The first arrests of those accused of the organisation and implementation of the Armenian Genocide took place in the beginning of December 1918, in Ankara, Çorum, and Adana. Mass arrests took place in January-February 1919.
In January 1919, a conference took place in Paris that formed a committee, giving it authority to find the war criminals. Thanks to the work of this committee, articles holding those guilty of the Armenian massacres to account were included in the Treaty of Sèvres. In February 1919, Ahmed Tevfik Pasha, Prime Minister of the Ottoman Empire, appealed to four neutral countries – Switzerland, Denmark, Spain, and Holland – asking them for two judges each in order to establish an international court to bring those responsible for the massacres of the Armenians to trial, but the United Kingdom hindered this, since it intended to bring those responsible to trial in its own courts.
The first initiative to establish courts-martial to bring the criminals accused of the massacre of the Armenians to trial was in mid-December 1918, when the Sultan’s edict to that effect was announced. In order to sentence the criminals, courts-martial were established in Constantinople, and the empire was divided into ten investigative regions.
In January 1919 the first, second, and third extraordinary courts-martial were formed in Istanbul. Members of the Young Turk party and the government were investigated together at first, but, at the second session, at the request of the judge, the case against government members was separated.
In March 1919, by special edict of Sultan Mehmet VI Vahideddin, the leaders and ministers of the Committee of Union and Progress were handed to the extraordinary court-martial of Istanbul. Prime Minister Damad Ferid Pasha had declared that he would work according to the wishes of the British. The arrests followed immediately. Besides Said Halim, the previous prime minister, several ministers and MPs were also arrested. Great Britain had given the Ottoman Empire 61 names. Three hundred people in all were arrested on charges of the deportations and massacres (tehcir ve taktil) of the Armenians. Amongst them were ministers, provincial and county governors, policemen, gendarmes, and journalists. The majority of those arrested were held in prison, but they were not under strict supervision. Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk) and Kâzim Karabekir visited the prisoners.
As a result of the lax conditions of the prison, several of the criminals escaped. Amongst them was Mehmet Reshid Bay, one of the well-known slaughterers of the Armenians, member of the Ittihad party and the governor of Diyarbakır. He, being surrounded by the police in Istanbul, committed suicide in the neighbourhood of Beşiktaş. Later, Enver Pasha’s paternal uncle Halil and the well-known Ittihadist, Küçük Talât, also escaped from prison.
In May 1919, after the sentencing and hanging of Mehmet Kemal in Bayazit Square in Constantinople, when the political atmosphere became tense and there was a large demonstration by the Ittihadists against the court case taking place in Istanbul, the government set 41 criminals free and the investigations into the accused Ittihadists were temporarily halted. The British transferred 78 prisoners, mostly Ittihadist criminals, to Malta or Mudros on May 28. Later, the British, instead of trying the implementers of the Armenian Genocide being kept in Malta, exchanged them for British prisoners-of-war.
The trial of those directly responsible for the Armenian Genocide–the members of the Council of Ministers and the CUP’s Central Committee – was opened on April 27, 1919 before the extraordinary court-martial in Istanbul. These legal proceedings should have brought together the 23 titular members of the Central Committee and the CUP’s Political Bureau, most of whom had held posts as ministers or administrators. But twelve of them – members of the Central Committee Mehmet Talât, Ismail Enver, Ahmed Cemal, Bahaeddin Şakir, Ahmed Nâzım, the head of the Department of State Security Aziz Bey, the police prefect in the capital Bedri Bey, the vali of Trebizond Cemal Azmi, a state secretary in the Ministry of War in charge of food and supplies Ismail Hakkı, a member of the Central Committee who had operated in Azerbaijan and the Van region Rüsûhi, a member of the Central Committee EyubSabri (Akgöl), and the vice-president of the Special Organisation,Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa, who was in charge of its operations in Erzerum Filibeli Ahmed Hilmi – had fled abroad or already withdrawn to Anatolia.
Nevertheless, when the trial opened on 27 April, ranking personalities were to be found in the dock: a former chairman of the parliament, former foreign minister and a member of the Central Committee Halil (Menteşe), the Central Committee’s secretary-general Midhat Şükrü, a former grand vizier and a member of the Central Committee, as well as Ziya Gökalp, Kara Kemal, Yusuf Rıza, Ahmed Şükrü, Giritli Ahmed Nesimi (Sayman), Atıf Bey, Ahmed CevadBey, Ibrahim Bey, and Küçük Talât Bey.
Later two former şeyhul-Islams and members of the Central Committee Hayri Effendi and Musa Kâzımwere added to this group, along with former ministers Mustafa Şerif Bey, Abbas Halim Pasha (Said Halim’s brother), and Hüseyin Haşim, as well as Ismail Canbolat, Ali Münif Bey, and Rifât Bey.
On 5 July 1919, the court-martial delivered a verdict condemning Mehmet Talât, Ismail Enver, Ahmed Cemal, and Ahmed Nâzım to death in absentia, and Cavid, Mustafa Şerif and şeyhul-Islam Musa Kâzim to fifteen years of hard labour. The court acquitted Hüseyin Haşim and Rifât Bey. Of the 63 court cases initiated on charges of committing the Armenian deportations and massacres, over twenty were given the death sentence, of which only three were realised because the other criminals were on the run.
Ali Kemal, who had held the position of education minister and subsequently that of interior minister, wrote in the Sabah daily that, “Four or five years ago a crime which had no precedent in history was committed, a crime which caused fear throughout the world. If we want to give an idea of the size and conditions of that crime, we must speak not about five to ten, but about a hundred thousand criminals. It has already been discovered that in reality that tragedy had been planned based on the Central Committee of the Ittihad.”
Interior Minister Cemal had accepted in one of his interviews that the Ittihadists had displaced and massacred 800,000 Armenians. Thus, the first high-level official of the Ottoman Empire to publish official details about the Armenian victims was Cemal.
To be continued, this chapter is from Tatul Hakobyan’s book- ARMENIANS and TURKS
Image – Enver
