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May 13 - May 25, 2021
Thousands died before British troops entered the city to quell the rioting.
The rioting against Armenians spread throughout the provinces, where thousands more died.
Thus was born the revolutionary career of the man who, twenty-five years later, would found the Nemesis conspiracy. Armen Garo would become one of the most prominent and controversial forces within the ARF.
Around this same time, a clique of young Ottoman military officers chafing at the bit of the sultan’s ineffectual rule sought the reestablishment of the constitution and parliament. These men would be labeled “les Jeunes Turcs” (the Young Turks).
The Young Turks, with help from their putative enemies, the ARF, would eventually succeed in overthrowing the sultan.
The sultan’s days as all-powerful leader of the Ottoman Empire were numbered. In 1908 the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP; in Turkish, Ittihad ve Terakki Cemiyeti), with help from the Armenian Tashnags and other non-CUP Muslims, succeeded in bringing down the government.
Together the CUP and the ARF pulled off a bloodless coup. Abdul Hamid was forced to restore the constitution he had shelved back in 1877. “For the first time in Ottoman history an organized political party dominated politics.”
Finally, in 1913, the more radical members of the CUP completed their takeover of the government. This time the coup was not bloodless. On January 23, 1913, Enver Pasha, accompanied by an entourage of Ittihadists, burst into parliament and gunned down the minister of war, Nazim Pasha. The Grand Vizier, Kamil Pasha, was forced to resign and, fearing for his life, abandoned Constantinople.
Talat, Enver, Djemal, Dr. Behaeddin Shakir, and other members of the CUP Central Committee would from this point on direct the Ottoman Empire.
These men were the true bosses of the Ottoman Empire during World War I.
Most histories of the Ottoman Empire during World War I describe the leadership as a “triumvirate” of Talat Pasha,
Enver Pasha, and Djemal Pasha, but in fact the Ittihad had many guiding hands.
Generals Mustapha Kemal (Ataturk) and Kara Kemal provided military muscle.
Like many Young Turk leaders, Talat was not ethnically Turkish; rather he was of Pomak descent, that is, native Bulgarian Muslim.
The man who later would lead the “Special Organization,” the secret paramilitary tasked with some of the most gruesome killings of the genocide, was Dr. Behaeddin Shakir, a former personal physician to the Ottoman crown prince.
Shakir, like many of the other leading lights in the CUP, was the son of refugees (muhacirs) from Bulgaria. As such he had been witness to the vicious Christian attacks on the Bulgarian Muslim populations.
Genocide, after all, is an exercise in community-building. —Philip Gourevitch
The southern flank of World War I would hold long-term consequences for the Western world because the prize was nothing less than control of the earth’s greatest oil deposits, regions that to this day represent over half the world’s known oil reserves.
And it was under the cloak of this war between the Ottoman Empire and the Allies that the Armenian Genocide proceeded with little detection.
Likewise, the Young Turk government could just as easily have found an ally in Great Britain and historically had a genuine affinity for France. The real enemy for both Germany and the Ottoman Empire was Russia, which shared a long, challenging border with both states. For at least a century, Russia had its sights set on controlling the Bosphorus, and that meant Constantinople, which the Russians fondly called “Tsargrad.”
By the summer of 1914, the Young Turk government was exhausted by two wars in the Balkans.
The Young Turks tried to stave off a clear decision about joining the war for as long as possible, but by the end of July, Winston Churchill had seized Turkish vessels being built in English shipyards, clearly setting the stage for conflict between the two powers.
Secret negotiations led to an alliance between Germany and the Ottoman Empire, and when Ottoman (formerly German) warships fired on Russian ports on the Black Sea, the Turks had finally entered the war.
Over the ensuing months, the Ottoman army held the line at Gallipoli as British, Australian, and New Zealander troops suffered thousands of deaths and tens of thousands of casualties.
of the Turkish soldier was best summed up in General Mustapha Kemal’s famous command at Gallipoli: “I’m not ordering you to fight, I’m ordering you to die.”
