Operation Nemesis The Assassination Plot that Avenged the Armenian Genocide Book

June 3, 2015 By administrator

By Eric Bogosian (Hardcover Book, 2015)

Book review by Lucine Kasbarian

Seven years after starting his research about one of the most dramatic episodes of 20^th century Armenian history, actor, playwright, and novelist Eric Bogosian has written Operation Nemesis: The Assassination Plot that Avenged the Armenian Genocide (Little, Brown & Co.; April 21, 2015).

Much was expected of this widely publicized book whose author is fairly well-known to the American public. Many Armenians hoped that the work would bring into focus the fact that a group of Armenian patriots executed Turkish leaders who had escaped court-ordered death sentences for planning and carrying out the Armenian Genocide.

However, while serious students of the Armenian Genocide may be merely disappointed in this book, others could be misled.

Bogosian’s account of Operation Nemesis—the post-WWI Armenian execution of Talaat and other Turkish genocidists—does not start until one-third of the way into this 300-page book. Readers first learn about the events that led up to the Genocide. Much later in the book, the author provides information irrelevant to Nemesis. Even if this was ostensibly done to provide context, the title Operation Nemesis: The Assassination Plot that Avenged the Armenian Genocide is misleading because it gives the impression that the book is solely about Operation Nemesis.

Moreover, “Assassination Plot” implies a sinister or unjust political motive, which is definitely not the case for the Armenians of Nemesis. Call me fastidious, but a more appropriate title for these events would be Operation Nemesis: The Secret Plan to Execute the Guilty Perpetrators of the Armenian Genocide.

His bibliography indicates that an incredible amount of research material was at Bogosian’s disposal to produce this book. But the selectivity he exercised in the use of that material is apparent. Bogosian’s choice of words, phrasing, style, tone, and reasoning—as well as certain insertions and omissions of information—will often bewilder and disorient knowledgeable readers as well as those new to this history.

In the opinion of this reviewer, the result obfuscates the significance of the Nemesis operation and the gravity and persistent dangers of Turkish ultra-nationalism. One winces reading many of the author’s passages. In our opinion, this book disingenuously brings the Turkish reputation up a few notches while subtly bringing that of Armenians down at least that many. Having read both the pre-publication and published editions, we have noticed that a few of the more egregious passages have been modified or removed in the published edition.

Perhaps Bogosian is following today’s so-called ‘conflict resolution’ paradigm. That is, in exchange for Turkish acknowledgment of the Armenian Genocide, the victim group must sacrifice truthful aspects surrounding this crime against humanity and concede that the Ottoman Turkish Empire simply found itself under siege in WWI, had an anxiety attack, and, unfortunately, struck out against ‘rebellious’ Armenians.

Following are some passages from the book and our comments.

P. 17: “At their peak, the Ottomans displayed a culture and scientific sophistication equal to the greatest pre-modern civilizations.”

To the extent that this may, in part, be true, can Bogosian prove that this was the doing of the Ottoman Turks themselves rather than that of the empire’s subject peoples?

P. 18: “Aside from their respective religious faiths, the two peoples [Turks and Armenians] are in many ways congruent in their culture and style.”

Most Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks, as well as visitors to the Ottoman Empire during the periods Bogosian writes about, would disagree.

P. 30: “A slave girl from the most remote corner of the empire could become mother to a sultan.”

True, but the phrasing implies that a girl’s captivity in the imperial harem was somehow an honor. Turks abducted or captured thousands of non-Muslim women to live as the sultans’ harem sex slaves and servants. Only five pages later does the author say that harem women were sometimes executed or drowned when no longer deemed useful.

P. 31: Bogosian takes a page to describe Europeans’ allegedly erroneous view of Ottoman Turkey (“an impressive civilization”) as being composed of “outlaws who abducted women into their harems, castrated young boys, or enslaved the crews of captured ships.” Europeans, writes Bogosian, also had “lush fantasies” about harems “filled with naked slave girls and fierce eunuchs.”

Could it be that Europeans had a more accurate view of the Ottoman Turks than does Bogosian?

P. 33: “Religious minorities were tolerated under what was called the millet [community] system, in contrast to the violent suppression of ‘heretics’ common in Europe.”

This is very much a generalization. Was the Ottomans’ forced Islamization of many Christians “tolerant”?

P. 34: Turks seized Christian boys to become Ottoman soldiers—Janissaries (literally ‘new troops’): “The most attractive teenagers were collected under the process of devshirme [systematic collection], often with the consent of their families, because to be invited into the sultanic milieu was a great honor and opportunity.”

However, in those many cases where families did not consent, did these boys and their families really consider it a “great honor and opportunity” to be forcibly converted to Islam and never see their families again?

P. 54: Bogosian has apparently bought into some pro-Turkish historians’ contempt for ‘nationalism’: “The Serbs, the Greeks, the Arabs, and the Armenians also began to think of themselves as ‘nations’” and some successfully broke away from the Ottoman Empire. But for Armenians “nationalism would have tragic consequences.”

It was Turkish ultra-nationalism, however, rather than Armenian nationalism that brought about the Armenian Genocide. Armenians mainly desired to not be oppressed and massacred. Moreover, are people forever condemned to live in multi-national empires ruled by Turks and others? For example, should the various peoples of North America, South America, and Africa still be ruled by European empires?

P. 59: “With the assault on the Bank Ottoman [1896] and now the attempts on [Sultan] Abdul Hamid’s life [1905], the Tashnags [Armenian Revolutionary Federation, or ARF] were establishing themselves as a truly dangerous terrorist organization.”

While the use of the word “terrorist” (also see p. 50) may be appropriate in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and while the ARF at the time used it, in 21st century America it implies something deliberately sinister and inhumane and misleads readers early on. Only in a footnote (#6) buried on p. 318 does Bogosian concede that the ARF did not generally target “innocent civilians.”

