The second series of trials started at Ankara on August 2, 1926. In the dock this time were Hüseyin Rauf, Abdülkak Adnan, Mehmed Cavid, Dr. Nâzim, Hüseyinzade Ali (Turan), Yenibahçeli Nail, Filibeli Ahmed Hilmi, Hüseyin Cahid, Küçük Talât, Hüseyin Avnı, Kara Vasıf, Midhat Şükrü (Bleda), and Ahmed Nesimi (Sayman). These Ittihadist leaders were judged on three counts: “the CUP’s irresponsible wartime” polices and “abuse of power,” planning to remove Mustafa Kemal from power in 1921, and planning Kemal’s murder in 1923.
The trials ended on August 26, 1926, and four very prominent Ittihadists were executed on the gallows at 10 p.m. the same night. The other accused men were given prison terms. One of the executed was Economy Minister Cavid, whose role in putting together the Armenian Genocide, if any, was negligible. But the other three were perhaps the most ferocious organisers of it, next to Talât.
Dr. Nâzim was a central figure in the Supreme Directorate of the party and in many respects the brains behind the very conception of the wholesale destruction of the Armenians. He operated behind the scenes and exerted great influence in the councils of the party leadership, including on Talât. He approached the gallows in a state of shock and trembling, protesting his innocence with such words as “vallahi” (“I swear, in the name of God I swear!”)
Yenibahçeli Nail was the CUP’s secretary responsible for the province of Trabzon, and at the same time the head of the Special Organisation forces of the province, whose Armenian population was subjected to the most severe forms of expulsion and destruction through massacres, sparing neither children, the infirm, nor the old. But on the gallows he pleaded with his son to take good care of his mother and siblings.
Filibeli Ahmed Hilmi was the CUP’s delegate for the province of Erzurum, where he served as Bahaettin Şakir’s right hand man and as the chief of the Special Organisation’s forces of the entire region. The deportation and extermination of that province’s large Armenian population was supervised by him. Like ex-Education Minister Şükrü, he too fell from the gallows as the rope snapped during the execution, and he too was hanged twice.
According to Vahakn Dadrian, the Ittihadists themselves had sentenced several local organisers of the Armenian massacres to death. Foremost among these are two party officers who devastated the border regions in the east of Turkey with inordinate savagery and repeatedly boasted about their lethal role in this respect.
Çerkez Ahmed was the main assistant of Van governor Cevdet in the campaign to liquidate the Armenian population of the province. He later served under Diyarbekır governor Dr. Reshid and in the process carried out the murder of Vardges and Zohrab, two Armenian deputies in the Ottoman Parliament. Charged with the crime of murder and plunder, he was court-martial led, convicted and hanged, along with his accomplice, Lieutenant Halil, by Cemal Pasha in Damascus on September 17/30, 1915. When commenting on this execution, Cemal’s Chief of Staff, General Ali Fuad Erden noted, “Indebtedness to executioners and murderers is bound to be heavy… Those who are used for dirty jobs are needed in times of exigencies [in order to shift] responsibility. It is likewise necessary, however, not to glorify but to dispose of them like toilet paper, once they have done their job.” When ordering his court-martial and sentencing, Talât, for his part, is quoted as saying, “His liquidation in any case is necessary. Otherwise he will prove very harmful at a later date [on account of his knowledge of and involvement in the massacres].”
Yakub Cemil, like Çerkez Ahmed, played a major role in the extermination of large clusters of Armenian populations in the eastern Ottoman Empire. However, he had a falling out with Enver and Talât and began to threaten them. He too was tried, convicted, and executed on September 11/24, 1916 as a result of the intervention of Talât and his aide Kara Kemal, who succeeded in accelerating his conviction.
A Kurdish brigand chief, Amero, carried out the mutilation and murder of 636 Armenian notables of Diyarbekır on orders of Governor Dr. Reshid. He was set upon by ten Circassian brigands and killed on orders of the same governor and Diyarbekır deputy Feyzi, two main organisers of the mass murders.
Murza Bey, a Kurd, was a chief brigand around the Kemakh Gorge. He boasted of having killed 70,000 Armenians from the Erzurum region passing through the area. He was shot dead following a decision by his superiors that he could prove dangerous afterwards on account of his penchant for boasting.
Cemal Pasha hanged a number of Kurds for participation in atrocities against Armenians in Islahiye. VehibPasha hanged two officers of the Special Organisation for organising the massacre of 2,000 Armenian labour battalion soldiers in Suşehir, Sivas.
Legends have been woven about the brutality and bloodthirstiness towards the Armenians of three well-known leaders of the Special Organisation.
