Betrayal Broke the Resistance

By Varouj Pogharian, Bogota, Colombia, 2 November 2025

Twice, at the most critical moments of Armenian resistance, it was an Armenian who opened the door to ruin. Garabed in Sasun and Arshavir Sahakian in Constanța, Romania. The names changed, but the pattern was the same. Together they form a dark thread in the fabric of our nation’s history: the corrosion of trust under the weight of despair.

– Sasun, 1904 — The Judas of the Mountains

The mountain villages of Sasun had long defied Ottoman authority. When the Second Sasun Resistance started in 1904, the Ottoman government resolved to put an end to the pocket of defiance once and for all. They saw Sasun as a contagion that needed to be eradicated.

Armenian fighters—the fedayees—under Hrayr Dzhoghk, Andranik Ozanian, and Gevorg Chavush, fortified the valleys and caves around Shenik, Tapik, and Gelieguzan. They were short on ammunition but rich in resolve. Facing ten thousand Ottoman soldiers and Kurdish irregulars, they held out for weeks. To European observers, the Armenians’ stand recalled the sieges of antiquity.

– Then came Garabed.

Garabed was a local, known to both the villagers and the fedayees. One night, he slipped away and told Ottoman commanders what they most needed to know: the mountain passes, the hidden arms, and the escape routes. By dawn, the army had taken their positions on the paths the Armenians thought were secure. When the smoke cleared, the resistance was crushed. Thousands were dead, and Sasun was in ruins.

Why did Garabed do what he did? Some said he was bribed with gold or land by a Kurdish agha. Others believed his family was being held hostage. Still others claimed that he had quarreled with a fedayee and sought revenge.

The fedayees found him two years later in Mush. They shot him and left his body in the street as a warning. Yet vengeance could not bring satisfaction. The damage he caused was permanent. Sasun’s defeat became a parable whispered throughout Armenian villages: Beware the Garabed in your midst.

Garabed’s act was more than treachery—it was the triumph of fatigue over faith. By 1904, after decades of massacres, exile, and false promises from the Sultan and the European powers, many Armenians had stopped believing in salvation. The empire’s cruelty had infected their judgment. The instinct to survive had turned inward. Betrayal was no longer unthinkable—it was plausible, and for some, even rational.

– Constanța, Romania, 1913 — The Informant Among Comrades

Nine years later, in a different setting, the pattern repeated itself. In September 1913, the Seventh General Convention of the Social Democrat Hnchakian Party convened in the Romanian port city of Constanța. The Hnchaks were one of the main Armenian revolutionary parties—comprising intellectuals, teachers, and workers united by the dream of equality within the Ottoman constitutional system. Many had celebrated the Young Turks’ revolution of 1908, believing it would bring freedom to all Ottoman citizens. By 1913, that illusion was dead. The Committee of Union and Progress had become an ultra-nationalist dictatorship. Armenians were again under surveillance, their presses closed, and their leaders imprisoned.

The delegates gathered in secret, aware that the spies reached far beyond the Ottoman borders. For days, they argued: could peaceful activism still save the Armenian nation, or had the time come for violence and vengeance? Ultimately, they chose resistance. The convention voted to return underground and to sanction targeted assassinations of leading Young Turk officials.

The delegates thought their decision was private. It was not. Among them sat Arshavir Sahakian, a delegate with respectability and poise. Unknown to his comrades, he was passing their every word to Ottoman agents. Within days of the delegates’ return to Constantinople, mass arrests began. More than a hundred Hnchak members—students, printers, and teachers—were arrested. Many were tortured and executed. The party was decapitated. Its infrastructure in the capital collapsed.

Sahakian would later defend himself, claiming he had prevented a greater catastrophe. He insisted that the Hnchaks’ assassination plans would have provoked massacres worse than those at Adana in 1909. He claimed he had “sacrificed a few to save thousands.” But history gave him no vindication. The genocide came anyway, and the thousands he claimed to protect perished in the deserts of Syria.

Once again, an Armenian had delivered his own people into the hands of their executioners. In Sahakian’s case, his betrayal came wrapped in perverse logic. Of course, these men should be condemned for their actions. But we need to understand the world that made them possible. Garabed lived surrounded by soldiers who could butcher his family in an instant. Sahakian lived under a government that sent dissidents to the gallows. Their betrayals were not acts of ideology but of exhaustion.

From the time of the Hamidian massacres in the mid-1890s to the Genocide in 1915, our Ottoman and Turkish rulers wielded fear like a surgeon’s knife—turning neighbors into informants, clerks into spies, and always Armenian against Armenian. When the price of loyalty to one’s community is death, collaboration begins to look like survival. Garabed and Sahakian were products of that world. Their decision to betray was more a symptom than an aberration.

Divide-and-rule was not merely an Ottoman tactic; it was an infection that spread among the communities of the oppressed. The real victory of the Ottoman oppressors did not come from the massacres and death marches alone, but the moment the victims began to reason in the oppressor’s terms.

– What If?

What if Garabed had chosen to remain silent a little longer, keeping the caves of Sasun a secret? Could this have led to European intervention on our behalf? What if Sahakian had placed his trust in the courage of his comrades, rather than the mercy of his Ottoman handlers? Could the Hnchaks have entered 1915 with their leadership intact, ready to rally resistance when the relocation orders came?

The historian’s answer is straightforward: probably not. The empire was already set on its course toward race annihilation, and one man’s silence would not have altered the situation. But history is not only about causations—it is also about possibilities, about the roads never taken. The tragedy of these two men lies not in what they changed, but in what they proved inevitable: that oppression sustained long enough breeds its own executioners.

For Armenians, Garabed was a curse and Sahakian a warning. Their names are rarely spoken, yet the archetype endures—the insider who bargains with evil, the brother who betrays the tribe. Each generation finds its own version. And each time, the same justification returns: I did it to save lives.

– The Lasting Wound

The collapse of the Ottoman Empire did not only leave behind ruins, but also a deep-seated psychology of fracture—a legacy of mistrust among those who had survived by compromise. The Armenians, dispersed and diminished, carried this psychological wound into their diaspora. In every debate about politics or survival, one can still hear echoes of Garabed and Sahakian: the lingering fear that the actual danger lies not outside the walls, but within them.

The Armenian tragedy, then, is not only about oppression; it is about the profound psychological impact of oppression on the human soul, how moral clarity erodes in the face of fear, and how noble causes can decay when survival becomes the primary goal. This universal truth in our small nation’s tragedy resonates across time and place. We see evidence of the same corrosion today in other parts of the world. Watch the nightly news on Gaza or the West Bank: a people hemmed in, exhausted, turning suspicion inward as much as outward. Under relentless siege, even the most steadfast hearts begin to falter. History repeats itself not in form but in feeling—the slow erosion of hope until betrayal seems like a strategy and survival feels like guilt.

Nations are rarely destroyed only by their enemies’ swords. They are destroyed when the trust that binds people to one another is broken. Oppressive regimes do not need to kill their victims outright. Sometimes, it is enough to sow seeds of doubt among them. The Ottoman state perfected this art.

*****

Varouj Pogharian was born and raised in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. His grandparents were from Van, Arapkir and Urfa. His family moved to Canada when he was 18. He retired from the Canadian federal government following a career that included assignments in South America. He is currently working on a historical novel, which is set in Asia Minor during the tumultuous period that spanned the reign of Sultan Abdulhamid II and the rise of the Young Turks. His narrative is poised to explore the complexities of this historical backdrop.