Other ethno-religious groups were also subject to destruction by the Ottomans during the First World War. Primary among them were the Assyrians, an ancient Christian people who lived in eastern Anatolia and western Iran. Massacred along with Armenians from 1894 to 1896 and in 1909, Assyrian civilians were also repeatedly subjected to forced expulsions and massacres by the Ottoman army, the Special Organisation, and the Kurdish Hamidiye cavalry from 1914 to 1916. They were especially targeted in eastern Anatolia in Hakkari, where they were accused of siding with the Armenians and the British. They were attacked along the Ottoman-Persian border near Van and in the Iranian Azerbaijan city of Urmia, invaded and occupied by the Ottomans, where they were accused of disloyalty and collaboration with the Russians.75 In the latter case, Iran’s foreign minister formally protested to the Ottoman government about the ‘atrocities committed by the Ottoman troops’ and Kurdish cavalry, noting that Christian villagers were ‘mercilessly massacred’.76 At the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, a delegation of Assyrians would claim that a quarter of a million people, nearly half their original population, had been killed by the Ottomans. While Assyrians formed resistance and self-defence units in Hakkari and Urmia, nothing could justify Ottoman mass expulsions and murder of civilian noncombatants.
How could it have come to this? Why would the Ottoman regime turn on its own citizens? Why would an empire that had allowed different groups of people to live together with little violence for so many centuries turn to a policy of annihilating one of the constituent peoples? The Armenian genocide is a part of European history, not only because many of the Young Turks emerged as militants in Paris and Geneva, or because they borrowed their ideas from Western Europe, or even because German generals and government officials were complicit in mass murder, justifying genocide as ‘military necessity’.77 Although the first genocide committed by a European empire in Europe began in Istanbul, it was not motivated by Islam or Turkic ethno-nationalism. Nor was it a civil war between Turks and Armenians or the result of class tensions. It was not an inevitable event predestined to occur due to some innate quality of the empire or its rulers. The genocide was rather a contingency resulting from many actors and factors, one that could have occurred only during the perceived exigencies of world war.
Some have suggested that religion played a key role in the genocide. After all, Muslims (Turks and Kurds) targeted a Christian population (Armenians). As many as one hundred thousand Christian girls and women converted to Islam when they were taken in by Muslim families as servants and brides, thereby sparing their lives during the massacres. The Ottomans had converted Christians for centuries. This was the last great wave of religious conversion in the empire.
But if Islam was a primary motivation, why had the Ottomans never attempted to wipe out the empire’s Christians prior to 1915? From the days of Osman at the turn of the fourteenth century, Muslims had ruled over Christians, but had never before sought their annihilation. The Ottomans targeted Armenians in 1915, with Assyrian Christians also suffering great losses. The Ottomans made clear distinctions between these groups and Greeks, Catholics, and Protestants. Greeks were deported but not massacred. If the perpetrators were motivated by Islam, why were Armenians and Assyrians, not all Christians, singled out?
This was not a clash between Islam and Christianity. Armenians who had converted to Islam but had not disappeared into Muslim homes were not spared deportation to their death. The aim was to destroy the Armenian people. The regime was driven by a relentless desire to wipe out the Armenians and Assyrians, paying no heed to Islamic precepts that prohibited such actions. But Islamic piety served for some Muslims as a reason to save the Christians targeted by the regime.78 Citing Islamic protection of Christians, a number of local officials refused the orders to deport Armenians—the governors of Adana and Ankara and a local official in Mardin among them. But they were either replaced or assassinated for resisting orders. If Islam was the motivating factor, then why did the regime not target all people who were not Muslims, such as Jews? The people who ordered the massacres were not Muslim religious fanatics, but atheists who used religion as a tool to save the empire, despite their personal anti-religious convictions.
It might appear that Turkish ethno-nationalism caused the perpetrators to become murderers. Again, this claim is undermined by the fact that Albanians, Bulgarians, Circassians, Dönme, Kurds, and Turks all contributed to the murderous effort, and not Turks alone. Kurds especially could not have been motivated by Turkish nationalism to assault their Armenian neighbours. The CUP was not made up of Turkish ethno-nationalists. To claim that they were overlooks the diverse backgrounds of the leadership.
This was not an ethnic conflict, or a civil war fought between Turks and Armenians. Ottoman Muslims and the CUP were not pursuing the establishment of an ethno-national Turkish state at that time, but were aiming to save the Muslim empire. Until the Ottoman Empire entered the First World War in November 1914, the Ottoman Armenian political parties held similar views. They promoted reform within the empire, an amelioration of oppression, and some form of political autonomy, not separation. Such reforms included the Armenian Reform Agreement, signed by the Ottomans and other European powers in early 1914, which entailed the creation of two provinces in eastern Anatolia to serve as an autonomous Armenia under the supervision of European inspectors- or governors-general based in Erzurum and Van. They were to work to ameliorate the conditions of the Armenians, especially the seizure of their agrarian landholdings by Kurds.79 The CUP abrogated the agreement when the Ottoman Empire entered the war later that same year.80 But all reforms, especially those permitting foreign oversight and intervention, were viewed by the CUP as a lethal threat to the empire’s national security and territorial integrity.