P. 62: “A series of attacks against Armenians erupted in the vilayet of Adana in 1909, leaving some twenty to thirty thousand dead.”

True. But these significant massacres are mentioned in only four or so other sentences in the entire book. Had Turkish massacres of subject nationalities become so commonplace that they came to appear normal to Bogosian? Would the author have devoted more pages to these massacres had Armenians been the perpetrators and Turks the victims?

P. 68: “And it was under the cloak of this war between the Ottoman Empire and the Allies that the Armenian Genocide proceeded with little detection.”

This is a strange assertion that an editor should have caught. In May 1915, as Bogosian knows (he mentions it in footnote #34, chapter 3), Allied governments warned Turkey that they will “hold personally responsible for these crimes all members of the Ottoman government, as well as their agents who are implicated in such massacres.” There were also hundreds of contemporary worldwide newspaper reports of the Genocide in 1915 and later.

P. 71: “The Central Committee of the CUP [Committee of Union and Progress, also known as the “Young Turk” party] quickly came to believe that the Armenian population represented a mortal threat to the dying Ottoman Empire.”

If the empire was “dying” anyway, how could Armenians—particularly women and children—represent a “mortal threat”? And why omit that scholars have found considerable evidence that the Genocide was pre-meditated, not something decided, as Bogosian puts it, “quickly”?

P. 97: Before the Genocide, Armenian “revolutionaries, hard to distinguish from the bandits who roamed the countryside [of eastern Ottoman Turkey] with impunity, made it their life’s work to pester the local authorities.”

Bogosian’s wording is confounding. Since when is fighting back against a government that was massacring Armenians “pestering”?

P. 107: During the Genocide, “Muslim fighters were well aware of acts of atrocity that the Russian army had committed against their [Muslim] Bulgarian brethren during the Balkan wars only a few years before.

Even if true, this could not justify killing Armenians. The average reader might also conclude that were it not for the Balkan wars Turks would not have massacred Armenians. Yet Turkey had massacred Armenians in the 1890s and 1909, years before the Balkan wars of 1912-13.

P.108: In May 1915, the Armenians of Van, “certain they were about to be attacked by the Ottoman army … fortified their city and prepared for battle. These preparations incited the [Turkish] military to attack.”

Armenians “incited” Turks? It was the other way around: the Turkish massacres incited the Armenians of Van to defend themselves.

P. 110: “In the early days” of the Genocide, forced Armenian conversion to Islam “meant real salvation—literally, a means of saving one’s neck.”

We doubt it was that simple. Did Bogosian mean to editorialize that it was preferable to convert than to die for remaining loyal to one’s chosen beliefs? Moreover, Bogosian does not immediately make it clear that for females ‘conversion’ was often just another word for abduction and rape. Armenian women—some already widowed from the massacres—and girls were subsequently forced to bear the children of their Turkish captors.

P. 126: After the Allies won WWI, they “memorialized their thousands of fallen brethren by stomping on Turkish pride.” What is Bogosian’s evidence for the alleged “stomping”? French Marshal Louis Franchet d’Espèrey entered Constantinople “riding a white horse, a symbolic gesture of victory harking back to the Crusades … greeted by cheering crowds of Armenians and Greeks” and occupied the palace of genocidist Enver Pasha; Allied ships anchored in the harbor; and the city was “crowded with thousands of foreign troops.”

Should the Allies, instead, have handed out pakhlava to the “proud” Turks, provided them grief counseling, and told them that they really didn’t lose WWI?

P. 128: Apparently referring to the pre-WWI period, Bogosian writes, “The Armenians themselves did not constitute a majority in most of the territory considered a potential territory for them.”

Of course, it really depends on the particular regions being considered and is, therefore, a somewhat misleading demographic generalization. Bogosian also fails to note the massive toll that many pre-Genocide massacres, forced Islamizations, abductions, deportations, and the deliberate Turkish importation of non-native peoples had taken on the Armenian population. Moreover, in some locations Turks were in the minority while Armenians combined with non-Turks constituted the majority. And what about the Greeks and Assyrians in those regions?

P. 131: “As the war was winding down, [British] Prime Minister Lloyd George, a great champion of the Greek nation, encouraged the former Ottoman possession, which had been independent from Turkey since the early nineteenth century, to invade the Turkish lands along the coast in an attempt to ‘reclaim’ its ancient littoral. To the Greeks, this made sense, because there still existed large Greek populations in the city of Smyrna, in villages along the coast, and in the Aegean islands. This ill-considered move would result in the tragic destruction of the city of Smyrna in a devastating fire.”

Occupied and dispossessed peoples such as Greeks are called invaders, victims are to blame, and the Turkish destruction of Smyrna is excused. Bogosian does not mention the expulsion of Greeks—natives for 3,000 years in the Pontus region—along the Black Sea and the fact that Turkey persecuted, deported, and murdered its Greek citizens during WWI. Did not Greece have any right to protect the remaining Greeks in Turkey, or were they all to be left to the bloody whims of Kemal Ataturk? Bogosian (p. 250) accuses the Greeks, after Greece’s army landed in Turkey in 1919, of “atrocities against Turkish citizens.” “The Greek invasion was a crime against their [Turkish] humanity.” Again, Bogosian fails to mention that this “invasion” came only after an earlier, years-long genocidal campaign by the Young Turks against Greeks during WWI. Do only the Turks have the right to, as Bogosian calls it, “invade”?

P. 131: In Constantinople in 1919, says Bogosian, “the war crimes trials” of Turks accused of the destruction of Armenians “added insult to the injury of defeat.”

We are sorry that Turks considered it an “insult” that their esteemed leaders were being tried and found guilty for war crimes against Armenians. As for “injuries,” Armenians had been injured far more than Turks. Is the world expected to reward the bad behavior of mass-murderers?

