On
March 15, 1921, a 25-year-old Armenian in Berlin, Soghomon Tehlirian,
shot and killed Mehmet Talat Pasha, who had been the Ottoman minister of
the interior during World War I. After the Ottomans’ collapse, Talat
had fled into secret exile and was now plotting a return to power with
the other Young Turks (or, formally, the Committee for Union and
Progress) who had led Turkey into its disastrous wartime alliance with
Germany. To Tehlirian, however, Talat was something infinitely worse
than simply one of the leaders of a defeated empire. He was a member of
the central committee, with a key role in authorizing the Armenian
genocide, the series of deportations and massacres in 1915-16 that under
the fog of war had murdered much of Tehlirian’s family and some one and
a half million other Armenians.
In
the sensational trial that followed the assassination, Tehlirian,
apparently a lonely misfit seeking to avenge his mother’s death (he said
he had seen her beheaded), played David to Talat’s Goliath. And as the
world (and the German jury) learned more about the horrors of the
period, Tehlirian began to seem not so much a murderer (though he freely
admitted killing Talat) as an agent for justice. Talat, after all, had
been tried in absentia for war crimes and sentenced to death. Tehlirian
was avenging not just his family but an entire people. After a stunning
verdict to acquit was reached, The New York Times ran a headline that
read “They Simply Had to Let Him Go.”
When
the actor and playwright Eric Bogosian came across Tehlirian’s story he
initially thought it would make a good film, and he decided to devote a
few months to writing the screenplay. His dramatic instincts were
right: The assassination and trial, the core of “Operation Nemesis: The
Assassination Plot That Avenged the Armenian Genocide,” make absorbing
reading. But the few months stretched into seven years of research and
writing as Bogosian discovered that Tehlirian was only part of a larger
story — not about a hapless loner seeking to avenge his mother (whom he
had not seen decapitated) but about a trained member of a group called
Operation Nemesis, a band of assassins whose agenda was to draw
attention to the Armenian genocide. (As part of the plan, Tehlirian had
been ordered to stay with Talat’s body after the shooting to ensure an
arrest and public trial.)
Operation
Nemesis’ parent organization was the Armenian Revolutionary Federation,
one of the radical societies formed in the late 19th century to fight
Ottoman oppression. It was violent from the start, staging a spectacular
bank raid in 1896, an attempt on the sultan’s life in 1905 and similar
operations. But it was only after the Armenians watched the Turkish
perpetrators of the massacres slip away unpunished following the
conclusion of World War I that the decision was made to form a secret
organization of assassins.
Founded
in Boston in July 1920, and named Nemesis, the group managed in three
years to track down and kill seven high-level targets. It employed at
least 10 armed assassins and numerous lookouts, spies and diplomatic
supporters, as well as contacts in Paris, Geneva and (yes) Watertown,
Mass., where it established its headquarters. Many of the assassins were
never brought to trial (although one luckless gunman in Tiflis was
captured by the Soviet secret police and shipped to Siberia). Their
exploits were applauded by most Armenians at the time and make for
exciting reading even now. The crimes they were avenging were horrific,
their targets hardly sympathetic, and anyone might feel a certain
gruesome satisfaction in watching vigilante justice in action. (Imagine a
similar group picking off Hitler, Himmler, et al.)
But
how effective was Nemesis? Certainly in 1921 it caught the attention of
the world (or at least the world’s newspapers), but the Armenian cause,
and its dreamed-of homeland, was soon left behind and then lost in the
realpolitik of the Near East; cynical Soviet expansion; and the
nation-building of Ataturk, whose cult of Turkishness had no place for
public embarrassments like ethnic cleansing. As Hitler was once supposed
to have said, preparing for his own blood bath, “Who remembers the
Armenians?” Even in a region notorious for its long memories, Nemesis
became a largely forgotten force.
Its
legacy, however, can be said to have lasted much longer, and is now a
permanent feature of the political landscape. The Nemesis operators
didn’t see themselves as terrorists. They were consumed by the need to
remember their dead and to have the world remember. But the pattern is
now painfully familiar — the personal tragedy (a family killed), the
bottomless sense of being aggrieved, the recruitment into a new
“family,” the expatriate fund-raisers, the eye-for-an-eye ethos that
promises no end but only more death. We could be in Belfast in the late
20th century or Gaza in the 21st.
Operation
Nemesis was closed down after 1922, but its example has lingered, often
among people so removed in time from the original events that they have
been operating in the neverland of collective memory. As recently as
the 1970s and ’80s, another underground group, the Armenian Secret Army
for the Liberation of Armenia (Asala), furious because the Turkish
government still refused to accept the term “genocide” to describe the
events of 1915-16, dedicated itself to the assassination of Turkish
diplomats and politicians. It succeeded in assassinating 36 (including
family members) in France, Canada, Iran, even the United States, before
it discontinued its operations in the 1990s. An Asala bomb at Orly
airport in 1983 killed eight and injured another 55, most of whom had no
connection either to Turkey or Armenia. Bogosian tells us that the
group received “training and inspiration” from the Palestine Liberation
Organization, and later forged ties to Abu Nidal, a ruthless Palestinian
terrorist. We are a long way from “They Simply Had to Let Him Go.”
To
his great credit, Bogosian recognizes this and refuses to portray
Tehlirian or any of the other members of his group as heroes. He’s aware
of the gravitas of his story and the need to set it in context. But the
Armenian experience is so unwieldy and multifaceted that he has a job
just wrestling it all into some coherent shape. He assumes (rightly)
that most of his readers won’t know Turkish, much less Armenian history,
so he provides a brief overview. But historical narration isn’t his
strong suit. A section on the Armenian genocide’s parallels with the
Holocaust seems unnecessary after we’ve been told about the roundups and
the cattle cars and the camps. He likes to chase down intriguing loose
ends (was British intelligence complicit in fingering Talat?), but then
he can’t resist off-the-point excursions (like his discussion of the
rise of nativism in 1920s America).
Still,
where it matters most he delivers: in his gripping action accounts of
Nemesis at work, and in the sober assessment of its terrible aftermath.
In an opinion piece that followed its “Had To” headline, The Times
called the verdict on Tehlirian “a queer view of moral rightness [that]
opens the way to other assassinations less easily excusable than his or
not excusable at all.” And so it did.
OPERATION NEMESIS
The Assassination Plot That Avenged the Armenian Genocide
By Eric Bogosian
Illustrated. 375 pp. Little, Brown & Company. $28.
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