The Central Committee of the CUP quickly
came to believe that the Armenian population represented a mortal threat to the dying Ottoman Empire. Enmeshed in war with Britain and Russia and harassed by small bands of Armenian fedayeen on its eastern front, the Ottoman government decided to solve the “Armenian question” once and for all by eliminating all Armenians residing in Anatolia. This eradication of over a million people would proceed in stages, often disguised as deportations. All would be camouflaged by the fog of war.
The intensity of the violence, and the staggering numbers of people murdered in such a short period of time—almost one million people—introduced to the world a new phenomenon: genocide, the attempt to eradicate
a people, physically and culturally.
Equally important, this mass killing was committed by a government aga...
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The operation to remove and ultimately erase the Armenian population in Anatolia went into effect just as World War I was beginning. It was neither random nor unplanned,
but rather systematic and centrally orchestrated by a guiding hand in Constantinople. By the end of the summer of 1915, owing to this program of relocation and massacre, most of the hundreds of thousands of Armenians who had been living in Anatolia no longer resided in their villages. By the end of the war, most of those Armenians of the Ottoman Empire who had not managed to cross the border were either dead or dying in the Syrian desert.
Victims were often forced to undress before being killed, since it was against Sharia law to strip clothing off a corpse and then sell it in the market. Many deportees would arrive at their destination completely naked.
At one point, in a conversation with Ambassador Morgenthau, Talat Pasha demanded the life insurance proceeds for Armenians the regime had murdered!
A nation is a group of people, united by a mistaken view of their past and hostility toward their neighbors. —Karl Deutsch
Virtually overnight in the spring of 1915, on the evening of April 24–25, prominent Armenians throughout the Ottoman Empire had been swiftly rounded up as a prelude to what was to come.
“The Young Turks and the Armenians made the revolution together. The leaders were friends and supported one another’s election. During the first months of the war, relations between them seemed amicable. Suddenly on the evenings of April 24 and 25, 1915, to the complete surprise of everyone in Constantinople, 235 Armenian intellectuals [meilleure société] were arrested, jailed, and then sent to Asia Minor.… Practically all of the Armenian intellectual leaders in Constantinople were wiped out in this manner.”
On October 30, 1918, the Armistice of Mudros was signed and World War I officially ended for Turkey.
In the Ottoman capital city, the British were arresting members of the CUP in preparation for war crimes tribunals.
he could not find his mother or his family, Tehlirian would find revenge. He wasn’t sure what he was going to do exactly, but if it was something consequential, perhaps he could gain some sort of peace. Perhaps he could move on with his life.
“War crimes” are defined by the winners. I’m a winner. So I can make my own definition. —Adi Zulkadry, Indonesian executioner in the documentary film The Act of Killing
Though armistice had been declared and British and French troops had secured Constantinople, eastern Anatolia was caught up in an anarchic civil war
Months earlier, in the fall of 1918, the Great War between Germany and the nations of the Triple Entente had officially ended.
In a last-ditch attempt to create headaches for Russia, Britain had recommended that the United States assume a “mandate” over Armenia. “Mandates” and “protectorates,” terms that rang with a benevolent air, were the new way to describe the links between stronger and weaker states.
The British then went further and suggested that the United States “protect” all of Asia Minor (Turkey). Their motives were transparent. If the United States, under the
guiding hand of Woodrow Wilson, occupied the eastern half of Asia Minor, it would in effect create an impregnable wall between Russia and Britain’s significant oil-rich territorial possessions in Persia and Mesopotamia.
This was an appealing scenario for British leaders, who thought they could sell such a plan to the idealistic and inexperienced American leadership.
Despite Wilson’s seemingly good intentions, the United States had little will to enter into such a deal, let alone enforce it.
By the fall of 1919, the president could no longer lobby for his agenda. He had suffered a stroke from which he would never fully recover.
Two years earlier, as the Bolsheviks abandoned the war, they had upset the international applecart by publicizing the secret Sykes-Picot agreement, which would partition out Turkey’s territories and resources to the predicted “winners,” Britain and France.