P. 139: Regarding the post-war Treaty of Sèvres (1920) signed by the Allies and Armenia: “Had such a plan gone into effect, there would have been little left of the Ottoman Empire but a fraction of its former self.”

True. Aggressive empires that lose a major war inevitably forfeit territory. Should it be otherwise? Let’s recall that Turkey tried to destroy the Republic of Armenia during and after WWI. Kemal Ataturk ordered his generals to “destroy Armenia politically and physically.” Bogosian (p. 262) says that Sevres “conceded territory to the Armenians and distributed the rest of Anatolia to Greeks and Kurds.” Not quite true. The treaty actually left Turks considerable territory in central Asia Minor. Had the Turks won the war, they would not have been so generous to their enemies. When all was said and done, Turkey got 100% of Asia Minor, including the Armenian Plateau, while Armenians, Assyrians, Greeks, and Kurds got nothing whatsoever.

P. 150: Bogosian says that Soghomon Tehlirian, Talaat Pasha’s assassin and Nemesis member, followed “in the footsteps of the first assassins” when he killed Talaat in Berlin in 1921. The word assassin, explains Bogosian, refers to the followers of Hassan-i Sabbah, an 11th century Muslim “extortionist” who “vengefully sent out followers to murder his enemies.” Bogosian also harkens back to the Turkish sultans who assassinated their brothers to gain the Ottoman throne.

This may be interesting history, but Tehlirian followed in no such historical “footsteps,” was not an extortionist, and aspired to no throne. He and other members of Nemesis carried out entirely justified executions. Talaat and others had already been sentenced to death in absentia by post-war Turkish tribunals. After his acquittal by a German jury, Tehlirian married and lived a modest, unassuming life in San Francisco.

P. 155: Bogosian compares the ARF to the CUP. Each had “no compunctions about deploying violence” and “a shared code of violence.”

Whatever one thinks of the ARF, it is clearly inaccurate to compare a political party whose goal was to defend Armenians against oppression and massacre to one that tried to expand an oppressive empire via genocides.

P. 281: Bogosian lauds mass-murderer Kemal Ataturk. The latter was “ruggedly handsome,” “one of the most quoted men in history,” (p. 277) “a born leader of rare genius,” (p. 134), and “a resilient and an able foe” (p. 178) who had “tremendous vitality and charisma” (p. 283).

It is unusual for a truly informed writer to praise Ataturk, though Bogosian sometimes (p. 282-283) describes him in less flattering terms. That Ataturk annihilated Armenians who had survived the Genocide is largely passed over. That he inducted many Young Turk genocidists into his new government is given one sentence (p. 301).

P. 290: “Within each community [of the Armenian diaspora] were thousands of survivors who had mixed feelings about Tashnags [ARF]. Some sided with the ARF, believing that in the years leading up to and including World War I, the only appropriate Armenian response to Turkish violence was strong revolutionary, often violent action. Others (and among these I would include my own grandparents) felt that the politically activist Armenians were troublemakers who willingly courted violence.” Note: The book’s pre-publication version had ended that sentence with “and had possibly triggered the Armenian Genocide.”

The oppression and massacre of Armenians by Turks spawned Armenian revolutionaries rather than the other way around. Moreover, in hopes that Turkey would reform, the ARF largely cooperated with the CUP/Young Turks before and after the 1908 Young Turk revolution. Those who blame Armenian revolutionaries must ask themselves why Turks also committed genocide against Christian Assyrians and Greeks, who had not formed such revolutionary groups. Continuing in this vein (p. 305), Bogosian writes: “The Armenian Genocide is part of that [the Ottoman Empire’s] history, but so is the story of Armenian revolutionary groups and their actions.” Is Bogosian following in his grandparents’ footsteps by giving credence to the false idea that the ARF brought the Genocide upon the Armenian people?

P. 301: Bogosian questions the legality of the executions committed by the Armenians of Operation Nemesis: “Though the perpetrators [of the Armenian Genocide] were convicted by a court of law in Constantinople, those convictions were later thrown out by the new Ankara government.”

To which we must ask, since Bogosian does not: Did the new “Ankara government” of Kemal Ataturk have the legal right to do so? Bogosian (p. 302) concedes that the “men and women of Operation Nemesis did what governments could not. They were appealing to a higher, final justice.” Fine, but Bogosian’s questioning the legality of the Nemesis executions is rather breathtaking considering the millions of crimes committed by thousands of individual Turks against Armenians that went, and have gone, completely unpunished to this day, and for which Bogosian seems to want, at best, a mere acknowledgment.

P. 302-303: Bogosian spends two pages meandering, equivocating, and asking himself if and why the Genocide may be important today. “Memory lies at the center of the Nemesis story. It is the engine of an intense bloodlust. We remember, but we remember differently. Our respective narratives lead to different actions. Thus the conundrum of history” and so on.

Does Nemesis really inspire “bloodlust” in Armenians? Or do Armenians simply seek justice for the Genocide and its concomitant dispossession of culture and homeland? Bogosian fails to mention a major reason why the Genocide is important today: Turkey’s pan-Turkic ambitions in Azerbaijan and Central Asia—now supported by the power of the US, Europe, and NATO—remain a threat to Armenia. An unrepentant, snarling, and self-admitted neo-Ottomanist Turkey is an obvious danger, but there is no indication that Bogosian understands this or wishes to let readers know this.

305: Bogosian rarely gives much credit to the Nemesis group or to Armenians.

Only in the Postscript’s final sentence does Bogosian bother to describe the Nemesis participants as “this brave group of men possessed of remarkable will and courage.” This is too little, too late.

