Operation Nemesis: The Assassination Plot that Avenged the Armenian Genocide - Bogosian Eric - Страница 61

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Shiragian simply made the sign of the cross over his chest and, ignoring Yerganian’s pleas, replied that Yerganian could join him or not but he was going in for the kill, the only option being to attack the group from behind. Drawing his weapon, Shiragian stepped out into the street. Yerganian followed. Shiragian nodded and they ran full tilt toward the Turkish entourage. Talat’s widow, seeing Shiragian’s pistol, screamed and tried to grab him. He shoved her to one side, thrust his arm forward, and shot Azmi below his left eye. Azmi fell dead.

Shiragian then turned to Shakir, who in terror simply cried, “Ah, ah, ah.” Shiragian replied, “Yes, ‘ah’!” He fired, wounding Shakir. Yerganian shouldered past Shiragian, fired his Mauser, and delivered the coup de grace. “Shakir fell across the body of his comrade murderer; their corpses formed a hideous cross,” Shiragian writes in his memoir. Dr. Rusuhi fainted. Shiragian does not say what happened to the blond German.

Shiragian and Yerganian ran. The crowd chased after them, shouting, “Catch them! Stop them!” Recollecting the moment, Shiragian says he was amused by his partner’s anger. “Like many other comrades, he had never worked in a European city before.… Here in Europe, these strange Germans were actually trying to catch us. ‘What do these people want?’ Aram shouted angrily. ‘What are they saying?’ ”

Shiragian couldn’t resist circling back to the scene of the crime. There he found the women crouched over the lifeless bodies of Azmi and Shakir. He continues: “Nor did I feel sorry for their women, who were sobbing and hysterical, bending over their corpses. Had these women shed one tear for all the Armenian children, women and men who had been murdered by their husbands and sons?” Understanding that the police were establishing a cordon around the area, Shiragian struck up a conversation with a German family standing in the midst of the onlookers. As the family moved on, Shiragian exchanged a few words with one of the little girls, took her by the arm, and together they slipped through the police cordon.

Djemal Pasha (Tiflis, Georgia, July 21, 1922)

The last high-level official remaining on the Nemesis list was Djemal Pasha, who, along with Talat and Enver, had been one of the “ruling triumvirate” of the Young Turk Ottoman Empire. Djemal had been in charge of the navy, as well as commander of the Fourth Ottoman Army in the Arab lands south of Anatolia. As such, he had overseen the forced surgun (population relocation) of Armenians into Syria. Djemal was a member of the Central Committee and was intimately involved in the decision-making process of the Ittihad. Nonetheless, in 1922, when he published his account of his wartime activities in a book, Memories of a Turkish Statesman,²² Djemal argued that, rather than being a driving force behind the deportations, he was dedicated to protecting and saving Armenians.²³

The story was far more complex. In December of 1915, with the empire fully embroiled in the First World War, an attempt at a secret truce was brokered by a Tashnag, Dr. Hagop Zavrian (Zavriev). This truce, which could have ended the war on the southern (Ottoman) flank, was founded on a plan whereby Djemal would stage a coup against his cohorts, particularly Enver and Talat. In exchange for a massive bribe and the guarantee that he would be granted reign over a new state composed of “an independent Asiatic Turkey consisting of Syria, Mesopotamia, a Christian Armenia, Cilicia and Kurdistan as autonomous provinces,” Djemal would sue for peace and end the slaughter of the Armenians. Wealthy Armenians outside of Turkey stood ready to provide the cash for the bribe. Russia, Britain, and France agonized over the proposal for months. Finally, “in their [the Allies’] passion for booty,” the proposal was abandoned, since it deprived them of the opportunity to take over those territories themselves. Djemal Pasha would later point to this unconsummated deal as evidence of “protecting” Armenians. In the end, however, he supported the government effort to eradicate the Christian population in Turkey, or at least move it out of Asia Minor.²⁴ If Djemal convinced anyone of his paternal attitude toward the deportees, Tashnag ears were deaf to his pleas. His name remained on “the list.”

When the Regional Central Committee of the Tashnag Party operating in Georgia learned that Djemal was en route to Moscow via Tiflis, it assigned Stepan Dzaghigian to find and kill the former leader. Dzaghigian was a veteran who had successfully carried out executions against “war criminals.” Upon his arrival in Tiflis, Dzaghigian met with the agents who had been tracking Djemal, and they informed him that Djemal always traveled with two bodyguards.

Dzaghigian was backed up by his nephew Artashes Kevorkian, and by Bedros Der Boghosian. When Djemal went for his daily stroll at four p.m. on July 21, 1922, the killers moved in, surrounding the former leader and his two bodyguards as they passed the secret Soviet Cheka headquarters. Djemal Pasha and his young bodyguards died in a fusillade of bullets. Two hundred Tashnags in Tiflis, Dzaghigian among them, were rounded up by Soviet Georgian Chekists. Though General Dro, an Armenian fighter with influence in Soviet circles, interceded on behalf of those arrested, Dzaghigian was thrown into prison. There were rumors that, while in prison, Dzaghigian created an underground organization to aid Armenian prisoners in the Soviet Union. “Provisions and clothing were sent as far as Siberia.”²⁵ But that’s about the last we know of him. In time, Dzaghigian was exiled to the gulag. There is no record of his death.

Enver Pasha (Cegen, Tajikistan, August 4, 1922)

Enver Pasha and Dr. Nazim were, of course, high on “the list.” Operation Nemesis tracked both men but did not succeed in assassinating them. Since they were targets, and because they died violent deaths, they must be mentioned here.

Enver Pasha had developed a tenuous relationship with the Soviet authorities while living in Moscow (where he befriended and was interviewed by the journalist Louise Bryant, consort of John Reed). Enver had at first entangled himself in Soviet politics at the 1920 Congress held in Baku. But as he attempted to insinuate himself into Moscow’s good graces, he found himself cut off from the center of power in Turkey. Mustapha Kemal viewed Enver as a real threat to his authority. They were rivals in the military hierarchy, and on March 12, 1921, only days before Talat’s assassination, the Turkish Grand National Assembly issued a decree “to the effect that Enver and Halil Pasha were prohibited from returning to Anatolia,” as this would be “detrimental” to the workings of Kemal’s new government.²⁶ Louise Bryant also reports that Enver seemingly had little affection for his fellow CUP leader Talat. In March, upon receiving word that Talat had been gunned down in Berlin, “he read the message with no show of emotion,” Bryant observed, “commenting only that, ‘His time had come!’ ”²⁷

Understanding that he had to consolidate his power using means outside the control of Kemal, Enver traveled to Bukhara in Central Asia as a representative of the Soviet authorities. Ostensibly he was there to help suppress Islamic uprisings against the local Bolsheviks. Once he was in Tajikistan, however, on the pretext of going hunting, Enver slipped away from his Russian escorts and joined up with the local Basmachi rebels, Central Asian and Turkic Muslims who were rising up against Bolshevik rule. He assembled a new “Islamic Army,” comprised of Basmachi fighters who accepted him as leader because of his credentials. In these ancient Muslim khanates, it was meaningful to the faithful that Enver was the son-in-law of a previous caliph, Sultan Abdul Hamid.

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