Operation Nemesis: The Assassination Plot that Avenged the Armenian Genocide

by Eric Bogosian

he first had to obtain permission from his mother (his mother!), the Valida Sultana, in a long and complicated ritual.

The girl would return to her cell and, if nine months later she did not produce royal progeny, she would probably never see the sultan again.

Male heirs were prized, of course. Mothers of the princes and princesses had the highest status in the harem.

And once the new sultan was firmly enthroned, his mother became Valida Sultana, the most powerful woman in the realm, simply by dint of her ability to control him.

As a result of this competition, there was a very dark side to bearing sons for the sultan. Should a boy find his way onto the throne, all of his brothers were in immediate danger.

Beginning with Mehmed the Conqueror, all adult male relatives of the sultan were at risk. This culling would ensure that royal competition...

Babies were smothered; grown men were garroted. It was understood that to leave any other heirs alive would jeopardize the stability of the state. Nothing personal. Murder was an essential part of the smooth running of the empire.

In 1566 Selim, the son of Suleiman, ascended the throne. He invited a Hungarian convert to Islam, Gazanfer, to take the job of chief white eunuch and head of the privy chamber. He had to accept castration as the price to be paid for this most lofty position. Gazanfer went on to become one of the most influential persons in the Ottoman Empire, serving for over thirty years.

Though it was an Islamic empire, the Ottoman Empire was for much of its history roughly fifty percent non-Muslim, either Christian or Jewish.

Under the millet system, Muslims constituted the ruling class, while Christians and Jews were raya, the flock, who were tolerated as long as they kept to their place.

A millet system of self-governance on the part of each religious group was encouraged and took root, and each group (Greek, Armenian, Jewish) had its religious community leaders or patriarchs. In this way, the millets became political entities within the Ottoman Empire “representing” each community.

In the modern era, the fragmented and dispersed Armenian population existed in areas under Ottoman, Persian, and Russian control. These three antagonistic empires treated their Armenian populations in different ways.

The Armenian Genocide was nothing less than the final clash of two civilizations: the ancient Armenian nation and the Ottoman Empire. The centuries-old intersection of two peoples had come to an end.

By 1923, with the birth of the Republic of Turkey, the Armenian presence in Asia Minor would effectively be over.

In 1848 revolution broke out in Italy, Germany, Denmark, Hungary, Ireland, Romania, and Moldavia.

Civil war and revolution would follow in the United States, Mexico, India, and China. The short-lived socialist regime known as the Paris Commune was born during this period, in 1871, and rebellions arose across the Balkans against Ottoman rule.

The Boer Wars in South Africa, the Boxer Rebellion in China, as well as uprisings in India and the Philippines were all manifestations of a world order in flux.

Tsar Nicholas I had famously labeled the Ottoman Empire “the sick man of Europe.”

The half century prior to World War I was open season on world leaders. Three American presidents, Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley, were shot to death by assassins. A bullet would end the lives of Prime Minister Juan Prim of Spain, King Umberto of Italy, King Carlos of Portugal, King George of Greece, and Naser al-Din Shah Qajar of Persia.

Empress Elizabeth of Austria, President Sadi Carnot of France, and Richard Southwell Bourke, sixth Earl of Mayo, were stabbed to death. Gabriel García Moreno, president of Ecuador, was hacked to death by machete. The killing spree against world leaders reached its climax in 1914, when Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austro-Hungary was gunned down in Sarajevo by Gavrilo Princip, a Serbian nationalist, triggering World War I.

Between 1919 and 1922, the period of the Nemesis murders, there were over three hundred political killings in the German Reich alone.

In many rural areas, whoever owned the land owned those who worked it, and when the land was sold, the peasants living on the land came with the property.

Most Christian Armenian peasants had no economic power and no rights.

This bad situation came to a head in 1894, 1895, and 1896, when Sultan Abdul Hamid let the Hamidiye loose on the Armenian villages in a series of bloodbaths, crushing any sign of insurrection, real or fabricated. The violence was terroristic, leading to hundreds of thousands of civilian fatalities.

The goal was to undermine Armenian support of the Russians in their perennial war with the Ottomans. This began what Vahakn Dadrian has called “a culture of massacre” in Asia Minor that persisted from that period through World War I.

With no recourse against government-sponsored violence, in the late nineteenth century, Armenians formed revolutionary societies,

notably the Armenakan Party, the Hnchag (Bell) Party (or Hnchags), and the Hai Heghapokhakanneri Tashnagtsutiun (the Armenian Revolutionary Federation, or ARF, also known as the Tashnags).

They were also, by their own admission, terrorist.

With their headquarters located safely beyond the reach of the sultan and his spies, the Armenian revolutionary groups sent operatives across the borders and back into the empire.

Armed teams of fedayeen operated throughout eastern Turkey and the Caucasus.

The Armenian revolutionaries particularly sought the attention of Western leaders.

More than that, external pressure might secure constitutional rights for Ottoman minorities, giving them some relief.

Committees were formed by indignant Americans and British insisting that the horrific violence cease immediately. European powers demanded that Abdul Hamid “protect” the indigenous Christian populations living as subjects within the borders of his empire.

The sultan, and Ottoman Turks in general, were developing a very bad rep.

Despite their disdain for the barbarism of the East, Europe and the United States

had already written their own bloody histories as overlords of their respective colonies.

When the West overpowered native populations, these actions, no matter how violent, were rationalized as manifestations of the natural order of things.

Europeans saw themselves as superior and naturally born to rule.

Empires were gradually giving way to a new paradigm, the “nation,” an idea that a “people” have a shared history, language, and culture that form the bedrock of a “nationality.” As the nineteenth century ended, Europe, and eventually the whole world, became enamored with nationalism.

In theory, the idea of a nation seemed to be an immutable truth, but it was actually a complex ideological fantasy.

It would nevertheless be only a matter of time before the idea of “nation” served as a catalyst to war.

Nationalism, ethnic cleansing, and genocide are related: they all share mythic notions of a pure and common origin, and ...

Egged on by Great Powers like Russia and Great Britain, smaller populations like the Serbs, the Greeks, the Arabs, and the Armenians also began to think of themselves as “nations.” Inspired by that idea, they attempted to break away.

Some succeeded; others did not. In the case of the clash between Armenians and the Ottoman Empire, nationalism would have tragic consequences.

The Ottoman Empire had become an economic colony of the West. By World War I, Britain, France, and Germany would own or manage not only the empire’s finances but most of its infrastructure and resources as well.

In 1896, twenty-five years before Talat’s assassination, and the year of Soghomon Tehlirian’s birth, the ARF established its international reputation by making a spectacular raid on the Imperial Bank Ottoman.

The Armenian revolutionaries set dynamite charges on every floor and issued a list of demands, threatening to blow up the building if they were not met.

As the sultan’s artillerymen primed their guns, foreign warships drifted into the great harbor of Constantinople. British diplomats then contacted Abdul Hamid’s Grand Vizier in his offices at the Sublime Porte and explained that if the sultan destroyed the European-owned bank, the sultan’s home, Yildiz Palace, would be shelled in turn.

Abdul Hamid blinked and stood down his guns. It was a three-way standoff.

Sadly, the sultan’s spies had been aware of the Tashnags’ plans all along and used the attack as an excuse to punish the Armenian community.