339: The large bibliography, some 450 references, includes many excellent books on the Genocide but also many Genocide denial books by authors such as Kamuran Gurun, Bernard Lewis, Guenter Lewy, Justin McCarthy, Hugh Pope, and Stanford Shaw.

We hope that they have not filled Bogosian’s head with falsehoods. Is he trying to hit a “happy medium” between the facts of the Genocide and its denial?

After reading Bogosian’s book, one comes away thinking that the literary, educational, and political establishments of the West would be very pleased if young people, including Armenians, who read Operation Nemesis, conclude that Armenians are partly responsible for the Genocide, and decide that it is best to leave the past alone.

In publishing this book, an opportunity was squandered to let the world know that the Armenians got a raw deal after their attempted annihilation; that valiant Armenians stepped in only after the 1919 Turkish Military Tribunals did not follow through on their verdicts; and that a century later the legacy of a great unpunished crime against humanity begs to be resolved.

Perhaps Bogosian will consider the above issues if he publishes a second edition of this book.

Three other books about Operation Nemesis have recently been released:

Special Mission – Nemesisby J.B. Djian and Jan Varoujan; illustrations by Paolo Cossi; translated into English by Lou Ann Matossian (Editions Sigest; Sept. 2014). Covers the events before, during and after the execution of Talaat. A good primer for all ages, produced in graphic novel format.
Sacred Justice: The Voices and Legacy of the Armenian Operation Nemesisby Marian Mesrobian MacCurdy; Edited by Gerard Libaridian (Transaction Publishers; March 2015). A combination of Armenian, community, and family history as it relates to MacCurdy’s grandfather, Aharon Sachaklian, a member of the Nemesis group. Not reviewed at press time.
Operation Nemesisby Josh Blaylock; illustrations by Hoyt Silva (Devil’s Due Publishing; May 2015). An interpretation of Tehlirian’s life, the Talaat execution, and the subsequent trials in Berlin. The attire and use of language featured are not entirely authentic to the times nor of the peoples they depict. Presented in graphic novel format.

For those interested in other accounts of Operation Nemesis, visit: http://www.operationnemesis.com/further_reading.html

Book Review: ‘Operation Nemesis: The Assassination Plot That Avenged the Armenian Genocide’

May 25, 2015 By administrator

By Rupen Janbazian

By Eric Bogosian
Little, Brown and Company, New York (April 21, 2015), 384 pages
ISBN 978-0316292085; Hardcover, $28.00

Special for the Armenian Weekly

Cover of Operation Nemesis

Over the years, the story of Operation Nemesis, the clandestine plot to assassinate the chief architects of the Armenian Genocide, had been told with a certain cloud of mystery and ambiguity hanging over it. While the topic had been discussed and written about in parts, authors were generally hesitant to present an all-encompassing understanding of the often-ignored, true story of Nemesis. Moreover, nearly a century after the project was carried out, the topic continues to remain somewhat taboo in the Armenian community.

Fast forward to 2015, the Centennial of the Armenian Genocide, which has already seen the publication of several books and volumes that deal with various aspects of the operation. From Marian Mesrobian MacCurdy’s Sacred Justice: The Voices and Legacy of the Armenian Operation Nemesis, which includes narratives, selections from memoirs, and previously unpublished letters, to the graphic novel Operation Nemesis: A Story of Genocide & Revenge by Josh Blaylock (author), Mark Powers (editor), and Hoyt Silva (illustrator), the 100^th anniversary of the genocide seems to have provided the perfect opportunity for authors to shed light on the sometimes-murky details of this historical quest for justice.

Renowned actor, novelist, and playwright Eric Bogosian first heard about the assassination of Talaat Pasha about two decades ago. According to Bogosian, the story struck him as “wishful thinking,” which was far from the truth—an Armenian urban legend, of sorts. After some research and investigation, though, Bogosian quickly realized that not only had the assassination taken place, but that it was part of a much more complicated history of secrecy.

Bogosian thought Tehlirian’s story would make a good film, so he decided to dedicate a few months to writing the screenplay. The few months would snowball into more than seven years of meticulous research and study. The result: Operation Nemesis: The Assassination Plot That Avenged the Armenian Genocide, a 384-page, in-depth history of the conspiracy.

Published in April by Little, Brown and Company, Bogosian’s book aims to go “beyond simply telling the story of this cadre of Armenian assassins by setting the killings in the context of Ottoman and Armenian history.” And it holds true to this promise.

In part one of the three-part book, Bogosian brilliantly paints a thorough picture of Armenian history, with a particular focus on the Armenians of the Ottoman Empire before and during the Armenian Genocide. By drawing on a number of academic and non-academic sources, including several primary sources, such as newspaper articles, memoirs, and letters from the time, Bogosian provides his reader a concise, yet wide-ranging historical context for the operation.

While some may feel that Bogosian dedicates too much of the book to historical background, it seems to be a wise decision on the part of the author, as most readers do not have a sufficient understanding of Armenian history.

In part two of the book, Bogosian details the origins of Nemesis, the story of the assassination of Talaat Pasha, and gives insight into its immediate aftermath. Bogosian does this fiercely, sparing little detail. By employing Tehlirian as his protagonist, he vividly describes the inner-workings of the covert operation, while giving readers an intimate look into a young survivor’s post-traumatic inner world.

Bogosian’s description of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation’s (ARF) role as the parent organization of Operation Nemesis is refreshing and crucial, considering it is often ignored or discussed in passing in other English-language works examining the operation. Bogosian openly writes about how the ARF aimed to exploit the assassination strategically to bring international attention to the Armenian Genocide, a reality rarely written about in the past.

Finally, Bogosian brings in a completely ignored facet of the Nemesis story: international intelligence in the context of the plot. Bogosian provides much evidence, for example, that British Intelligence at the time knew exactly where Talaat Pasha was, while in hiding in Berlin.

