Operation Nemesis: The Assassination Plot that Avenged the Armenian Genocide

by Eric Bogosian

Though Enver Pasha, like Talat, had abandoned Turkey, once he eluded the British and

French authorities, he formed the “Army of Islam” and entered Azerbaijan with his men. Enver was intent on uniting the pan-Turanistic and pan-Islamic forces in the region, after which he could take on the role of their leader within the new Soviet system. Or not. It would depend on which way the cookie crumbled.

his presence in the region was of great concern to both the Russians and the British.

There was tension among the three “Transcaucasian” nations: Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan. All three were struggling with their delicate geographical position as buffer zones between Turkey and Soviet Russia.

Most Ittihadists were fervent nationalists, but not all of them were racists, especially when it came to Armenians. Some prominent Ittihadists were reluctant pragmatists when it came to violence, and most subscribed to some code of ethics. But others had committed war crimes with relish and were motivated by greed or an appetite for sadistic violence in their persecution of minorities.

Memoirs indicate that high-ranking Young Turks in exile, like Bekir Sami Bey, Kemalist minister of foreign affairs, were aware of being hunted.

Shiragian’s assassination of Said Halim was the most flamboyant of the Nemesis kills.

Unlike Tehlirian, who had spent the night before Talat’s assassination alone in his room weeping as he sang sad songs, Shiragian went shopping. He bought eye-catching new clothes designed to create drama and distract observers from his personal features.

According to his memoirs, having spied the carriage, Shiragian stepped away from Helena into the middle of the street and placed himself directly in its path. In one deft move, he raised his hand, forcing the horse to rear, then slipped around to the side, stepped up onto the running board, and, face-to-face with the startled former Grand Vizier, fired once. The bullet caught Said Halim square in the middle of his forehead, killing him instantly.

Our organization had not embarked on a program of mass

extermination-genocide. We were meting out punishment to persons who had been tried in absentia and who had been found guilty of mass murder. There were Armenian traitors high on this list as well.

Despite a massive manhunt for the assassin in the black hat, he was never apprehended.

The Nemesis team resumed their reconnaissance in Berlin.

Along for the ride was Seto Jelalian and Arshag Yezdanian (Yezid Arshag). Seto, who had been the Yerevan police chief during the short-lived republic, would be a problem

due to his unreliable...

Yezid Arshag had problems, too, with anger management. When he drank, his temper would flare up, potentially bringing unwanted attention to the plotters.

Yezid Arshag was sent home.

Recollecting the moment, Shiragian says he was amused by his partner’s anger. “Like many other comrades, he had never worked in a European city before.… Here in Europe, these strange Germans were actually trying to catch us. ‘What do these people want?’ Aram shouted angrily. ‘What are they saying?’

The last high-level official remaining on the Nemesis list was Djemal Pasha, who, along with Talat and Enver, had been one of the “ruling triumvirate” of the Young Turk Ottoman Empire.

Enver Pasha and Dr. Nazim were, of course, high on “the list.” Operation Nemesis tracked both men but did not succeed in assassinating them.

With the executions of Nazim and Djavid Bey and a dozen others, Mustapha Kemal secured his hold on power. And another two names were scratched off the Nemesis list.

Kemal’s Turkish republican army had successfully pushed the Greeks, the Armenians, the French, and the Italians out of Asia Minor. In the end, the Allies did nothing to intervene. A decision had been made: Europe would no longer directly interfere in Turkey. In the United States, Congress drifted toward isolationism.

General Mustapha Kemal had become a national hero in Turkey. He and his generals had succeeded in preventing Britain, France, and their allies from parceling out and consuming their vatan (homeland).

From his position of strength, Kemal negotiated new terms. The Lausanne Treaty signed in Paris in 1923 would establish the new Republic of Turkey.

Despite its success, the Nemesis operation was problematic for the ARF by 1922.

Pursuit of an ongoing program of institutionalized assassination had no further upside, especially now that Kemal had begun

to strengthen Turkey’s connections with the West.

Eleven days before Talat was killed, Warren G. Harding was sworn in as the twenty-ninth president of the United States.

Harding specifically rejected the concept of a League of Nations.

During Harding’s brief tenure (he died in 1923, before he could complete his term of office), he would set an agenda in American domestic and foreign policy that endures to this day.

Harding’s cronies and the likes of the Dulles brothers would make the needs of big business the first priorities of foreign policy...

Lacking a secure source of oil, armies, navies, and air forces could not move. Without oil, commerce could not function. The tremendous reserves of the Near East, what we now call the Middle East, had to be secured for the West.

When the World War I armistice was declared, British forces in Mesopotamia did not lay down their arms but illegally advanced northward, taking possession of the region surrounding Mosul, fairly sure that major oil reserves lay there. As treaties were hammered out, the British claimed all the Arab lands as part of their “mandate,” despite vigorous protestations from the Turkish government (not to mention the Arabs).

Harding’s cronies’ appropriation of the massive Teapot Dome oil rights and other domestic sites would trigger a major scandal in Washington.

All of these men were committed to creating strong economic ties with the new Republic of Turkey, seeing Kemal’s new nation as key to providing a base of operations in the Middle East.

Behind each decision made in and around the region, the United States and its allies had always had oil in mind.

International oil cartels had been formed to distribute the oil and share the wealth. The Americans and the French, who were the only other loud voices here, were party to these cartels, so they did not interfere with British acquisition of the Arab lands.

October 1911, Great Britain had 189 seagoing vessels requiring fuel oil. Britain needed 200,000 tons of petroleum per annum, but had no fully secure source for this natural mineral resource.

As the years ticked by and oil exploration became more sophisticated, the need to exploit the massive petroleum reserves lying under Turkish, Arab, and Persian deserts became irresistible.

Complex negotiations over oil rights took place almost nonstop in the decade preceding World War I.

British, American, French, and German leaders and businessmen felt that they had the rights to the mineral resources in the former Ottoman Empire because they had “discovered” the oil in the first place. It seemed obvious to the Europeans that the people who had settled amidst the sand and rocks lying on top of these vast reserves were irresponsible and backward and had no idea how to exploit what they had.

It has often been argued that Armenia was “sold out” for oil.

Iraq, particularly northern Iraq, home to hundreds of thousands of Kurds, was wild country. It was land that over the centuries had been ruled by Ottomans, Arabs, Mongols, and Persians. What made it so very valuable now was oil. Not that the British would ever admit that fact.

Perhaps no direct connection can be made between the loss of the “Armenian mandate,” or the genocide itself, and the world’s appetite for oil and other mineral rights.

once the territories of the former Ottoman Empire were divvied up to everyone’s satisfaction, any lingering outrage and the impetus on the part of the West to defend and fight for Armenian rights simply evaporated.

When there had been a crying need for factory workers, thousands upon thousands of immigrants were allowed to flow into the United States.

In 1927 Kemal gave a speech that, with intermissions, took three days to deliver.

This speech, presented at a political party convention, is so famous in Turkey that

it is simply called “Nutuk” (...

The speech was delivered in the midst of the cultural revolution Kemal had initiated after establishing the new Republic of Turkey in 1923.