I found out what he meant when I
read Shiragian’s memoir The Legacy a few years later. He was one of the volunteers
who tracked down and executed Turkish officials responsible for the Armenian
Genocide.
The best known of the avengers was
Soghomon Tehlirian, who gunned down Talaat Pasha on a Berlin street in 1921.
One of Turkey’s ruling triumvirate during the First World War, Talaat is
considered the chief figure in the scheme that claimed at least 1.5 million
Armenian lives.
At the war’s end, Talaat and his
comrades fled the nation they’d led to defeat. They were tried, convicted and
sentenced to death in absentia. But those sentences posed little threat as the
victorious French and British soon withdrew from Constantinople while the
vanquished Talaat found safe haven among his former allies in Germany.
By 1920, Turkey was again
convulsed in violence as Mustafa Kemal’s nationalist army reclaimed lost
territory and took aim at the Caucuses. Just months before the Republic of
Armenia collapsed under dual assaults by Turks and Russians, the Armenians launched
their one shot at justice.
The plan to execute the nation’s
arch enemies had to be carried out secretly and at arm’s length because Armenia
was still clinging to hope that its Big Allies would stand by their commitment
to protect its sovereignty while punishing the Genocide’s perpetrators.
In fact, the British knew where
to find Talaat but did nothing. They also knew that Talaat and the others were
plotting a return to power in league with their ally Kemal. This didn’t seem to
bother the British or the French but the prospect both terrified and infuriated
Armenians.
Any chance of finding and
executing the targets depended on rapidly recruiting and deploying a dedicated
network of spies and killers. The story of that effort, and its improbable
success, is the subject of a new book by Eric Bogosian: Operation Nemesis.
The author is better known to
most Americans than any of the book’s characters. He’s a talented writer and
actor who has won praise for his stage, screen and television work as well as
his novels. He’s best recognized from his long-running role on TV’s Law and
Order: Criminal Intent.
Operation Nemesis is a striking
departure, a serious nonfiction work that demanded long and intense research.
I’d love to tell you Bogosian succeeded brilliantly because his name on the
cover guarantees wide exposure well beyond the Armenian community. I think this
is a story that deserves to be told boldly and without apology.
Unfortunately, Bogosian appears
ambivalent at best on that central point.
To Bogosian’s credit, he deals
forthrightly with the Genocide, which he portrays accurately and in brutal
detail. He leaves no doubt that the slaughter of the Armenians was planned and
carried out by their rulers.
Other interesting chapters deal
with the highly publicized trial of Tehlirian. Bogosian shows that his arrest
was very much part of the plan in hopes that a trial would allow a full airing
of the Armenian case for justice.
The defense's portrayal of Tehlirian as a
man driven by grief after witnessing the death of family members was calculated
to gain sympathy for him and for the greater cause. In fact, Tehlirian was abroad
in 1915 when his home was raided and his mother murdered. But his grief and
revulsion were real, and they compelled him to find and kill the man he held
responsible.
The trial strategy worked. Tehlirian
was acquitted by the jury, and the German public was exposed to the enormity of
its war-time ally’s crimes.
Unfortunately, Bogosian
interrupts the tale repeatedly to offer observations and historical allusions
that tend to diminish any sense of heroics on the part of Tehlirian and his
colleagues while distancing the author from the vast body of Armenians of the
time who embraced them.
He clearly understands why
Armenians wanted Talaat and the others dead but he is just as clearly
uncomfortable with the means of execution. At one point, he wonders if the
Genocide stirred a “bloodlust” in the survivors.
The best critique I’ve read is
by author and political cartoonist Lucine Kasbarian. She takes issue with Bogosian's efforts to frame the operation as a political assassination plot
rather than an attempt to bring convicted killers to justice.
Bogosian is entitled to his
point of view, of course, but Kasbarian identifies many errors and misinterpretations
in the text, notably in the author’s attempt to draw a parallel between
Genocide’s perpetrators and Armenian patriots who fought against them by citing
“a shared code of violence.
This is the weak foundation for
Bogosian’s further attempts to connect the Nemesis executions with the killings
of Turkish officials by Armenians in the 1970s and the 2007 murder of Armenian journalist
Hrant Dink in Istanbul by a Turkish extremist.
It’s all quite strained at best.
