Turkish courts-martial of 1919–1920
Turkish courts-martial of 1919–20 were courts-martial of the Ottoman Empire that occurred soon after the Armistice of Mudros, in the aftermath of World War I. The leadership of the Committee of Union and Progress and selected former officials were charged with several charges including subversion of the constitution, wartime profiteering, and the massacres of both Armenians and Greeks. The court reached a verdict which sentenced the organizers of the massacres – Talat, Enver, and Cemal – and others to death.
Since there were no international laws in place under which they could be tried, the men who orchestrated the massacres escaped prosecution and traveled relatively freely throughout Germany, Italy, and Central Asia. This led to the formation of Operation Nemesis, a covert operation conducted by Armenians during which Ottoman political and military figures who fled prosecution were assassinated for their role in the Armenian Genocide.
The Turkish courts-martial were forced to shut down during the resurgence of the Turkish National Movement under Mustafa Kemal. Those who remained serving their sentences were ultimately pardoned under the newly established Kemalist government on 31 March 1923.
Background
World War I
Following the reportage by US Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire Henry Morgenthau, Sr. of the Armenian resistance during the Armenian Genocide at the city of Van, the Triple Entente formally warned the Ottoman Empire on 24 May 1915 that:'' on 4 November 1918 after the Three Pashas fled the country following World War I. It reads: "Their response to eliminate the Armenian problem was to attempt the elimination of the Armenians themselves."
In the months leading up to the end of World War I, the Ottoman Empire had undergone major restructuring. In July of that 1918, Sultan Mehmed V died and was succeeded by his half-brother Mehmed VI. The Ministers of the Committee of Union and Progress, including the Three Pashas who ran the Ottoman Government between 1913 and 1918, had resigned from office and fled the country soon afterwards. Successful Allied offensives in Salonika posed a direct threat to the Ottoman capital of Constantinople. Sultan Mehmed VI appointed Ahmed Izzet Pasha to the position of Grand Vizier and tasked him with the assignment of seeking an armistice with the Allied Powers and ending Ottoman involvement in the war.
On 30 October 1918, an armistice was signed between the Ottomans, represented by the Minister of the Navy Rauf Orbay, and the Allies, represented by British Admiral Sir Somerset Gough-Calthorpe. The armistice essentially ended Ottoman participation in the war and required the Empire's forces to stand down although there still remained approximately one million soldiers in the field and small scale fighting continued in the frontier provinces into November 1918.
Surrender of Constantinople
In November 1918, Britain appointed Admiral Sir Somerset Gough-Calthorpe as High Commissioner and Rear-Admiral Richard Webb as Assistant High Commissioner in Constantinople. A French brigade later entered Constantinople on 12 November 1918, and the British Troops first entered the city on 13 November 1918. Early on December in 1918, Allied troops occupied sections of Constantinople and set up a military administration.The US Secretary of State Robert Lansing summoned the representatives of the Ottoman Empire, Sultan Mehmed VI and Grand Vizier Damat Ferid Pasha. The Paris Peace Conference established "The Commission on Responsibilities and Sanctions" in January 1919.
On 2 January 1919, Gough-Calthorpe requested from the Foreign Office authority to obtain the arrest and handing over of all those responsible for the incessant breaches of the terms of the Armistice and the continued ill-treatment of Armenians. Calthorpe got together a staff of dedicated assistants, including a notable anti-Turkish Irishman, Andrew Ryan, later Sir, who in 1951 published his memoirs. In his new role as the chief Dragoman of the British High Commission and Second Political Officer, he found himself in charge of the Armenian question. He proved instrumental in the arrest of a large number of the Malta deportees. These fell broadly into three categories: Those still breaching the terms of the armistice, those who had allegedly ill-treated Allied prisoners-of-war and those responsible for excesses against Armenians, in Turkey itself and the Caucasus. Calthorpe asked for a personal interview with Reshid Pasha, Ottoman Minister of Foreign Affairs, to impress on him how Britain viewed the Armenian affair and the ill-treatment of POWs as "most important" deserving "the utmost attention". Two days later Calthorpe formally requested the arrest of seven leaders of the Committee of Union and Progress. While between 160 and 200 people were arrested, another 60 suspected of participating in the massacre of Armenians remained at large.
