The British Empire and the Armenian Genocide

“British Statesman … promised the civilized world that those responsible for the [Armenian] massacres should be held personally responsible … it was the firm intention of His Majesty's Government to fulfill that promise.”

– Report of a conversation between a British official and the Ottoman Grand Vizier, Constantinople, January 28, 1919

After the war came the reckoning. The Allied victors demanded compensation, concessions and admissions of guilt from the losers. The Central Powers conceded defeat in the fall of 1918. The following year, the world watched as the final peace settlement marking the end to the war in Europe was signed in France at the palace at Versailles. The story of the Treaty of Versailles' harsh demands on Germany as a condition of the peace is well known. Historians blame this ill-conceived treaty for spawning Germany's economic collapse which led to the rise of Adolf Hitler and, ultimately, World War II. The end of the war in the East had equally dramatic consequences. The four years it took to broker peace with the Ottoman Empire after the signing of the armistice in 1918 created the conditions for ethnic, religious and political instability in the modern Middle East. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (1881–1938) finished the job of ridding Anatolia of its Christian minorities, forging modern Turkey out of the ashes of the Ottoman Empire as a secular but ethnically and religiously homogenous nation state.

The Armenians were just one of the groups caught in the middle of the remaking of the Middle East in the shadow of Mustafa Kemal's exclusionary nationalist politics, which later inspired Hitler.¹ Their case, however, remains emblematic of the larger crisis of the postwar settlement that witnessed the dividing up of the land and peoples of the former Ottoman Empire. As victims of systematic massacre and mass displacement, Armenians came to symbolize the plight of those ethnic minorities who looked to the Allies for aid and protection after they declared victory in 1918. The question of how the Allies, led by Britain, would use victory over the Ottoman Empire to punish perpetrators of genocide weighed heavily on those charged with making the peace. It also had important implications for future debates over intervention into the internal affairs of other nations, humanitarian or otherwise.

Britain played the central role in negotiating the armistice with Turkey at Mudros in October 1918. In that document, Admiral Somerset Gough-Calthorpe laid out the conditions for a favorable settlement for Britain and her Allies. Each of the victorious powers had something they wanted, but as the war resisted easy resolution those ambitions became harder and harder to realize. In short, the armistice refused to yield a blueprint for a sustainable peace. One of the things Britain wanted in the initial settlement was justice for victims of war crimes. The War Cabinet reported that plans were in place for “the formation of a tribunal” to try war crimes on the eve of the signing of the armistice and already had contacted the attorney general and key jurors.² Prosecuting Germany and the Ottoman Empire for crimes against humanity and crimes committed against British prisoners of war thus became part of the initial postwar settlement. Facilitating the Ottoman war crimes tribunals after the armistice agreement with Turkey, however, proved difficult as an act of peace making.

In the end, war crimes trials in the case of both Germany and the Ottoman Empire worked no better than any other aspect of the peace. The trials, now long forgotten, were short-lived and did not ultimately punish those accused of the gravest crimes against civilian and military personnel. But these trials created a precedent, later put into practice after the Holocaust, that perpetrators of crimes against civilian populations during war would be held accountable. Britain's role in establishing war crimes tribunals to try those accused of massacring Armenians introduced “crimes against humanity” into the lexicon of human rights. The failure of the tribunals to effectively bring perpetrators to justice exposed the weakness of both the international ideal and the postwar imperial order responsible for its birth.

Punitive justice, poorly planned and half-heartedly pursued in the Ottoman case, proved dangerously ineffective for the British and the Armenians whom they claimed to defend. The failure of the Ottoman war crime trials further emboldened Turkish nationalists and contributed to weakening Britain's position in the Middle East. For the Armenian, Greek and Assyrian victims in whose name the trials were established, it opened the door to further persecution and massacres in the years that followed. Genocide continued its work after the war, proving a highly effective means of purging Turkey of its Christian minority populations which, despite their near elimination from Anatolia, continued to be labeled as a disloyal and dangerous element. This is the reason why Armenian communities have disappeared from eastern Anatolia. Those who remain today in Istanbul, a group that owes its existence to a condition of the 1923 Lausanne Treaty, live under a self-imposed silence about what happened in 1915. The story of the failure to prosecute Ottoman officials for crimes against humanity thus must be understood in the context of both what it represented at the time for those pursuing justice and those who found themselves caught in the crosshairs of a seemingly unending war.

The British Empire took the lead in war crimes prosecutions after the war.³ No other country or institution was in a position to pursue this course. The US stood aside, deciding to take an arms-length approach to engaging the Ottoman Empire. Britain took the opportunity to marginalize France, its ally in the Mediterranean, and set the terms of the postwar settlement. “Practically the whole of the forces employed against Turkey were British forces,” the Prime Minister told his cabinet the week before negotiations began at Mudros. Lloyd George claimed to have dedicated half a million troops towards directly supporting the effort and felt justified in determining the Allied course of action with Turkey.⁴

Britain immediately made it known that it would hold the Ottoman Empire responsible for crimes committed against minorities during wartime. With the League of Nations still in its infancy, Britain positioned itself as an arbiter of international justice in its dealings with the question of war crimes.⁵ Britain's moral and practical claim as protector of Ottoman Armenians over Russia, now plunged into a bloody civil war after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, as well as other European powers, was strengthened by the account of the massacres found in Bryce's Blue Book and supported by the Anglo-American humanitarian movement.⁶

Britain, some believed, shared responsibility for what happened in 1915. The failed invasion of Gallipoli implicated the Allies alongside the Ottoman government in the killings that happened immediately in its wake. “The Armenian race in Asia Minor has been virtually destroyed,” charged one critic who blamed the massacres in part on “the ill-success of the Dardanelles expedition.”⁷ Others continued to invoke Article 61. “One of the objects which the Allies set before themselves when they were in the War was the liberation of the Christian minorities in Asia Minor,” Lord Curzon declared in Parliament in December 1922, an unfulfilled “pledge” which dated from the Berlin Treaty.⁸ This understanding of British responsibility, coupled with the over one million troops still stationed in the Ottoman Empire at the war's end, poised the government to take the lead in Allied peace efforts on the Eastern Front that included the arbitration of the Armenian case.⁹