I wonder why Bogosian thought any of it was necessary, or even interesting? I sense
the heavy hand of a mediocre editor with a political agenda. A better editor
would have sharpened – or preferably deleted – the author’s muddled attempt to summarize
his thoughts about Operation Nemesis.
Bogosian notes that the agents
of Operation Nemesis “did not see themselves as terrorists” and certainly
believed they were responding to a higher calling than mere retribution.
“That does not make what
Operation Nemesis did legal. One question that surrounds these assassinations
is this: If you desire a world where justice prevails, then you must rely on
laws. If you rely on laws, they must be universal. Laws cannot be superseded simply
cause some feel that they are wrong or because a person ‘knows’ he has the
right to break them.”
(Note to the publisher: You
might at least hire an editor who knows what a question is.)
The author correctly states that
many Armenians feel cheated by not having had a Nuremberg, the city where Nazis
were tried by a special court set up by the Allies after the Second World War. His
readers might have been better served, and his observations better formed, if
Bogosian had explored the experience of the people most affected by those
trials.
Of the many Nazi leaders
involved in the persecution and murder of Jews, only 10 were executed as a
result of Nuremberg. Others were sentenced to prison, but many more escaped
prosecution and a number found refuge in other countries. As in the case of the
Armenian Genocide, the world’s powers were eager to move on. Responsibility for
tracking down the most vicious fugitives fell to Nazi hungers like Simon
Wiesenthal and the Israeli government.
It took 15 years to locate the
ugliest of all, Adolf Eichmann, who planned and directed the transport of
European Jews to Nazi death camps.
Like Talaat, Eichmann had taken
advantage of post-war chaos and powerful friends to elude justice. Arrested by
the Allies in 1945, Eichmann escaped from American custody. This man
responsible for the deaths of millions was living comfortably under an assumed
name in Argentina when Israeli agents with the help of Wiesenthal were tipped
to his whereabouts in 1960.
The Israelis could not risk seeking
Argentina’s cooperation because Eichmann might be alerted, or even helped to
escape once more. So no attempt was made to extradite him. Instead, Eichmann
was kidnapped, flown to Israel on a government jet and tried for crimes against
the Jewish people.
We know now that a good deal of
consideration went into this plan. The Israelis believed a trial in Israel
would have far-reaching effects in a world where the Nazis horrors already
seemed to many like ancient history.
They were right.
Like the trial of Tehlirian, the
trial of Eichmann – televised live– was about much more than one man’s guilt or
innocence. Dour and unrepentant, Eichmann personified the Nazi death machine
far more vividly than any grainy war-time newsreel. He was found guilty,
sentenced to death and hanged.
To me, that sentence seems justified and overdue. But how was it legal?
Eichmann had committed no crimes
in Israel, which didn’t exist when he fled Germany. The Israelis had no jurisdiction
in Argentina, which protested the violation of its sovereignty. Although he was
charged with violations of international law, Eichmann was never turned over to
international authorities.
These objections were raised by
legal scholars, including some Israelis. They echoed similar objections raised
at the time of the Nuremberg trials. Among the prominent Americans who deplored
the Nazis but challenged the legality of their post-war trials was Ohio Sen.
Robert Taft. “We cannot teach liberty and justice in Germany by suppressing
liberty and justice,” he said.
I think we can safely declare
the good senator wrong based on a half-century’s hindsight and our knowledge of
Germany’s emergence from both Nazis and Communists as a liberal democracy.
In trying the Nazis at
Nuremberg, the world reached a vital consensus that the law of statutes and court
opinions is always subordinate to the higher law that gives us all the right to
live freely. Defendants at Nuremberg argued truthfully that they were following
orders. That did not save them from the gallows.
In capturing and killing
Eichmann, Israel followed its principles rather than any code book or treaty.
Eichmann’s pivotal role in the Holocaust demanded the ultimate punishment, and
there was no other realistic way to carry it out.
I see the Operation Nemesis in
the same light.
To me, it’s this simple: Talaat
and his murderous gang did not deserve to die in bed – and Armenians deserved
justice. Operation Nemesis achieved both goals, and the people who carried it
out should be venerated.
Would Bogosian feel
the same way if he’d been lucky enough to shake hands with Arshavir Shiragian?