While part two of the book is captivating to read, it is also straightforward and balanced. Bogosian is careful not to follow the traditional typecast of heroizing Tehlirian (and later, his co-conspirators). Instead, he is able to provide a sober description of the operation in an in-depth and well-explained context.

Many critics, especially those from the Armenian community, will be quick to point to Bogosian’s overuse of the term “assassin” to characterize Tehlirian and his fellow collaborators, and may accuse him of trying to downplay their significance in history. However, Bogosian’s choice to characterize them as such can be considered fair, considering the word “assassin” is defined as “a murderer of an important person in a surprise attack for political or religious reasons.” And that’s exactly what Tehlirian and the rest of the gang were.

In his conclusion, Bogosian points out that the members of Operation Nemesis saw themselves as “holy warriors” carrying out more of a spiritual, rather than strictly political, calling to exact “some fraction of justice” for the destruction of a nation.

Bogosian closes off his masterpiece with the hopes that more serious scholarship examines the “memories we are losing” and the “history we’ve lost,” including the story of Operation Nemesis. What he ignores, however, is the fact that he himself has made a substantial and lasting contribution to the history of Operation Nemesis.

Bogosian’s Operation Nemesis is the result of painstaking and thorough investigation and research. Not only does he offer a comprehensive historical account of the plot, but also successfully changes the traditional narrative on one of the most important and most ignored aspects of post-genocide Armenian history.

‘Operation Nemesis: The Assassination Plot That Avenged the Armenian Genocide’ – The Washington Times

May 13, 2015 By administrator

Vengeance is born when justice dies. “Operation Nemesis” is the gripping tale of how a small, ruthlessly determined group of Armenians hunted down the architects of the Ottoman Empire’s World War I program of organized mass murder, specifically intended to eliminate a people, the Armenians, who had lived in Anatolia and other parts of the Ottoman Empire for thousands of years.

Many governments, spiritual leaders (including the current pope), and most independent historians and legal analysts agree that what began in Istanbul a century ago on April 24, 1915, was the first modern genocide. By the time it was over, best estimates are that 1 million Ottoman Armenians had been killed, starved or driven to their deaths — as many women and children as able-bodied men. Trials in Istanbul immediately after World War I convicted and condemned to death in absentia key members of the responsible Young Turk leadership, but political upheaval erupted before most sentences could be carried out. While Kemal Ataturk, founder of the modern Turkish republic, personally denounced the mass murder of Armenians as “a shameful act,” his and other successor governments never officially acknowledged what happened. In the perilous early days of the Turkish republic — a poor, war-ravaged country — denial was understandable if not justifiable. The first and only priority was to establish a cohesive Turkish identity to replace the conflicted racial and religious melange that was the Ottoman Empire.

This meant creating a cadre of Muslim Turkish doctors, engineers, artists, intellectuals, architects, bankers and entrepreneurs to replace the Christian Armenians, Greeks and other minorities who had dominated those fields throughout the Ottoman centuries. It also meant avoiding restoration of valuable farmland, commercial property and seized or looted personal wealth to the families of murdered or exiled Armenians at a time when the Turkish economy was struggling to survive. This, in turn, led to rewriting history and demolishing ancient churches and other traces of Armenian civilization that had stood for centuries before the first Turks set foot in Anatolia.

Today, Turkey is a prosperous regional superpower, but its government is still in deep denial. It is as if every postwar German government, from Konrad Adenauer to Angela Merkel, had denied the existence of Nazi atrocities and passed laws banning the discussion of Hitler’s crimes against humanity. Of course, no analogies are perfect. Even as the Young Turk leadership organized and carried out its program of mass extermination, a few Christian Armenians were exempted. A great uncle of mine, a palace architect to the sultan, was already serving as an Ottoman engineer officer when the mass murders — unbeknownst to him — began. His wife, as a senior officer’s spouse, was spared. Uncle Mihran ended up a British POW on the Arab front and would build a new life — and a distinguished architectural career — in America. To his dying day, he had nothing but respect for Kemal Ataturk as a brilliant soldier and nation-builder. Obviously, you wouldn’t have found any Jewish officers in senior German ranks under the Third Reich, and wives of purged Jewish officers would probably have perished in concentration camps.

But that hardly alters the big picture. The mass murders of defenseless Armenian civilians, deportations, abductions of children, unrecompensed confiscation of possessions, and deliberate failure to provide food or medical treatment to Armenian death marchers clearly qualify as genocide. Small wonder then, that in the absence of justice in the early 1920s, a handful of Armenian conspirators took the law into their own hands and hunted down several of the convicted mass murderers living comfortably in cities like Berlin. Sadly, theirs is a story with more villains and victims than heroes. In “Operation Nemesis,” Eric Bogosian, a successful playwright and novelist, portrays the revenge killers warts and all; they included at least one neurotic and one braggart who clearly enjoyed his work a little too much. Worse was to follow. As late as the 1980s, a handful of radical Armenian nationalists with Middle East terrorist links carried out murders of innocent Turkish diplomats, possibly with encouragement from behind the Iron Curtain.

Meanwhile, the bloody shirt of Talaat Pasha, one of the architects of the Armenian genocide — a man who gloated about it and even pressured U.S. Ambassador Henry Morgenthau to turn over any American life insurance benefits paid on the deaths of his victims — was placed on display at the Turkish Army Museum inIstanbul as evidence of Armenian atrocities against Turks; the equivalent would be a contemporary German museum displaying clothing worn by Adolf Eichmann at his execution as evidence of Jewish atrocities against Germans.
Justice has yet to replace revenge, but growing numbers of Turks are seeking — and speaking — the truth, even at the risk of jail. When Hrant Dink, a courageous Turkish-Armenian journalist I was privileged to know, was gunned down by an extreme Turkish nationalist in front of his Istanbul office in 2007, 200,000 mourners, overwhelmingly Muslim Turks, filled the streets carrying signs declaring “We Are All Hrant Dink” and “We Are All Armenians.” What better reminder that the sense of justice is often stronger in ordinary citizens than in politicians?