Wartime Prime Minister David Lloyd George embraced World War I as a fight for international justice led by the British Empire. At the war's end he intended to make good on this promise by pursuing the prosecution of the German Kaiser and those responsible for the Armenian massacres for war crimes. The Prime Minister called upon the British Empire to support the cause of freedom and humanity in a series of wartime speech published as The Great Crusade, much as his Liberal predecessor W.E. Gladstone might have done.¹⁰ “With all its faults,” he declared, “the British Empire, here and across the seas, stands for freer, better, ampler, nobler conditions of life for man.”¹¹ In a later speech he spoke of the importance of imperial unity and singled out India's contribution of over one million men to the war effort.¹² To explain this show of support he praised the “beneficence of the British Empire” calling it “the most potent factor today in the struggle for human liberty.”¹³

The Prime Minister, in anticipation of an Allied victory, attached this claim to the pursuit of justice after the war. “There must be reparations done for violations of international law,” which would honor those who have suffered for the “common cause of freedom.”¹⁴ In a response to the Ottoman delegation at the Peace Conference, Lloyd George made clear the kinds of “violations” he had in mind. The case against the Ottoman Empire regarding the treatment of civilian populations during wartime centered on that government's own failure to defend minorities: “There is a great deal of proof that it took upon itself to organize and lead attacks of the most savage kind on a population that it ought to have protected.”¹⁵

The decision to pursue the prosecution of war criminals tested the limits of Lloyd George's crusade. He worried that Britain would be able to indefinitely support the 1,084,000 men he cited as occupying the Ottoman Empire after the war and was warned by Winston Churchill that he needed to reach a settlement quickly, while he had the military backing on the ground.¹⁶ The Allies developed the war crimes tribunal as a new tool to hold accountable the Ottomans and Germans, which initially included plans to try the German Kaiser himself.¹⁷ The Leipzig Trials were the result and, in the end, amounted to a short-lived set of legal proceedings that yielded the prosecution of several minor German officials in a German court. Convictions ultimately meant short prison sentences for perpetrators of war crimes.¹⁸ The decision to try Ottoman officials for a new category of crime, “crimes against humanity,” committed during wartime against the empire's own subjects, fared little better.

The framing of the armistice document offered the first opportunity to put into practice the May 1915 Joint Declaration, in which the Allies had accused Turkey of committing crimes against humanity and civilization. The document also posited a responsibility to protect human rights which the Bryce Report had positioned Britain to defend. Admiral Somerset Gough-Calthorpe was the man charged with making the peace. Serving as both the Commander in Chief of British Mediterranean Naval Forces and the High Commissioner at Constantinople, he had strict instructions from the Foreign Office that this should be a wholly British affair.¹⁹ Britain rebuffed French demands to have a hand in negotiations, claiming that such action amounted to little more than “butting in,” in the words of one observer.²⁰

The Armenian issue found its way into several sections of the Armistice that Calthorpe singularly negotiated with Ottoman officials in October 1918 aboard a ship docked in the Turkish port of Mudros. The most significant of these agreements was the sanctioning of Allied involvement in the subsequent pursuit of war criminals. Others included amnesty for Armenian prisoners, giving Britain charge of Turkish prisoners of war and securing the right to occupy Armenian villages to prevent further massacres. The French and other Allies accepted Calthorpe's document, agreeing to substitute the word “Allied” for “British” in the final document.²¹

After the signing of the Armistice, The Times confidently declared that the prosecution of “those responsible for the massacres would come as a matter of course” because the Ottomans feared harsher measures “imposed by the Allies.”²² In the following months, news of continued massacres and pressure from humanitarian organizations put the plans for the tribunals into motion.²³ The Ottoman War Crimes Trials, a series of courts-martial set up to prosecute Turkish officials for the Armenian massacres, tried the accused as a condition of the peace.²⁴ By the spring of 1919, the Ottoman government, under British pressure, arrested over 100 high profile suspects including government ministers, governors and military officers.²⁵ The trials took place between 1919 and 1922 and resulted in the execution of three minor officials for what Calthorpe labeled “crimes against humanity.”²⁶

One of the most surprising things about the war crimes tribunals, in light of the persistent denial of the Armenian Genocide by Turkey today, was the open cooperation of the Ottoman government in the proceedings. Even before the Armistice was signed, Grand Vizier Ahmet Izzet indicated his support for investigating the massacres. His successor, Grand Vizier Ahmet Tevfik, launched an actual investigation on November 11, the eve of Calthorpe's leading of the Allied fleet through the Dardanelles to occupy Constantinople. The Allies stated intention to try “all members of the Ottoman government and those of their agents” implicated in Armenian massacres had forced this course of action.²⁷ Two weeks later, Sultan Mehmet VI publicly declared, in an emotionally rendered statement, that the trials would go forward, claiming that “Such misdeeds … have broken my heart. I ordered an inquiry as I came to the throne … Justice will soon be done.”²⁸

The Ottoman Chamber of Deputies, which included Armenian and Greek representatives, a legacy of the 1908 Young Turk revolutionary reforms, debated the topic of the massacres throughout the month of November. The chamber openly addressed the question of culpability. The continued attention to the Armenian issue led some members to express frustration with the debates and demand that the matter be laid to rest as quickly as possible. “Let us bring out the truth of the matter and then let us be done with it,” a Turkish deputy from Trabzon declared. Another deputy concurred, soliciting cheers of “yes, yes” from the chamber when he remarked: “With a resolve never to return to it for discussion again, we should close this chapter for good, while maintaining our other resolve to inflict punishment on the guilty ones with the severity of a thunderbolt.”²⁹ The result was the formation of the Mazhar Inquiry Commission set up to investigate the massacres. Though plagued by a lack of cooperation by local officials who themselves feared prosecution, by January 1919 the Commission began conducting investigations of mass killings in 28 Turkish provinces.

Talk in the Chamber of establishing a High Court to try Ottoman Cabinet Ministers in early November did not win support. The investigating Commission instead established what came to be labeled “The Extraordinary Court-Martial.”³⁰ Investigations by the Ottoman government of the Adana massacres in 1909 yielded no tangible results. There seemed little reason to believe that the consideration of wartime atrocities would be any different. The conditions of the armistice and the shaky status of the Ottoman government after the war, however, put pressure on the leadership to act. On December 14, 1918, the Sultan issued an edict that set the trials in motion. The courts-martial were open proceedings which allowed both media and public access and were directed at high-ranking members of the CUP in power during the war. They received the support of the Ottoman leadership. When Grand Vizier Damat Ferit took over for Grand Vizier Tevfik in March of 1919, he told his cabinet that he sought to speed up the prosecutions of those “whose crimes drew the revulsion of the entire human kind.”³¹