Courts-martial
Establishment
The courts-martial were established on 28 April 1919 while the Paris Peace Conference, 1919 was ongoing. An inquiry commission was established, called the "Mazhar Inquiry Commission", which was invested with extraordinary powers of subpoena, arrest, et cetera, through which the war criminals were summoned to trial. This organization secured Ottoman documents from many provinces of the Ottoman Empire. Sultan Mehmet VI and Grand Vizier Damat Ferid Pasha, as representatives of the Ottoman Empire during the Second Constitutional Era were summoned to the Paris Peace Conference. On 11 July 1919, Damat Ferid Pasha officially confessed to massacres against the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire and was a key figure and initiator of the war crime trials held directly after World War I to condemn to death the chief perpetrators of the genocide.The Ottoman Government in Constantinople, foisted the blame on a few members of the Committee of Union and Progress and long-time rivals of his own Freedom and Accord Party, which would ensure that the Ottoman Empire received a more lenient treatment during the Paris Peace Conference. The trials helped the party root out the Committee of Union and Progress from the political arena. On 23 July 1919, during the Erzurum Congress, General Kâzım Karabekir was issued a direct order from the Sultanate to place Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and Rauf Orbay under arrest and assume Kemal's position as Inspector-General of the Eastern Provinces. He defied the government in Constantinople and refused to carry out the arrest.
At that time Turkey had two competing governments in Constantinople and Ankara. The government in Constantinople supported the Turkish trials with more or less seriousness depending on the current government. While Grand Vizier Damat Ferid Pasha stood behind the prosecuting body, the government of Grand Vizier Ali Riza Pasha barely made a mention of the legal proceedings against the war criminals. The trials had also blurred the crime of participation in the Turkish National Movement with the crime of the Armenian Genocide, and ultimately resulted in increasing support for the government in Ankara that would be led later on by Atatürk.
Procedure
The court sat for nearly a year, from April 1919 through March 1920, although it became clear after just a few months that the tribunal was simply going through the motions. The judges had condemned the first set of defendants when they were safely out of the country, but the Tribunal, despite making a great show of its efforts, had no intention of returning convictions. Admiral Sir Somerset Gough-Calthorpe protested to the Sublime Porte, took the trials out of Turkish hands, and moved the proceedings to Malta. There an attempt was made to seat an international tribunal, but the Turks bungled the investigations and mishandled the documentary evidence so that nothing of their work could be used by the international court.According to European Court of Human Rights judge Giovanni Bonello, 'quite likely the British found the continental inquisitorial system of penal procedure used in Turkey repugnant to its own paths to criminal justice and doubted the propriety of relying on it'. Or, possibly, the Turkish government never came round to hand over the incriminating documents used by the military courts. Whatever the reason, with the advent of power of Atatürk, all the documents on which the Turkish military courts had based their trials and convictions, were 'lost'. Admiral John de Robeck replaced Admiral Gough-Calthorpe on 5 August 1919 as "Commander in Chief, Mediterranean, and High Commissioner, at Constantinople". In August 1920, the proceedings were halted, and Admiral John de Robeck informed London of the futility of continuing the tribunal with the remark: "Its findings cannot be held of any account at all."
An investigative committee started by Hasan Mazhar was immediately tasked to gather evidence and testimonies, with a special effort to obtain inquiries on civil servants implicated in massacres committed against Armenians. According to genocide scholar Vahakn Dadrian, the Commission worked in accordance with sections 47, 75 and 87 of the Ottoman Code of Criminal Procedure. It had extensive investigative powers, because it was not only limited to conduct legal proceedings and search for and seize documents, but also to arrest and imprison suspects with assistance from the Criminal Investigation Department, and other State services. In a course of three months, the committee managed to gather 130 documents and files pertaining to the massacres, and had them transferred to the courts-martial.
Turkish courts-martial also had some cases of high-ranking Ottoman officials, who were assassinated by agents of the CUP in 1915, for disobeying criminal orders of the central government to deport and completely eliminate the Armenian civilian population of the Ottoman Empire.
