Germany Rescues Ottoman Triumvirate

Raffi Bedrosyan, Toronto, 4 November 2014

Nov. 2, 1918 is an important turning point in Turkish, German and Armenian history. Three days after the Navy Minister of Ottoman Turkey signed the Mudros Armistice (Turkish: Mondros Mütarekesi) aboard British warship Agamemnon on Oct. 30, 1918 and accepting defeat in the First World War, a German submarine picked up three persons from three different port locations in Istanbul and spirited them to Sevastopol in Crimea, and then to Germany. Who were these three persons running away from Istanbul in the middle of the night?

HMS Agamemnon

They were the leaders of the Ottoman government–Talaat, Enver and Cemal, the triumvirate which led Ottoman Turkey into the First World War, causing the deaths of millions of Ottoman citizens, disappearance of the Ottoman Empire and the deliberate annihilation of the Armenian people from the lands that they had inhabited for 4,000 years. Their imperialist dreams of creating an all-Turkic Empire called Turan stretching from Europe to Caucasus, Middle East and into Central Asia, manipulated and encouraged by Germany at the expense of Great Britain and Russia, had failed miserably. Hundreds of thousands of Ottoman Army conscripts had died and millions of civilian Muslims displaced for the sake of this dream; 1.5 million Armenians regarded as an obstacle to this dream were killed outright or driven to desert for a slow death.

Raffi Bedrosyan, Toronto, 4 November 2014

Nov. 2, 1918 is an important turning point in Turkish, German and Armenian history. Three days after the Navy Minister of Ottoman Turkey signed the Mudros Armistice (Turkish: Mondros Mütarekesi) aboard British warship Agamemnon on Oct. 30, 1918 and accepting defeat in the First World War, a German submarine picked up three persons from three different port locations in Istanbul and spirited them to Sevastopol in Crimea, and then to Germany. Who were these three persons running away from Istanbul in the middle of the night?

HMS Agamemnon

They were the leaders of the Ottoman government–Talaat, Enver and Cemal, the triumvirate which led Ottoman Turkey into the First World War, causing the deaths of millions of Ottoman citizens, disappearance of the Ottoman Empire and the deliberate annihilation of the Armenian people from the lands that they had inhabited for 4,000 years. Their imperialist dreams of creating an all-Turkic Empire called Turan stretching from Europe to Caucasus, Middle East and into Central Asia, manipulated and encouraged by Germany at the expense of Great Britain and Russia, had failed miserably. Hundreds of thousands of Ottoman Army conscripts had died and millions of civilian Muslims displaced for the sake of this dream; 1.5 million Armenians regarded as an obstacle to this dream were killed outright or driven to desert for a slow death.

Both Turkish and world public opinion had branded these three persons as "most wanted men and criminals against humanity". German intelligence reports circulated that these three persons would be immediately arrested and hanged from street light poles as soon as the Allied occupation forces landed in Istanbul. German leaders who had encouraged the Ottomans to enter the war for their own imperialistic dreams, and who had turned a blind eye to the systematic slaughter of the Armenians during the war, were now afraid that these three persons would start ‘singing’ upon arrest, would rightly or wrongly blame the Germans for their excesses, and would shift responsibility for the crimes against humanity onto the Germans. Therefore, an escape plan was hatched for the three .

On the night of Nov. 2, 1918, the German boat first picked up Talaat, Istanbul Governor Bedri and five others from the port of Moda on the Asian shores of Istanbul. The password used to let the Turks come aboard the boat was ‘Enver’. Then the boat sailed to Arnavutkoy on the European side to pick up Enver and a few other Ittihat Terakki Party leaders. Following north on the Bosphorus, the boat had a final stop at Istinye for Cemal, before sailing into the Black Sea toward Crimea.

Beginning in May 1919, the three persons were tried in abstentia by a Turkish military tribunal in Istanbul for ‘treason, war crimes, and crimes against civilians’. On July 5, 1919, the court sentenced the three to be executed. Of course, they were nowhere to be found in Turkey. And it was left to the Armenians to carry out the death sentences with the ‘Operation Nemesis’, named after the ‘Goddess of Revenge’ in Greek mythology. Talaat was executed in Berlin in 1921, Cemal in Tbilisi in 1922, and Enver in Bukhara also in 1922. Other Ittihat Terakki mass murderers also met justice through Armenian operations, most notably Bahattin Shakir, leader of the Special Organization (Teshkilati Mahsusa), who organized the implementation of the deportations and mass murders employing convicted murderers released from prisons for this purpose, and Cemal Azmi, governor of Trabzon, who organized mass drownings of the Armenians of the Black Sea region by taking them to sea in boats and then sinking them.

It is interesting that for almost a hundred years, the official history books of the Turkish state portrays Britain, Russia and France as imperialist powers, with Ottoman Turkey heroically fighting against them, without once mentioning that Ottoman Turkey itself was an imperialist entity, whose blindly ambitious leaders sent millions of its citizens to death without blinking an eye. The official history books of the Turkish state still portrays these three treacherous cowards who ran away as soon as the war was lost, as national heroes with their names given to dozens of neighborhoods, schools, streets and mosques. The official history books of the Turkish state still do not mention how much property and assets these three persons and their followers stole from the Armenians. In fact, the Turkish state has passed legislation which awards the houses and assets of murdered Armenians to the families and heirs of these three and other executed Ittihat Terakki leaders as ‘blood money’, who continue receiving payments to this day.

The denialist policy of the Turkish state was not challenged by the brainwashed past generations within Turkey. But today, civil society and enlightened citizens of Turkey have started to see the truth and more importantly, have started to pressure the government to see the truth, if not for empathizing with the Armenian victims, but for the sake of stopping the embarrassment to themselves as Turkish citizens caused by the lies and denials.