Historians have noted the unprecedented nature of these proceedings: “a postwar Turkish government not only officially acknowledged it, but more important … ventured to investigate and punish the crime and its perpetrators.”³² Though instability in the Ottoman government and pressure from Allied forces hindered the process and rendered the court martials ineffective, the proceedings brought accusations against the Ottoman government made during the war to light. Ultimately, the rise of Mustafa Kemal in the early 1920s would put an end to the tribunals. Even Mustafa Kemal reportedly called what happened to the Armenians a “shameful act” and allegedly told a Swiss newspaper reporter that he supported the hanging of those “rascals” who perpetrated the massacres.³³

Mustafa Kemal's priorities, however, lay elsewhere. The future leader of Turkey had yet to consolidate his power when arrangements for the trial of Ottoman war criminals began to take shape in Constantinople. He would eventually restart the cycle of violence with new massacres of Armenian, Greek and Assyrian minorities committed by his army in eastern Anatolia after the French occupation and in the western city of Smyrna in 1922. It was an act, among others, that, according to Stefan Ihrig, later captured the imagination of the Nazi leadership who understood the new Turkey as “a standard bearer for the modern nationalist and totalitarian politics that they wished to bring to Germany.”³⁴ But this would come later. Between December 1918 and April 1919, with pressure from the British and the cooperation of the Ottoman leadership, it looked like the trials might have a chance.

Sir Somerset Arthur Gough-Calthorpe (1864–1937) was no crusader for human rights. Admiral Calthorpe, a title he earned during the war, was born in London to a titled family with strong military ties in 1864. After entering the navy in 1878 and attending the Royal Naval College, Dartmouth, he started his steady rise from Lieutenant to Captain and eventually maneuvered up through the ranks of the Admiralty. Serving in Africa and later as a naval attaché to Russia, Norway and Sweden, he had what his biographer described as “a worthy but certainly not spectacular career.”³⁵ His work on the investigation into the sinking of the Titanic in 1912 earned him some public notoriety. In 1913, he was recommended and then passed over to serve as naval attaché to Germany by First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill, who nevertheless noted his “high professional and social standing” as a man of “private means and much experience.” These qualities would eventually earn him Churchill's respect and confidence on the eve of the Gallipoli campaign, when he promoted Calthrope to acting Vice Admiral and Senior Cruiser Admiral.³⁶ In August 1917, he achieved the rank of commander-in-chief of British forces in the Mediterranean. When the war ended, Calthorpe emerged both as the key Allied figure in facilitating the peace and as the one with responsibility to enforce the agreement to try and prosecute Ottoman war crimes.

The British initially had not anticipated the Mediterranean's central importance to defeating the Central Powers. It focused instead on the Western Front. During this period, the Admiralty remained content to leave it to Calthorpe to sort things out with the French, who held command of the region at the beginning of the war. Calthorpe had lived in France as a boy and spoke fluent French, which helped him to navigate dealings with his French superior. Described as “conscientious and hardworking” but a little unsure of himself, he took his job coordinating anti-submarine warfare from his shore-based post in Malta seriously. Eventually, Calthorpe established a solid authority over his command and found himself somewhat unexpectedly at the center of peace negotiations when the war ended. The British, now recognizing the significance of the region to future dealings in the Middle East, wrested control from the French in the Mediterranean when the collapse of the Ottoman Empire seemed eminent.

Calthorpe took personal charge of the Mediterranean command in the fall of 1918, a post he held until his resignation in July 1919. His naval and diplomatic service up to that point left him ill-prepared him for the task that lay ahead. Although the disaster at Gallipoli ended Churchill's reign as head of the Admiralty, Calthorpe maintained his position. He failed to make an opportunity of the reprieve. The Admiral proposed an ultimately badly conceived plan early in 1917 to weaken the convoy system in order to make more ships available for military engagement, which would have crippled the Allied position in the Mediterranean. Before any damage was done, the Admiralty overruled his decision. Britain's poor track record in the Mediterranean, attributed largely to leadership mistakes, understandably weakened the reputation of commanders including Calthorpe. The decision to put him in charge of the peace negotiations with the Ottoman Empire as head of Allied Mediterranean forces thus produced obvious surprise in some quarters, as did his subsequent appointment as High Commissioner at Constantinople.

Remembered as an “organizer and diplomatist,” Calthorpe's most notable achievement was most certainly negotiating the armistice with the Ottoman Empire.³⁷ News of the fall of Bulgaria in early October 1918 drew the Admiral's fleet to the Turkish port of Mudros, where they waited for a signal. One of the men in Calthorpe's convoy recorded in his diary “feeling that something new was in the air, an end to the long stalemate” when he heard reports that a British ship spied a boat “bearing a flag of truce” near the coast.³⁸ After some back and forth, Calthorpe ordered a ship to bring the remaining plenipotentiaries from shore to begin deliberations. In the midst of a surprise storm, negotiations began on Calthrope's ship with navy minister Huseyin Rauf Bey on October 26, the Admiral was the sole Allied representative.³⁹ As a sort of omen of what was to come regarding the future peace, powerful winds, rain and high waves prevented the immediate conveyance of news that the war was over with Turkey. Signed on October 30, the sailor charged with getting the message to the Eastern Telegraph Company office on shore remembered braving “torrents of rain” and rough roads to get his message out. “It is good news,” the courier reported to the men in the military telegraph post, “an armistice with Turkey.”⁴⁰

The War Office responded enthusiastically to the news when they met the next day. Lord Curzon concluded that “Vice-Admiral Calthorpe had made better terms even than those expected.” Curzon admitted to believing agreement would only come on four clauses. The Ottoman government had agreed to over six times that number. The Allies secured the “right to occupy any strategical points in the event of any situation arising which threatens the security of the Allies” which in essence issued a blank check to control Ottoman internal affairs. Another clause clearly spelled out what occupation meant for Armenia: “In case of disorder in the six Armenian villayets the Allies reserve to themselves the right to occupy any part of them.” The agreement vaguely excluded Greek man-of-wars from participating in the occupation due to continued animosity between Greece and Turkey which would soon erupt into armed conflict.