Was the genocide the result of class tensions? In eastern Anatolia there was competition and strife between Kurdish landlords and Armenian peasants, exacerbated by the ever deeper reach of the more powerful, centralising policies of Sultan Abdülhamid II. In the cities, especially Istanbul, Muslims resented the rise of the Armenian bourgeoisie. Yet such an explanation cannot clarify why the Armenians bore the primary brunt of Kurdish and Muslim envy and resentment. The Greeks of western Anatolia, whether peasants or part of the rising middle class, were not deported to their death in the desert. Nor were Jews of similar class stature.
The genocide of 1915 was in fact a contingent event. It was not the culmination of a purported preexisting Turkish or Muslim genocidal impulse, previously manifested in the turn-of-the-century Abdülhamid II–era massacres. The oldest extant narrative account of the Ottoman dynasty depicts the early Ottoman rulers as annihilating every last enemy man and boy and enslaving all women and girls. In the first centuries of Ottoman rule, the Ottomans had used the Collection to forcibly transfer hundreds of thousands of Christian children for their administration and military. But such views and practices of rule did not point inevitably to this. Without the First World War, there would not have been all-out genocide. The CUP leadership was a revolutionary cadre seeking the radical transformation of state and society in order to save the empire. Driven by existential fear of being massacred by their enemies, and in need of an ‘enemy of the people’ to rally the elements deemed to form the empire’s core, the CUP leaders were suddenly thrust into the context of world war. It is in that situation that they carried out the annihilation of a people blamed for their condition.
During the First World War, the CUP regime faced Russian political and material support for the Armenians of Anatolia, Armenian revolutionaries slaughtering Muslim soldiers and civilians in eastern Anatolia, and an Armenian uprising in Van that led to the Russian army occupying the region and appointing an Armenian governor. This is not to blame the victims for their own destruction, but to point out how events fit the mindset of the perpetrators.81 Uprisings in eastern Anatolia cannot justify the mass deportation and murder of unarmed civilians far from the battle zones, such as in Bursa. Nor can they justify the destruction of visible traces of those people, the demolition of their churches, and the plundering of their wealth and property. Such practices point to a cultural genocide, the annihilation of Armenians’ historical presence after their murder as a people. The only explanation for that is to be found in how the leaders of the regime viewed them: as a dangerous, disloyal population conspiring with foreign enemies.
An historical parallel presents itself. When the Polish Jewish teenager Herschel Grynszpan assassinated a Nazi diplomat in France in 1938 in revenge for Nazi treatment of his parents, the Nazis used the event as a pretext to launch the 9–10 November pogrom known as Kristallnacht. It was the beginning of the Holocaust. Historians would not rationalise or justify the Holocaust on this single act. Why, then, do we do so with the Ottomans?
Germany and the other Central powers, including the Ottoman Empire, were defeated. November 1918 witnessed the armistice ending the war and the abolition of the monarchies in Germany and Austria-Hungary. Among the Triple Entente powers, Russia had undergone the Bolshevik revolution, with the last tsar, Nicholas II, having been executed four months earlier. The Ottoman dynasty could read the writing on the wall.
On 31 October 1918, the Ottoman minister of the navy signed an armistice with the commander of the British Black Sea fleet at Mudros on the island of Lemnos. The British pledged that their forces would advance no further north from Syria and Iraq. The Ottomans agreed to military occupation of the Bosporus, gave up control over the railways, ports, and telegraph lines, demobilised and disarmed their troops, surrendered all Arab-majority provinces, and gave the Allied powers the right to send their militaries to occupy any Ottoman territory. In November, as their planes flew overhead, their battleships steamed into the city, and their flags decorated major streets, fifty thousand British, French, Greek, and Italian troops took over Istanbul, although the official occupation did not begin for another year and a half. The CUP may have lost the war, but it had succeeded in its battle. By 1918, Anatolia was largely bereft of Armenians.
As soon as the Ottoman-British armistice was signed, the leaders of the Ottoman regime—Mehmed Talat Pasha, Enver Pasha, Cemal Pasha, Dr. Bahaettin Şakir, and others—fled to Germany, where they were offered asylum. Britain, France, and the United States demanded that Germany send the members of the regime home to stand trial. The requests were denied.