Verdicts
On the 8 April 1919,l the former Kaymakam of Boğazlıyan, Yozgat was sentenced to death and the verdict was carried out by hanging on the 10 April 1919.Abdullah Avni the commander of the gendarmerie in Erzincan was sentenced to death during the Erzincan trials and hanged the 22 April 1920.
Behramzade Nusret, the Kaymakam of Bayburt, was sentenced to death on the 20 July 1920 and hanged on the 5 August 1920.
On 5 July 1919, the court reached a verdict which sentenced the organizers of the massacres, Talat, Enver, Cemal and others to death. The military court found that it was the intent of the CUP to eliminate the Armenians physically, via its Special Organization. The pronouncement reads as follows:The Court Martial taking into consideration the above-named crimes declares, unanimously, the culpability as principal factors of these crimes the fugitives Talaat Pasha, former Grand Vizir, Enver Efendi, former War Minister, struck off the register of the Imperial Army, Cemal Efendi, former Navy Minister, struck off too from the Imperial Army, and Dr. Nazim Efendi, former Minister of Education, members of the General Council of the Union & Progress, representing the moral person of that party; ... the Court Martial pronounces, in accordance with said stipulations of the Law the death penalty against Talaat, Enver, Cemal, and Dr. Nazim.
The courts-martial officially disbanded the CUP and confiscated its assets and the assets of those found guilty. Two of the three Pashas who fled were later assassinated by Armenian vigilantes during Operation Nemesis.
Detention in Malta and aftermath
Ottoman military members and high-ranking politicians convicted by the Turkish courts-martial were transferred from Constantinople prisons to the Crown Colony of Malta on board of the SS Princess Ena and the SS HMS Benbow by the British forces, starting in 1919. Admiral Sir Somerset Gough-Calthorpe was in charge of the operation, together with Lord Curzon; they did so owing to the lack of transparency of the Turkish courts-martial. They were held there for three years, while searches were made of archives in Constantinople, London, Paris and Washington to find a way to put them in trial. However, the war criminals were eventually released without trial and returned to Constantinople in 1921, in exchange for 22 British prisoners of war held by the government in Ankara, including a relative of Lord Curzon. The government in Ankara was opposed to political power of the government in Constantinople. They are often mentioned as the Malta exiles in some sources.According to European Court of Human Rights judge Giovanni Bonello the suspension of prosecutions, the repatriation and release of Turkish detainees was amongst others a result of the lack of an appropriate legal framework with supranational jurisdiction, because following World War I no international norms for regulating war crimes existed, due to a legal vacuum in international law; therefore contrary to Turkish sources, no trials were ever held in Malta. He mentions that the release of the Turkish detainees was accomplished in exchange for 22 British prisoners held by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.
Punishment
At the Armenian Revolutionary Federation's 9th General Congress, which convened in Yerevan from 27 September, to the end of October 1919, the issue of retribution against those personally responsible for organizing the Genocide was on the agenda. A task force, led by Shahan Natalie, working with Grigor Merjanov, was established to assassinate Talaat Pasha, Javanshir Khan, Said Halim Pasha, Behaeddin Shakir Bey, Jemal Azmi, Cemal Pasha, Enver Pasha, as well as several Armenian collaborationists, in a secret operation codenamed Operation Nemesis.Purging of evidence
A WikiLeaks cable classified and signed by David Arnett on 4 July 2004 at the Consulate General of the US in Istanbul states the following:
According to Sabanci University Professor Halil Berktay, there were two serious efforts to purge the archives of any incriminating documents on the Armenian question. The first took place in 1918, presumably before the Allied forces occupied Istanbul. Berktay and others point to testimony in the 1919 Turkish Military Tribunals indicating that important documents had been "stolen" from the archives. Berktay believes a second purge was executed in conjunction with Özal's efforts to open the archives by a group of retired diplomats and generals led by former Ambassador Muharrem Nuri Birgi.
According to the cable, ambassador Muharrem Nuri Birgi was effectively in charge of destroying evidence during the 1980s. During the process of eliminating the evidence, ambassador Birgi stated in reference to the Armenians: "We really slaughtered them." Others, such as Tony Greenwood, the Director of the American Research Institute in Turkey, confirmed that a select group of retired military personnel were "going through" the archives. However, it was noted by a certain Turkish scholar that the examination was merely an effort to purge documents found in the archives.