The agreement also included a secret clause. Clause 24 established a British mission “to Armenia to investigate the conditions there.” Fear of encouraging “Armenian revolutionaries” left this clause unpublished in the final agreement released to the public. The discussion of the terms of the armistice in the House of Commons caused some concern when it came to the Armenian question. Sir George Cave, who announced the agreement soon after news of the armistice reached Britain, asked if he was authorized to respond to questions regarding the protection of Armenians. After some deliberation the War Cabinet concluded that “if the question of the protection to be given under the Armistice to Armenians was raised, he should be authorized to satisfy the House of Commons on that point.”⁴¹

With over 1,000 Allied ships under his command, Calthorpe set about the work of enforcing the agreement. Minesweeping commenced immediately to pave the way for the 6,000 troops scheduled to land on November 6 to occupy Ottoman soil. Calthorpe did not anticipate needing the help of French or Italian ships, only the British Aegean squadron.⁴² Officially appointed British High Commissioner on November 9, 1918, Foreign Secretary A.J. Balfour informed Calthorpe that “he would be the official channel of communication with the Turkish Government in regard to the protection of British interests and the execution of the terms of the armistice.” Balfour made Calthorpe's charge in relation to Armenian, Greek and Assyrian minorities clear: “Turkish domination over subject races should be ended irrevocably.”⁴³

Calthrope kept detailed records of his dealings in Constantinople and regularly reported his findings in secret dispatches to the War Cabinet. Eliminating the influence of the Committee of Union and Progress which was blamed for waging the war against Britain topped concerns. By the end of November, the ushering in of a new but notably weak government made up of “respectable elderly men without pronounced political antecedents,” and led by Tevfik Pasha (1845–1936), the last Grand Vizier of the Ottoman Empire, worried Calthorpe.⁴⁴ Old political rivalries had the opportunity to delegitimize the peace process and benefit the CUP. Resentment of the Allied occupation of Constantinople and reported “indiscriminate flag-wagging in the Christian quarters, especially by the Greeks,” did not help matters.⁴⁵

Calthorpe received reassurances from the Turkish foreign minister that “the Government was doing its utmost to maintain order and to loyally carry out the terms of the armistice.” Political intrigue engaged in by well-funded and highly visible members of the former government promised to derail these plans, according to this source, who for dramatic emphasis placed blame on the CUP for “plung(ing) Turkey into war with its best friend.” The Armenian issue weighed heavily on the minds of Calthorpe and his staff that November. Making little headway with the new government, they at first focused on humanitarian relief. Assistant High Commissioner Richard Webb (1870–1950) entered into discussion with American relief workers to see what could be done for displaced Armenians. Allowed to return to their homes, they remained “without clothing or food.” Their homes in ruins or occupied by “Moslem emigrants from the Balkans and Syria” left little real possibility for repatriation. More than likely, such a program would lead to Armenians being further “persecuted.” The answer: feed and clothe refugees in temporary accommodation through the winter. Webb concluded by raising the issue of establishing an Armenian state in eastern Anatolia where the “previous Christian inhabitants had been extirpated” to provide a place for these homeless refugees to resettle.⁴⁶

Meanwhile, conditions deteriorated in the countryside, while the Ottoman government faced its own challenges. Despite good harvests, prices had risen 4,000 per cent, according to the “Eastern Reports” issued by the British government. This affected refugees made homeless by the massacres still in the country as well as millions of others living in towns and cities across the Ottoman Empire. People began to starve in places where food should have been available due to speculation, corruption and the rising cost of transportation. Distrust of the paper currency caused inflation, further contributing to widespread discontent across the country. In Adana, one of the richest food-producing regions of the country, wartime massacres contributed to conditions that produced starvation on a mass scale that continued after the war. These conditions came to affect the entire community, placing further pressure on the internal refugee crisis. Allied occupation, some believed, would stabilize the economy by propping up the Turkish currency and keeping the peace in places like Adana where food shortages threatened to ignite further violence against displaced minorities.

The Ottoman government had political as well as economic reasons for not resisting the occupation. Those in power immediately after the war pledged to uphold the rule of the Sultan and keep the CUP out of government, a position ultimately supported by Britain. The government, however, struggled to maintain its hold over the country in the face of mounting postwar pressures. Ottoman leaders pursued a policy that placated the British in order to reconsolidate power against the CUP, while attempting to regain the confidence of the people who increasingly came to resent the occupation. The government also hoped its cooperation with the Allies would limit territorial losses in the final peace agreement. This proved a difficult balance. In late January, Calthorpe reported that the cabinet had undergone yet another reshuffling, making it “slightly more homogeneous than the old one, but almost as weak.”⁴⁷

The question of legitimacy hung over the occupation. As internal War Cabinet reports make clear, Britain steadily consolidated its position in Constantinople. This meant that decisions made regarding day-to-day governance of Ottoman internal affairs, enforcing the armistice and overseeing the capture and prosecution of those accused of war crimes, fell largely to Calthorpe, Webb and the military officers under his command.⁴⁸ Although the French complained of British overreach, Calthorpe broadly interpreted his task to assume charge over Ottoman affairs as ranging from policing to public health. He headed at one point a commission to clean up Turkish prisons in Constantinople, which he argued should fall under the category of “sanitary” reform. Control of the banking system also fell into the hands of the High Commissioner, who managed the array of foreign interests of those investors still operating in the capital.

Effectively marginalizing the French in the Mediterranean put Britain at the top of the Allied chain of command. This, coupled with a weak and ineffectual Ottoman government, allowed Calthorpe latitude in interpreting how to enforce the terms of the armistice. When news of the location of key figures wanted in connection with the Armenian massacres surfaced in January 1919, Calthorpe telegraphed London “asking for authority, without the consent of the Turkish Government to arrest Enver, Talaat and their leading confederates if he could do so.”⁴⁹ He used this power to influence the investigations into both those accused of the Armenian massacres and the “ill-treatment of prisoners of war.” Both the Grand Vizier and the Ottoman minister of foreign affairs expressed “their readiness to inflict suitable punishment” on the perpetrators in conversations with Calthorpe. Soon after, Calthorpe received a list from the government of 60 men implicated in the massacres who the minister of the interior wanted to arrest “at one coup.”⁵⁰

The weakness of the Ottoman government, while granting Calthorpe a great deal of latitude in his role as High Commissioner, hindered the war crimes investigations from the beginning. Calthorpe blamed the “timidity of the Sultan” for slowing down the process, along with his overestimation of the numbers of men arrested, which at one point he claimed totalled 200. Despite these challenges, the process continued. Damat Ferit Pasha (1853–1923),⁵¹ the brother-in-law of the Sultan and former Grand Vizier, reported that the Sultan had informed him of his intention to “punish those who were responsible for this crime” but was prevented from doing so by his cabinet, who lacked the energy and will see it through.⁵² The cabinet, made up of men who pledged themselves to carrying out the conditions of the armistice and remained opposed to the CUP, had little power. It was also highly unstable. Ministries fell and were again reconstituted, often with many of the same men in different positions. This situation persisted throughout almost the entirety of 1919 when the main drama of the war crimes investigations played out. Mustafa Kemal's nationalist campaign successfully delegitimized the administration of the so-called Ottoman Entente Liberal by the end of that year. This effectively rendered subsequent proceedings futile, despite the persistence of the tribunals until 1922.