Operation Nemesis – Arte-CINETV until May 5 – VIDEO

April 28, 2015 By administrator

http://info.arte.tv/fr/la-vengeance-des-armeniens-le-proces-tehlirian

ASBAREZ EXCLUSIVE: Eric Bogosian on Writing ‘Operation Nemesis’ and How the Project ‘Radicalized’ and Changed Him

April 26, 2015 By administrator

BY ARAM KOUYOUMDJIAN

Eric Bogosian on Writing ‘Operation Nemesis’

Eric Bogosian’s new book is not a novel or a script or a volume of monologues – the genres for which he is best known. In a surprising departure, Bogosian has written a non-fiction work entitled “Operation Nemesis,” which is about “the assassination plot that avenged the Armenian Genocide,” as its subtitle explains. The book, set for publication on April 21, examines the coordinated Armenian campaign in the early 1920s to assassinate the leading perpetrators of the Genocide in Constantinople (Istanbul), in Tbilisi, and in European cities where they had sought refuge. A significant part of the book is devoted to the assassination of Talat Pasha – one of the Genocide’s key architects – in Berlin by a young Armenian named Soghomon Tehlirian and to the ensuing trial which captured international attention and, stunningly, resulted in Tehlirian’s acquittal.

The multi-hyphenated Bogosian is not an academic or historian; rather, he is a prominent actor, playwright, monologuist, and novelist. Nevertheless, his study of Nemesis is premised on rigorous scholarly research, evidenced by nearly 50 pages of endnotes and bibliographic sources. At the same time, the book is a fast-paced, tension-filled, and altogether accessible work framed in the three-act structure of a script. Part I briefly surveys Armenian history up to and including the Genocide period; Part II tells Tehlirian’s story; and Part III recounts the remaining Nemesis assassinations and ponders their aftermath. Though factually driven, “Operation Nemesis” is layered with analyses of complex geopolitics, including the complicity of Western powers both with the Genocide and the assassination plot that followed.

We can trace Bogosian’s mastery of narrative to his prior body of writing – three novels and such plays as “Talk Radio,” which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and was made into a film by Oliver Stone (starring Bogosian himself), and “subUrbia,” which became a Richard Linklater film. A preeminent monologuist, Bogosian has also penned – and performed – such solo works as “Pounding Nails in the Floor with My Forehead” and “Wake Up and Smell the Coffee.” His acting credits span film (including Atom Egoyan’s “Ararat”), television (“Law & Order: Criminal Intent”), and stage – both Broadway and Off-Broadway.

Ahead of his visit to Los Angeles next week for appearances at the Alex Theatre and at Abril Bookstore, I had the opportunity to speak with Bogosian about his book, the process of its writing, and, ultimately, the impact it had on him. Our conversation of April 18 was lengthy, so the transcript below does not represent its entirety but captures substantial portions of it.

We began our talk with a discussion of identity – and Bogosian’s auspicious birthdate.

ARAM KOUYOUMDJIAN: Were you really born on April 24?

ERIC BOGOSIAN: Yes. Yeah. I didn’t fully understand the significance for much of my life. Oddly, I come from an Armenian family that just didn’t look at things from that perspective. It’s strange, I’m not even sure now why that was, but nobody seemed to be aware of the significance of April 24th in my family.

A.K.: When did you develop that awareness or consciousness of identity, and how did it emerge?

E.B.: I had a very clear idea of who I was as an Armenian from a very young age, because I had a grandfather who had somehow gotten out of Turkey at around the age of 20, so he was prime to be grabbed by the authorities in 1915, and he came to the United States. He used to tell me stories, and he was very clear, basically, that the Turks were bad people and that bad things had happened over there. […]

I had a notion that our being Armenian meant the church because I went to church – I was an altar boy, I went to Sunday school. “Armenian” meant old people who speak another language, “Armenia” meant someplace very far away, seemed to be Middle Eastern, but I wasn’t too sure about that, nobody was ever clear where Armenia was when I was growing up. The food, the music, the weddings – this was all for me my Armenian dimension of myself. Included in that was this narrative of the Genocide, which I understood in the most black-and-white terms. Other than that, I was pretty much part of, you know, regular old knucklehead suburban society and acted like that. I mean, I grew up in the ’60s …

In the ’90s, there was a shift for me, and it came from various directions. One was, very significantly, being in Atom Egoyan’s film “Ararat,” and being on that set where he replicated the city of Van during its siege. He had actors in costume, and it was just one of these odd moments, when I was walking through the set one day, and it just hit me that this must have been what it was like – and it moved me. At the same time, in the ’90s, the strife and the ethnic cleansing that was going on in Serbia and Bosnia was on TV every night, and for some reason it suddenly hit me that what I was seeing was what had happened to my own family. And I also read Peter Balakian’s book “Black Dog of Fate.” All these things started to stir me up, and I was sort of opened to the idea of doing something that would address my Armenian experience.

Having read “Passage to Ararat,” having read “Black Dog of Fate,” I didn’t see the point of me jumping in and telling a similar story talking about the contrast between growing up in the United States around a lot of American things and American TV and so forth, while I have all these very old-fashioned, old-country people around me making shish kabob in the backyard. I cherish those memories, but I felt [this terrain] had been covered by others.

A.K.: How did your interest in the Nemesis story originate?