Yahya Kaptan was in charge of the massive drowning operations at the Trabzon harbour on the Black Sea coast. Thousands and thousands of Armenian children, women, and old men were loaded on rafts, taken to the high sea, and thrown overboard after being bayonetted by boatmen from other boats accompanying them. Yahya Kaptan later joined the Kemalist insurgents without completely severing, however, his ties to the Ittihadists, especially Enver. This suspected duplicity sealed his fate; he was ambushed and killed by unknown assassins in Trabzon in July 1922. It should be noted, however, that Yahya Kaptan had threatened to reveal all he knew about state secrets during inquiries into his loyalties, in case he was ever interrogated strictly.
Topal Osman was a veteran guerrilla from the days of the 1912-1913 twin Balkan wars. During the war he operated in the eastern border regions, as a Special Organisation brigand (or çete). He too repeatedly had bragged about his murder missions against the Armenians. After the war he too joined the Kemalist insurgents and in the process organised extensive massacres against Greek populations in the Trabzon area as reprisal, as well as against clusters of surviving Armenians. He eventually was awarded by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk with the position of Chief of the Personal Guard Contingent with duties to protect Kemal. But he incurred the wrath of the Kemalist deputies in the fledgling parliament in Ankara when he lured a deputy to his home and, out of spite, strangled him. He was killed during an exchange of gunfire with military units trying to capture him, and his corpse was subsequently hanged in front of the parliament in March 1923.
As a Special Organisation officer [Deli] Halit was a participant in the killing operations in the eastern provinces. An ardent Ittihadist, he subsequently became an ardent Kemalist, while being sought by the post-war Turkish Court-Martial as a suspect in the crime of massacres. A cantankerous and defiant man, he got embroiled in altercations with other Kemalist leaders and deputies and was shot dead during one of these encounters in the foyer of the Turkish parliament on February 9, 1925.
Several Ittihadist leaders involved in the Armenian Genocide committed suicide.
Dr. Reshid was governor of Diyarbekır province. Following his arrest, escape from Bekiraga prison, and recapture by Istanbul police, Dr. Reshid shot himself to death in January, 1919. He was one of the most ferocious governors, who with great zeal executed the CUP’s plan of genocidal destruction of Diyarbekır Armenians, as well as multitudes of other Armenians who had to pass through that city, which was a hub for deported convoys, en route to the deserts of Mesopotamia.
General Mahmud Kâmil was commander of the Third Army, 1915-1916. His command zone encompassed the six Armenian provinces, plus Trabzon province. The extermination of Armenians there was entrusted to him by the CUP, of which he was an ardent member. He gave special orders not to spare the old, the infirm, or the pregnant women from the perils of deportation. He also threatened to hang in front of his house any Muslim who might dare to provide shelter to any Armenian. On November 28, 1922, he took his own life.
Kara Kemal was a top leader of the CUP and the alter ego of party chief Talât. All secret deliberations and plans of the party were under the supervision of Kemal at the CUP’s headquarters in Nuriosmaniye. He was indicted along with other Ittihadists by the Independence Court in 1926 on charges of conspiracy to murder Mustafa Kemal, but had managed to escape. When caught in a chicken coop, he shot himself to death on July 29, 1926, four days before he was formally indicted.
Some of the butchers of the Armenian nation died in accidents, heart attacks, and strokes.
Nuri Pasha was commander of the Army of Islam, which operated in the Transcaucasus and Baku. Brother of War Minister Enver, Nuri was responsible for the perpetration of a series of massacres in Russian Armenia and Azerbaijan, especially the 1918 September Armenian massacre in Baku. After World War I, Nuri became a businessman and, by the end of World War II, he had become an industrialist, operating a factory for weapons and ammunition in Istanbul. On March 2, 1949, he perished along with others in the rubble of that factory which was blown to pieces following a huge explosion and a fire that engulfed the entire complex in massive flames.
Mehmed Memduh was Erznka (Erzincan) district governor, Erzurum province. (Later on, he was consecutively governor of the provinces of Bitlis, Baghdad, and Mosul.) He was the chief organiser of his district’s massacres, in close co-operation with the local operatives of the Special Organisation. He accumulated great wealth he acquired through his Armenian victims, but died in a fatal auto accident while trying to establish a business in Smyrna (Izmir) after the war.
Hashim Bey was deputy from Malatya in parliament. A fanatic Ittihadist and foe of the Armenians, he sponsored his son Muhammed’s operations as a brigand chief of the area, carrying out a series of massacres annihilating Malatya’s Armenian population. Following a quarrel with an old Kurd about a stolen horse and an attack on him, Muhammed was shot by the son of the Kurd. Deputy Hashim, his father, suffered a stroke as a result and, after much agony, he died in 1917.
Sagir Zade was the mufti of Malatya. He directed the strangulation of the Armenian Catholic Primate of Malatya after subjecting him to many tortures and body mutilations for having refused to convert to Islam. Barely back home, the mufti suffered a stroke and died instantly.
This chapter is from Tatul Hakobyan’s book- ARMENIANS and TURKS