In the midst of this uncertainty, the British persisted. Calthorpe's dealings in Constantinople positioned the British Empire to prompt an international showdown on war crimes. Matters came to a head in February 1919, after four months of back and forth between Calthorpe, the Ottoman government and the War Cabinet. The Paris Peace Conference decided to take up the issue. British Solicitor General Sir Ernest Pollock turned his attention to the question of how to prosecute Turkey for “crimes against humanity.” “I think that a British Empire war tribunal should do it,” he argued to fellow Allied jurists.⁵³ Although the practice of international justice was not new, initiating war crimes tribunals for perpetrators of wartime civilian massacres as a prosecutable offense was.⁵⁴ The consideration of the Ottoman war crimes tribunals in Paris would up the stakes for the British, who had taken charge of Allied dealings in the Mediterranean and the Armenian issue.

The idea of a “High Court” to prosecute war crimes was first discussed as part of the Allied peace process in February 1919 at the Preliminary Peace Conference, where jurists met as part of the Committee on the Responsibility of Authors of the War to discuss violations of “human rights.”⁵⁵ It was while serving on this committee that Sir Ernest Pollock wrote to Lloyd George of his frustration with what he saw as the inevitable “delay” in setting up such an “International Commission.”⁵⁶ Pollock expressed further skepticism that such an international body would work due to the complexity of the cases and the variation in the juridical standards and procedures across Allied countries. This concern had led Pollock to suggest that the British Empire take this role, citing its global stature and the superiority of English law and its “single-judge system.”⁵⁷ Confident that “The British Empire is far in advance of other nations who sit at the Commission in their proposals as to (a) how the Tribunal should be constituted, and (b) the evidence in cases to be brought before it,” he raised the possibility in a letter to then Foreign Secretary Balfour of setting up the British Empire Tribunal, which he believed had “support from the Naval and Military representatives” on the Committee.⁵⁸

Though the Allies ultimately rejected the proposed British Empire Tribunal over the question of jurisdiction, Britain continued its pursuit of war criminals. The Foreign Office collected dozens of dossiers on suspects.⁵⁹ The decision to go it alone had to do with a combination of factors that included the diminished position of Russia as a defender of Christian Orthodoxy at the proceedings and France's weakened role in the Mediterranean after the war. The United States' active disinterest in the creation of an international body to try war crimes contributed as well.⁶⁰ Finally, Britain on some level believed that it should take the responsibility to oversee the proceedings. When Allied leaders met in April to discuss the findings of the Committee on Responsibility, Lloyd George echoed Pollock's concern over a proposal that the newly formed League of Nations set up its own court of justice. While supporting the idea that such a court should be “created by the League of Nations,” Lloyd George wanted to be sure it demonstrated “that it is capable of punishing crimes” that included “criminal acts” and “general orders in violation of human rights.”⁶¹

To the question of which body would control the trials was added the difficulty of defining a war crime. The prosecution of Ottoman leaders for the Armenian massacres overlapped with the issue of the mistreatment of prisoners of war from Britain and its empire.⁶² Ultimately, the category of “war crimes” in the Ottoman case included crimes against both British military and Armenian civilian populations, which further complicated the already complex proceedings.⁶³ One of the questions raised at the time by legal experts was whether or not “war crimes” applied to acts committed against a country's own subjects. In the case of the Armenians, this proved a particularly important distinction. Whereas the German case revolved around the issue of culpability for the violation of “laws and customs of war affecting members of the British armed forces or other British subjects,” as stipulated by the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907, the case against the Ottoman Empire ventured into less certain territory.⁶⁴

The issue of whether or not Ottoman officials could be tried for crimes against their own subjects during wartime opened up important questions regarding the application of nascent human rights standards in a military conflict. British officials asked, “whether the term ‘acts committed in the violation of the laws and customs of war’” covered “offences committed by … Turkish Authorities against Turkish subjects of the Armenian race.”⁶⁵

In the end, the War Crimes Tribunal did not fall under the jurisdiction of the British Empire or the League of Nations. The Ottoman government investigated and prosecuted those suspected of war crimes. Damat Ferit Pasha assured Britain that his government was not, “inclined to diminish the guilt of the authors of this great tragedy.”⁶⁶ Britain approved of the regional tribunals, which paralleled the agreement made to try German war criminals in a German court at Leipzig.⁶⁷

Following through with the maze of prosecutions of those accused of massacring civilians and mistreating prisoners of war in the Ottoman Empire proved more complex than in the German case. The May 1915 Declaration raised the stakes by introducing the issue of crimes against humanity as a potentially prosecutable offense. These trials thus represented an attempt to balance a commitment to human rights with concerns over what the British Empire believed it was possible to do in the early days of an unstable peace.

These challenges left Calthorpe in a bind. In January, Calthorpe issued the statement which opens this chapter to the Grand Vizier, through his representative Andrew Ryan. He warned of the grave obligation that British statesmen had made when they “promised the civilized world that the British would fully prosecute those responsible for the massacres.”⁶⁸ In an interview with an Ottoman official earlier that month, the High Commissioner addressed “the question of the Armenian massacres and the treatment of British Prisoners,” conveying the “inflexible resolve” that “the authors of both would have to be punished with all rigour.” Another official responded with assurances that the Ottoman government planned to punish those responsible and that “he would resign from the cabinet if this were not done.” Calthorpe expressed skepticism: “what we looked for was more than good will; it was for actual results.”⁶⁹

Calthorpe had little to show for claims that the British Empire intended to lead the “civilized world” in the cause of human rights justice. By the end of January, frustrated that the government had not yet arrested 60 men on the Minister of Interior's list of war criminals, he sent an urgent telegram to the Foreign Office: “It is of course high time that action should be taken; there has already been too much delay.”⁷⁰ Four days later, news of the escape of a key suspect, Reshid Bay, reached Calthorpe. He sent Ryan to visit the Grand Vizier and inform him that Calthorpe “took gravest possible view of incident” which was a direct challenge “not only to his government but to Entente Powers.” Ryan reported that both the Vizier and Minister of Interior understood the gravity of the matter and would try to recapture the prisoner. Still, Ryan let Calthorpe know that he believed after his interview that the “present unsatisfactory situation cannot be allowed to continue.”⁷¹

As the possibility of an international body created to try suspects was raised and then faded, responsibility increasingly fell to Calthorpe and his men to see through the proceedings. The escape of Reshid Bay at the end of January, someone he considered “deeply implicated in the Armenian massacres,” furthered Calthorpe's personal involvement in the war crimes investigations. Previously applied pressure had not yielded effective results with individual members of the Ottoman Cabinet. “I warned him again that the question of the prisoners of war and of the Armenians were most important and that he would do well to devote to them his utmost attention,” he informed the British Foreign Office in early January after speaking with a top Ottoman official.⁷² Calthorpe began to keep track of the names of arrested suspects for his superiors in London and recorded any hesitancy on the part of Ottoman officials to carry out arrests. As he concluded his report, “If the government could give no better earnest of a serious intention to punish the guilty other means would have to be found for the attainment of that object.”