E.B.: When I heard the story of Soghomon Tehlirian, at first I couldn’t even believe it was true. The notion that a young Armenian had assassinated the leader of the Turks after World War I was news to me. It almost seemed like this had to be some sort of Armenian pipe dream. As I explored it, I found out it was a true story. Certainly, the assassination, the trial, and the acquittal were true stories. I felt this would make a movie. In fact, there had been a movie made about it; at the time I didn’t know that. And so I set about to write this three-act [script].

When I write features or theater, I’m a structuralist as they say, and so I needed to know what the acts were. The first act would be in the desert during the deportation, and Tehlirian seeing his entire family murdered, and [himself] surviving and escaping, which was the story he told in court. The second act would be his running across Talat five years later in Berlin, and shooting him. And the third act would be the trial. It just all made sense. I sat down to do that – that was seven years ago.

As soon as I started researching the story further, I immediately learned about Operation Nemesis. And it was like, What? I mean, Tehlirian was in fact not a student but a member of a clandestine assassination squad operating out of the United States, and this squad had managed to knock off six major Turks after the war. Not only was I amazed by this story, but as I worked on it up until the very end, I continued to be amazed by what these men had pulled off.

When I looked at my particular situation at that time, seven years ago, two things occurred to me. One, if I write this book, it’ll get some attention just because I’m published already, and people know my name, but also, I wasn’t sure whether there was some sort of danger in working on something like this, danger to myself, danger to my children, danger to my career, or even my means of making a living. I thought, well, if there’s a matter of personal threat here, I can handle that, as long as I don’t have to worry about my kids. Well, my kids are in their 20s now, and they can take care of themselves, and my career has sort of peaked many years ago in terms of Hollywood, so that wasn’t going to be threatened either. I thought, you know, you’re in a unique situation to write this book and get it out there.

I wasn’t really thinking about the Centennial at the time because it was years ago, but I felt, you know, not only can you tell this incredible story, which everyone should know about, but also have an opportunity to talk about the Armenian Genocide again. I went on and researched all of this, and for me it was all news. I mean, so many aspects of the Armenian Genocide, as well as the story of Operation Nemesis, were things that I just didn’t know anything about. I didn’t know anything about Armenian history, I didn’t know anything about Turkish history, I didn’t know much about the geopolitics of the region, and I didn’t know any World War I history. So all these things I learned, and I learned very much, of course, about the Armenian political scene in the Ottoman Empire leading up to the Genocide and since then, specifically, the Tashnag [Party] or the Armenian Revolutionary Federation, who were – they were basically the sponsors of Operation Nemesis, they were the parent op organization.

A.K.: You had to tackle this project as a writer and a theater artist, rather than as a historian. In terms of perspective and preparation, was that an asset for you or a liability?

E.B.: I think every field has sort of a built-in tendency for the people in that field to become jaded to the field. You know, after you’ve been around a lot of movie sets or TV sets, the excitement isn’t really there anymore, it’s a job, it’s what you do for a living. Because I had never done anything like this, it was exciting for me all the way through.

I ended up at the University of Michigan with the Armenian Studies Program there, and I worked with those scholars . . . [Also,] fortunately for me, I had become friends with Aram Arkun many years ago, when he was at UCLA, and Aram is one of the most established historians in this field, and he gave me great assistance in learning, because I had to learn at a very accelerated rate . . . Then it turned out that I had other people I had gone to school with who were top translators in their field. I had befriended a French-Armenian filmmaker named Eddy Vicken, who was living in Paris, and he introduced me to [the historian] Raymond Kevorkian, so piece by piece, all the pieces came and fell into place. I actually taught myself how to access archives, which is a lot easier now than it used to be. I have friends in different countries, so I would get in touch with somebody, let’s say in London, and I’d say, can you find me a graduate student who can go into the British Archives and look for this, this, and this on these dates, or somebody in Rome, and so forth. And in a kind of a way, I don’t know, awkward, clumsy way, I put it all together. What was going in my favor was that I had the time to do it, and I was going to keep doing it until it was done. […]

I was just talking with one of the historians last night from the University of Michigan, and she said that when she read the book what was refreshing for her was that I wasn’t just making an argument and then proving it, which is the way [of] most historians. This is more a representation of my own curious mind in saying I’m basically going to get everything in the book that I think you’re going to want to know about.

A.K.: When you were deciding on a genre and opted for a research-based non-fiction book, did you consider the reach it would have – as opposed to the reach a screenplay would have?

E.B.: […] The reason that I felt I had to do it this way was because the subject matter was just too complex, and I know that movies simplify and distort history, so I just thought it was too important to get it right at least once. […] I actually hope that this book will inspire perhaps a really serious scholar – somebody who wants to put 20 or 30 years into it – to really look at what was going on with Operation Nemesis because there are still more archives to get into, and the connections to British intelligence, which I was only able to touch on with my research, are just too fascinating, and I explain why in the book.

I mean, there are characters here in the background who really need to be looked at more carefully because they were obviously playing some very complicated games. Often in history Armenians get stuck between players who have other agendas, not necessarily the agendas that the Armenians are looking for, so in the case of the assassination of these Turkish leaders, the Armenians are avenging the Genocide, but there are other people around at this time who have other agendas that maybe are promoted by removing these leaders and replacing them with other leaders, and in fact, inadvertently that’s what the Armenians did by knocking out Talat Pasha and Jemal Pasha (and also Enver Pasha being killed [by Russian forces] around the same time). This is how Kemal Ataturk was able to take over the country with nothing stopping him – I mean, these were all guys who would’ve vied with him for the leadership of Turkey. And the way Ataturk went about things – I don’t know if people knew that to be the case at the time – but he was a real pragmatist. The history we live with today is that Turkey became a strong ally of the West, and that was established early on. […]

A.K.: Are there any lingering issues that you did not have an opportunity to research, or are there any areas of inquiry in which scholarship is still lacking?