The dynasty—led by pro-British, anti-CUP sultan Mehmed VI, who had replaced his brother Mehmed V, who had died in July 1918—members of the Liberal Party, the occupying Allied powers, and the remaining CUP members all competed for power after the CUP leadership left. The sultan appointed an anti-CUP grand vizier on 11 November. The next governments through late 1919 were also led by anti-CUP grand viziers who were close to the palace.
The postwar Liberal, anti-CUP governments acknowledged what had happened to the Armenians and acted to punish the perpetrators. In 1919, as the victorious Allies continued to occupy Istanbul, courts-martial were empowered to arrest and try CUP members, military officers, and government officials including grand viziers and cabinet ministers. There were several dozen trials, the extensive evidence for which was made up exclusively of the testimony, telegrams, memorandums, communications, and letters of Ottoman army officers, government officials, and CUP members. According to the indictment pronounced on 12 April 1919 and the supplementary indictment of 22 May, the CUP was a criminal organisation operating under the guise of a political party. CUP central committee members were charged with having illegally seized the machinery of government, violated the empire’s laws and constitution, and used violence to fulfil their hidden aims, which included the annihilation of the Armenians.
Nearly two dozen members of the CUP leadership, cabinet, central committee, and Special Organisation were declared legally responsible for carrying out clandestine aims under cover of war through violence, ‘tyranny and oppression’, including the planned ‘looting of money and property, the burning of houses and corpses, the massacre of the population, rape, torture and oppression’. A ‘sizeable portion of the victimised’ was Armenian.82 These massacres were ‘carried out under the express orders and with the knowledge of Talat, Enver and Cemal’ Pasha.83 According to the supplementary indictment of 22 May, the express orders included attacking convoys of deported Armenians with gangs formed by the Special Organisation for this purpose. As a consequence, ‘the Armenians were annihilated and their goods and possessions looted and plundered’.84 The government, rather than protecting the Armenians, removed from office anyone who objected to their treatment. Mehmed Talat Pasha, Enver Pasha, Cemal Pasha, and Dr. Nazım were found guilty on 26 May and sentenced to death (in absentia) on 19 July 1919.85 In a trial held on 13 January 1920, Dr. Bahaettin Şakir was sentenced to death (in absentia) for atrocities committed by his Special Organisation, ‘which had been formed for the purpose of destroying and annihilating the Armenians’.86
Of the eighteen perpetrators sentenced to death, because fifteen had fled the empire, only three were hanged. One was Mehmed Kemal, the lieutenant governor of Yozgat in central Anatolia. His funeral turned into a demonstration, as he was seen as a hero and martyr by Muslims. From 1919 to 1922, as the trials were underway, the world’s first memorial to the Armenian genocide stood in the heart of occupied Istanbul, in Taksim Square. But the weak Ottoman government and the British eventually gave up on the prosecution. Most defendants were set free.
In 1921 and 1922, members of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation assassinated the members of the genocidal regime who had taken refuge outside the Ottoman Empire. In Berlin, they killed forty-seven-year-old Mehmed Talat Pasha, Dr. Bahaettin Şakir, and Cemal Azmi, the former governor of Trabzon province. Azmi had been sentenced to death (in absentia) by the postwar Ottoman courts-martial for implementing ‘the plans necessary for the actual massacre and annihilation of the Armenians under the guise of implementing the Deportation Law’, including by having his men ferry women and children in boats deep into Black Sea waters and then throwing them overboard.87 Armenian assassins shot fifty-year-old Cemal Pasha in Tbilisi, Georgia. The widows and family members of those CUP leaders assassinated by Armenians after the war in revenge killings were given pensions by the Grand National Assembly of what was now the new Turkish Republic. Their children were given free education and Armenian property.88 Mehmed Talat Pasha’s widow was awarded an Armenian mansion. The bloodstained shirt that he was wearing the day he was assassinated would later be placed on display in the Military Museum in Istanbul.
Following Talat Pasha’s assassination in broad daylight on a busy street in Berlin in 1921, his young Armenian killer, Soghomon Tehlirian, was acquitted. The grounds for his release were that he had been avenging the murder of his family and the Armenians of his hometown of Erzurum. A young Polish Jewish law student named Raphael Lemkin attended the sensational trial, which changed his life. He was troubled by the fact that while Tehlirian’s murder of one man was deemed a crime, the murdered man’s annihilation of one million people was not.89 It was through this trial that he realised that the principle of state sovereignty allowed governments to commit crimes against their own citizens with impunity. Twenty years later, during the Second World War, when he saw it happening to his own family, Lemkin coined the term ‘genocide’. The Ottoman regime engaged in all five acts enumerated in Article II of the Geneva Convention on genocide.90