That order came on February 5, when the Foreign Office instructed Calthorpe to “demand the immediate surrender” of “Turkish officers and officials” guilty of serious crimes. “Outrages to Armenians or other subject races in Turkey or Transcaucasia” topped the list followed by the “ill-treatment of prisoners.” Other violations included failure to comply with the armistice, looting, breeches in the laws and customs of war and insolence to British officers. The Foreign Office indicated that military tribunals were in the process of being formed to try individuals for these crimes.⁷³ Calthorpe soon received a list of suspects. A few days later, General Edmund Allenby, the chief commanding military officer during the Middle East campaigns, officially entered Constantinople to bolster British authority and support Calthorpe's new directive.

The final demand summed up the thrust of Allenby's visit and explains, in part, his nickname as ‘the Bull’: “It must be understood that I have the power to occupy any place I wish.” Allowing “no argument or discussion of these conditions” with Calthorpe close at his side, he issued his demands to the ministers of foreign affairs and war under the threat of force. Allenby claimed authority to disarm military and civilian personnel, remove Turkish officers, control communications, and repatriate troops. Most importantly for Calthorpe's purposes, Allenby assumed the power to “arrest any persons charged with crimes” and take charge of the repatriation of Armenians and the immediate restoration of their land and property.⁷⁴

This show of resolve had immediate, if only temporary, effect. Two days after Allenby's official visit, Reshid Bey was recaptured and subsequently committed suicide. In early March 1919, Calthorpe reported that he had the full cooperation of the newly formed government organized under Damat Ferit as Grand Vizier. Webb paid a visit to the Grand Vizier, where he reportedly declared that “he was prepared to arrest anyone we demanded” if Britain would provide financial help “to enable him to carry on.” In issuing this promise and request he assured Webb that “his only hope was in God and Great Britain.”⁷⁵ Fear of the CUP played a clear role in this positioning. In short, he would give Britain what it wanted by capturing suspects accused of war crimes in exchange for protection from his internal enemies. In a grand dramatic gesture most likely intended for the benefit of British officials, the Grand Vizier issued a dictate to his new cabinet that, “all manner of oppression, tyranny, persecution, massacres, deportation, has been banished.”⁷⁶

But the command failed to resonate beyond the walls of government. More massacres followed. British authorities restored order and put a stop to a new wave of violence against Armenians in Cilicia and Syria after reports of the CUP arming Turks in the city of Diarbekir against the remaining Armenian population surfaced. Meanwhile, the repatriation of Armenians forcibly taken away from their families during the war with their communities risked turning into a humanitarian disaster. The government ordered large numbers of captured Armenian women and orphan children to be turned out of doors immediately. This left foreign relief committees to deal with the problem of quickly resituating these populations. Webb reported that such an occurrence was tantamount to “massacre” since it would result in the deaths of those suddenly abandoned without any resources.⁷⁷

Calthorpe and his staff believed that the British could take command of the situation and see through their mission to enforce the conditions of the armistice. Eventually, the French put deep-seeded rivalries aside and supported the British position. At the end of March, General d'Espérey issued a warning that “the Turkish government would be held absolutely responsible for any disorders or massacres” currently underway. The Grand Vizier cried foul, blaming the Greeks for provoking the recent violence.⁷⁸ Tensions had increased between Turks and Greeks and Turks and Armenians during April, in part due to the aggressive line taken by the Allies. Reports indicated that many people in the interior of the country had no idea that the Entente had won the war, which undermined the legitimacy of Allied actions against CUP officials accused of war crimes.

The Ottoman government maintained that under the circumstances it “was doing everything in in its power to prevent disorder” and went as far as to suggest that the British government should help by intervening and stopping future disturbances. At this point, the British narrowed the scope of its investigations only to those accused of perpetrating civilian massacres and mistreating soldiers. By early April, Reuters reported the arrest of several key suspects, included Alif Bey, known as the “assassin of Angora.” Meanwhile, Greek and Turkish brigands allegedly operated with impunity in the countryside, reportedly committing murder and atrocities along sectarian lines.

April 1919 marked an important turning point in the story of the war crimes tribunals. That month witnessed the handing down and commuting of the first death sentence. Fear swept through the Ottoman cabinet that the decision would incite mass violence, further threatening its ever weakening authority. The Grand Vizier asked for help from Webb. He proposed the appointment of British officers to a committee which would oversee two commissions “vested with executive powers and presided over by a prince of the blood” to quell potential violence in the interior. Webb objected, claiming that the Turkish government needed to take full responsibility for the execution of a man tried and convicted by the tribunal of war crimes. Though it looked like the Grand Vizier was again playing politics, Webb believed that his intentions and that of the Sultan represented a “genuine” effort “to deal with a situation which was rapidly becoming one of the utmost gravity and anxiety.” General Milne, who was in charge of operations in the main areas of unrest, consented to help in the end by making British military and intelligence resources available to the commission.⁷⁹

This mattered little after the public learned of the conviction of Mehmet Kemal for the deportation and massacres of Armenians in the Yozghat district.⁸⁰ His public hanging in the presence of high-ranking government officials in Constantinople unleashed a wave of violence and realized the worst fears of the Ottoman government. Anti-Armenian protests broke out across the country. In Egypt, the CUP reportedly organized new massacres.⁸¹ Calthorpe informed officials back in London that, within days after the hanging, Mehmet Kemal, the Yozghat Deputy Governor, had become known “as the first martyr to a good cause,” which he took to indicate the still-powerful influence of the CUP over the hearts and minds of the Turkish people.⁸²

The British faced a difficult choice at this moment. They could fight the rising tide against the sitting Ottoman government and continue to pursue war criminals or retreat from previous pledges to enforce international commitments to try those accused of wartime atrocities against Armenians. Calthorpe started to express doubts. The determination to pursue justice in accordance with the Ottoman-Allied effort faded after witnessing the martyrdom of Mehmet Kemal. Concerned about waning Allied authority over the proceedings, he wondered if the Ottoman government “would have the courage to take drastic action on any large-scale especially when the criminals were highly placed” when it came to the Armenian massacres.