E.B.: We went pretty far into the British side of things, but the modern British intelligence system was always grounded in a lot of secrecy. And it’s very hard to get at what’s really going on in certain circumstances. I explain it very clearly in the book – the dynamics of Aubrey Herbert and others who were involved with this assassination, which I clearly believe they had something to do with it. The archives that I didn’t touch were Russian archives. I think there’s stuff in Russia. Lately, there’s been a lot of talk about Vatican archives just as far as the Armenian Genocide goes, but the Russian archives would be amazing things to get into, and there are archives in the United States that need to be opened, particularly the Tashnag archives in Massachusetts. […]

A.K.: As I read the book, your three-act structure was readily apparent, but I kept debating as to whether the book had a central character – and whether that was Tehlirian, the Nemesis campaign, or the Genocide itself, which you refer to at one point as “the core of what this book is really about.” Is there a central character in the book?

E.B.: The structure of this book went back and forth many times in the time that I wrote it. I had a lot of information I wanted to get out there, and how was I going to do that. I mean, you could imagine different ways this book could work. There was one time when I started with the trial. There were other times when I started with the killing of Talat.

The notion I always had was that there would be this spine which would be the story of Nemesis and how they were put together and how they did what they did, and then any time I got to a certain point, let’s say I mentioned Armenian Christianity, I would take a detour for a while and I would talk about why the Armenians are Christians and how that all began, so that the reader could keep being informed. When I finally came down to the final edit with my editor David Sobel, we found that this structure was very confusing for the reader because I was skipping back and forth in time, and the reader couldn’t understand where we were. Are we in 401 A.D., or are we in 1921, or where are we? So David insisted, Let’s just straighten out this very kinky string, and make everything that happens happen in line temporally. And that ended up solving the book.

Ultimately, the book, as a piece of writing, is kind of Byzantine. It’s the way that I write, it’s the way that I think, and the trick was to try to keep the reader interested, which I think I pulled off, while worming around all these different nooks and crannies that I just thought were too good to not talk about. I mean, the whole part about oil and Calouste Gulbenkian – I just thought this is important, I have to tell the story. The story of what’s a sultan, what are harems, what are janissaries, I just felt, how can you talk about Turks and not really know [who] a Turk is, I have to get this in there. […]

To get back to your question about is there a protagonist, I don’t think there is. I do follow Tehlirian for a long period of the book, because we know more about him than anybody else, there’s more information, and the story of the trial, being told here in a different way, is fascinating in and of itself. So, no, there really isn’t.

A.K.: As an Armenian-American writing this book, you are critical of Western atrocities throughout history, whether they be in the form of colonialism in Africa or the eradication of native populations in the Americas. How do you characterize the refusal of U.S. administrations to use the word “genocide”? When does silence become denial – or turn into aiding and abetting?

E.B.: […] I have been radicalized while I’ve been working on this project. I have shifted just recently from looking at the American government position as – I think I would have characterized it a year or so ago as pragmatic, understandable because Turkey is so strategic and the people who run the government are politicians, and I sort of felt, well, they didn’t have a choice, this is what they have to do. But I don’t believe that today. I think it’s cowardice, and I think it’s absurd because the United States is just too powerful to do things this way. This is the way bureaucracies act, they act weakly because they are run by cowards, and they don’t understand that the best way to deal with a bully is to punch him in the face. It’s absurd because Turkey can’t exist without us. Turkey needs the endless amount of aid that we give them and the support we give them. It is not a viable nation without support from the West. […]

As Robert Fisk was saying yesterday when we were talking about it, it’s ridiculous, it’s just ridiculous. They just have to – say what you need to say: It’s a genocide. And by not saying it, by perpetuating the denial, this is the last stage of genocide … Otherwise, we become complicit, we do become complicit, I agree with that.

A.K.: You mentioned that you’ve become radicalized, so aside from the obvious fact that writing this book has endowed you with a tremendous amount of historical and geopolitical knowledge, how has it changed you?

E.B.: Well, anybody who does the type of research that I’ve done will quickly realize how malleable history is, and once you realize how plastic history is, then all of reality starts to become suspect. […] I think the way I’ve changed is that I was always very certain that I knew things because I read a lot, and I thought I understood history or I understood political situations. Today, I’m not so sure about things, and in that way I’ve changed.

For example, when the Pope made a statement last weekend, on the surface of it, it seems that the Pope is a man of great spine and morality, and he just felt that he had to say what he said. Okay, but there’s also a political context for why he’s saying what he’s saying, and that has to do with what’s going on in the Middle East today with ISIS and so forth. So today I don’t just look at the thing as it sits right in front of me but look at the context, why is he saying it, why is he choosing today to say these things.

Likewise, yesterday the New York Times decided to suddenly, out of the blue, put a big piece right on the front page about Turkey and denial. And, you know, for a lot of us who watch the New York Times very carefully, this was surprising because only a few days before, they had kind of buried the Pope’s statement on page 7. It didn’t make the front page of the paper. How come they changed? Well, I think that they changed because there’s a sort of behind-the-scenes push-pull going on. The Pope said what he said, and then Turkey came back and lashed out with some very strong statements bordering on insults about Argentina, about the West, and then people are getting fired and thrown away [Etyen Mahcupyan, chief adviser to Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu was “retired” after referencing the Genocide], and I think the Pope’s moral spine inspired the New York Times to have some spine and say, If we just keep giving in to them all the time, if the Turks are going to get angry if we run this article, then where does this all lead? What is the point of even saying stuff about the [Genocide], if you’re just going to keep bending over every time this sort of position is taken, so I think there was more to it than just an article about Turkey on the front page yesterday.

So that’s how I’ve changed.

Aram Kouyoumdjian is the winner of Elly Awards for both playwriting (“The Farewells”) and directing (“Three Hotels”). His play “Happy Armenians” is slated for production this fall.