Both sides in the unfolding drama of the war crimes tribunals, however, still needed something from the other. The Ottoman government wanted someone to blame for the arrests and, now, the execution of a convicted war criminal. The British Empire, on the other hand, sought legitimacy as the leader of Allied operations in the Middle East over the French, who were gaining a foothold in Cilicia and Syria. For these reasons, the arrests and the trials continued through to the fall. The purposefulness and belief in the principles espoused in the early days of the armistice, though, had fallen away. More shuffling of the Ottoman cabinet took place in the coming months and the government grew steadily weaker as its authority over internal affairs declined. Popular protests in the Anatolian countryside against Allied actions cast a long shadow over the tribunals. The question of what to do with the remaining prisoners awaiting trial created further uncertainty.

By late spring, the case against a number of the defendants began to fall apart. Webb reported, somewhat incredulously, that the Grand Vizier had complained that he could not “frame proper charges” against those in prison. Charges against Enver Pasha, one of the key architects of the genocide, he noted “had been whittled down to one of cutting down trees.” The subsequent release of high profile prisoners by the Ottoman government in May forced a British response. Worries that the Ottoman government would release those awaiting trial for the massacres led General Milne to agree to take responsibility for supervising the prisoners.⁸³

On May 28, 1919, the British took custody of all the prisoners awaiting trial at Constantinople. The transfer of accused war criminals to jails in the British colony of Malta, unsurprisingly, failed to move the prosecutions forward. A “timorous” Sultan, as Calthrope once referred to him, who previously pledged to support prosecution efforts, worried now about a looming nationalist backlash mobilized behind the rising power of Mustafa Kemal. This, coupled with the threat that Turkish nationalists posed to the British Empire's supremacy in the region, made extensive trials of the hundreds of accused waiting in Malta unlikely. The invasion of Smyrna by Greek forces in mid-May 1919 was accomplished with the assistance of a convoy sanctioned by Lloyd George's government, and resulted in Greek massacres of Muslim civilians in western Anatolia. All of these factors together galvanized anger against the Allies, further limiting the possibility of Ottoman cooperation.⁸⁴

The confusion and embarrassment caused by what critics called Prime Minister Lloyd George's “Greek disaster” challenged British imperial claims that it stood willing and able to enforce human rights justice.⁸⁵ Diplomats and officials half-heartedly pressed on in the midst of the crisis, citing honor and prestige as a motivating factor.⁸⁶ Lloyd George's support for the Greek invasion and its war with Turkey would eventually force him from office and cause a deep rift within the Liberal Party. The controversy unfolding over the firing on unarmed civilians by British troops in the Indian city of Amritsar in April 1919 created more uncertainty. Instability in India, the “jewel in the crown” of the British Empire, drew attention away from the attempt to enforce the armistice in Turkey. Some worried that the trial of Turkish officers would inflame tensions between Indian Muslims and the British Empire, already outraged by the massacre at Amritsar. This coupled with British equivocation about what to do to punish perpetrators, loomed like a cloud over the war crimes trials. Continued deployment of Indian troops in the Middle East did not help matters.

In Turkey, Calthorpe reported that discontent spread throughout the interior after the Greek landing on the western coast of Anatolia. He received a protest against the occupation at the end of May from Turkish civic and governmental organizations. The Allies were blamed for the “maltreat[ment]” of Turkish villagers, civilian casualties and mass looting that took place in its wake. The Ottoman cabinet immediately resigned in protest. Though the Cabinet reformed with largely the same men put in different positions, Webb expressed concerns about the long-term stability of the constant reshuffling of an ineffectual government.⁸⁷

Meanwhile, the British continued to encourage the Greek mission to take the western coast of Anatolia. They also commenced trying and executing those Greeks who had committed “excesses” which included the massacre of Turkish civilians. Regardless of British efforts to keep order and try Greek perpetrators, the very presence of Greeks on the south-western coast of Turkey violated terms of the armistice, fueling resentment and giving further cause to resist Allied dictates. Calthorpe received a warning in the form of a letter from one of the affected Muslim communities: if the Greeks did not withdraw of their own accord, they would be driven out.⁸⁸

By June, Britain's position in Turkey was clearly in trouble. France began to make overtures to the Ottoman government to help “Turkey in the time of her greatest misfortune,” a pledge Calthorpe interpreted as hostile to Allied policy. Later, French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau admitted that such a statement “was improper.”⁸⁹ But the damage was done and distrust between the Allies further weakened their hand. Meanwhile, reports of Kurdish attempts to establish a majority in lands set aside for Armenian repatriation in Turkey undermined initial Allied plans to create an Armenian homeland. Lord Curzon asked Calthorpe to take “any steps to prevent the movement [of Kurdish settlers] he might consider practical.”⁹⁰ Tensions continued and fighting broke out between the French and Kemalist nationalist forces in early 1920. Eventually, the French would sign a separate peace with Turkey after failing to meet their objectives in Cilicia which outraged the British.⁹¹

The Allied situation also continued to deteriorate around Smyrna. Reports of massacres of Muslim civilians by occupying troops made their way to Calthorpe, who attempted an investigation. He concluded that atrocities in one region were equally divided between Turks and Greeks, but expressed concerns that, in the wake of the invasion, widespread fear had overwhelmed the Turkish population. He decided that keeping the Greeks at Smyrna would eventually restore order even as he continued to receive reports of pillaging and killing to the west and south of the region.⁹² By the end of July, Calthorpe realized the impossibility of this course of action. The Italians had begun their own campaigns in Anatolia, further destabilizing an already fragile situation. Calthorpe, in one of his final reports, observed that these campaigns, instead of securing the Allied position, had created a dangerous nationalist backlash.⁹³

Calthorpe relinquished his command in the Mediterranean within days after making these claims. He was replaced by Admiral John de Robeck who had served with Calthorpe during the Gallipoli campaign. Though he expressed concern about “the question of retribution for the deportations and massacres” if the prosecutions did not yield just results, de Robeck showed little active interest in continuing Calthrope's course of actively pursuing war criminals.⁹⁴ The remaining trials went on with little direct British involvement. With the accused still held on the British-run island of Malta, de Robeck's lack of resolve created further problems. Moving the accused to the sites of the trials from the Mediterranean island to Turkey proved difficult at best in the face of a reluctant cabinet and continued instability in the interior of the country.

Conditions at the jail in Malta came to resemble detention in name only. “The Prison Had Become a CUP Club” one news headline read, with the 112 prisoners at Malta given the freedom to communicate with one another and their sympathizers, have access to visitors at all hours, and to receive uninspected packages and communications.⁹⁵ The remaining trials conducted over the next two years yielded no substantial results, with 15 of the 18 men condemned to death for the Armenian massacres convicted in absentia. As Webb wryly observed, “the sentences have been apportioned among the absent and present so as to effect a minimum of real bloodshed.”⁹⁶

The winding down of the trials did little to shield the Ottoman government from reprisals from its nationalist political rivals for its role in cooperating with the Allies. The Times reported a noticeable rise in CUP activity in Anatolia in July, 1919. By October of that year, the government, made up of those opposed to the nationalist resurgence, received its strongest challenge to date by Mustafa Kemal. Widespread support for his leadership in the major cities, towns and villages of Anatolia as he marched toward Constantinople resulted in the Grand Vizier's resignation. This led The Times to speculate that once Mustafa Kemal reached the capital he would “demand further ministerial changes,” signaling the return to power of the CUP. That month brought a new wave of massacres in Cilicia which The Times estimated claimed the lives of 16,000 of the 20,000 remaining Armenian residents.⁹⁷

Suffering from a nervous breakdown in the wake of attempts to negotiate with Mustafa Kemal, Damat Ferit, the European-educated commoner who had married Sultan Abdul Hamid's daughter, would be remembered as the man who had help bring about the fall of the Ottoman Empire. His attempt to placate the demands of the Allies while serving both as Grand Vizier and a plenipotentiary at Versailles did little to preserve the old regime. The government's futile attempt to argue for the maintenance of the Ottoman Empire by agreeing to try CUP officials as war criminals ultimately contributed to his downfall. In February 1920, a parliamentary commission made up of nationalists and former CUP members discussed the impeachment of Damat Ferit Pasha on account of his inability to prevent the Greek landing at Smyrna and the ordering of “a large number of illegal arrests.” Though he continued in politics until 1921, he remained little more than a symbol of a doomed government. He died at Cap d'Ail on the southern coast of France in October 1923.⁹⁸

The end of British involvement with the war crimes trials did not mark the final Allied involvement with the aftereffects of the genocide. In July 1919, the supreme Allied council at Paris granted American Colonel William Haskell charge of Armenian relief organizations. This appointment acknowledged the predominant role the Americans were playing in relief work in the Near East. Colonel Haskell, a member of the US army, was given the title of High Commissioner for Relief Work on behalf of the governments of the US, France, Italy and Britain.⁹⁹ Fundraising continued to reach record heights during the 1920s under American leadership and the concerted efforts of Near East Relief. While refugees found help mitigating the traumas of the wartime massacres and postwar displacement thanks to humanitarian organizations operating in and around Turkey, the issue of war crimes was put aside. No other attempt to try anyone for crimes against humanity in the Armenian case would be made again. Angered by the failure to hold those responsible for the massacres accountable, Armenian revolutionaries took matters into their own hands. Talaat Pasha, who had been sentenced to death in absentia by the war crimes tribunals, escaped to Germany. On March 14, 1921, he was assassinated in a Berlin street by a member of “Operation Nemesis,” which vowed to finish what the British had started.¹⁰⁰

In light of modern day Turkey's continued denial of the Armenian Genocide, agreeing to try Ottoman officials for war crimes, even if it was done for political reasons, nevertheless seems hard to believe. Such a move clearly implicated the wartime government as a perpetrator of atrocities against its own people; a crime that just had begun to come into consideration under international law. This willingness to accept culpability for the killings did not last long and today cannot be found in any official history of the war in Turkey. Why did the Ottoman government willingly agree to pursue the war crimes trials as part of the peace?

As a defeated power, the Ottoman Entente Liberal had little choice but to attempt to enforce the armistice, or at least make gestures towards compliance. Revenge against the CUP, blamed for perpetrating the massacres and threatening the old regime, also played a role. Eventually, fear of internal political rivals replaced the desire for revenge as nationalist sentiment grew throughout the countryside and threatened the legitimacy of the Sultanate and the Ottoman government after the war. The belief, by the postwar government, that cooperation with the Allies would protect it against the nationalists also contributed to the willingness to cooperate with the British in the task of war crimes prosecutions.

Finally, it is worth considering taking the statements of Ottoman leaders seriously when calling the massacres a “shameful act.” Making amends, whether as a show for the Allies or to assuage guilty consciences, proved more difficult than putting those deemed responsible on trial. What started out as strange mix of victor's justice and interparty political revenge regarding the massacres exposed the culpability of officials at all levels of the past and present government.¹⁰¹ Punishing a few ruthless men ultimately meant indicting a program of violence that resulted in the systematic massacre of the Armenians during the war. In short, the investigations revealed that culpability ran all the way up the chain of command.

This positioning became increasingly complicated when it came time to prosecute the Ottoman wartime government for crimes against humanity in a period of rising nationalism in Turkey and growing unrest in the British Empire. Distancing the new nationalist government from crimes committed under the cover of war helped legitimate and forge the foundation of modern Turkey under Mustafa Kemal. Allowing the British to lead the Allied powers to confront the ruling elite with accusations of war crimes, even if these crimes purportedly were executed by the previous regime, would do little to serve the foundations of the new Turkish Republic. Even today, “insulting Turkishness” by considering what happened to the Armenians as genocide is a punishable crime, as modern Turkish writers, including Nobel Prize-winner Orhan Pamuk, who raised the Armenian question in recent years, have discovered.

The failure to fully prosecute key figures responsible for genocide came also from the problem of executing human rights justice under the banner of the British Empire in the wake of world war. After the signing of the Armistice, the British Empire alone had the authority, military infrastructure and political will to launch an inquiry into the massacres. At the same time, Britain looked to manage growing discontent among Indian nationalists after Amritsar that challenged the British Empire's positioning of itself as a Christian power that fairly ruled diverse religions and peoples.

In the end, attempts to bring Turkish war criminals to justice for the Armenian Genocide were tangled up both in imperial politics and a long standing tradition of humanitarian activism. Postwar reactions to, and the subsequent politicization of, the Armenian question were part of an imperial framework that eventually undermined attempts to prosecute perpetrators of genocide. As the next chapter shows, the script that still shapes contemporary understanding of the event relied on Britain's positioning of itself as a global empire and arbiter of international justice.