Mehmed Kemal Bey

Mehmed Kemal was the first person to be indicted and then sentenced to death in the Istanbul trials.[5][6] Hasan Mazhar had wished to start with him, as he had committed his acts in a region he knew well, and where he had been able to gather a substantial amount of evidence on the genocidal mechanisms at work. Other Young Turk administrators and officers took the opportunity of his trial to testify against him and his actions.[7]

The trials indicted Mehmed Kemal alongside some of his accomplices in the Yozgat deportations and massacres, Mehmed Tevfik and Abdül Fayaz.[8][9] The charges included:[8]

"The mass murder of Yozgat’s Armenian deportees at Keller and elsewhere, the pillage and plunder of the victim’s goods, and the abduction and rape of many members of the convoys."

His defense in court was complicated; he was accused by around thirty witnesses, including local Turkish officials and Armenians, of exterminating the Armenian population in his region. He claimed to be innocent and stated that he had merely followed the orders given to him,[10] but contradicted his written testimony where he had stated that the Young Turk government had ordered the destruction of the most incriminating evidence.[11]

During another session, Mehmed Kemal was forced to admit that some extermination orders were signed by his own hand, although he believed they had been destroyed.[11] His situation worsened further after the discovery of one of his telegrams sent to a lieutenant of the Special Organization, called Hulusi, in which he advocated for the "deportation, meaning annihilation" of the Armenian population.[11] One of the Turkish witnesses, a local official, accused him on February 22 of having massacred over 1,500 Armenians in just a few days.[12]

During his trial, Turkish deputy Shakir Bey from Yozgat intervened[13] and testified that Mehmed Kemal personally participated in the massacres and acted "with the manners of butchers."[14] He revealed the intentions of the Ottoman government by recalling that Mehmed Kemal boasted about being promoted to the position of governor of Yozgat as a reward for his Armenian massacres.[12] He reported the following statements allegedly made by Mehmed Kemal in his presence:

"I massacred the Armenians in Boğazlıyan, and I became an interim canton governor. I am killing them here as well. I will be appointed as the governor of a provincial district, or perhaps even a province."[12][15]

After Shakir Bey's testimony, Djemal Bey, the former governor of Yozgat, stated that there had never been intense rebel activity by Armenians in that region, which was the last argument used by the defense to save Mehmed Kemal.[11][16] Finally, the verdict was reached with the discovery of a telegram from Talaat Pasha, sent on August 9, 1915, stating that Mehmed Kemal had participated in the massacres and had already exterminated over 3,160 Armenians by that date.[12]

The court noted that only 80 Armenians remained in Yozgat out of an initial population of over 8,000.[11][15][17] On April 8, 1919, Mehmed Kemal was unanimously found guilty of premeditated mass murder in conjunction with robbery.[11][18][16][19] He was sentenced to death in accordance with Articles 45 and 170 of the Ottoman Penal Code and Article 171 of the Ottoman Military Penal Code. Premeditation was considered an aggravating factor.[11][15][20]

The court concluded that[21][22] :

"There can be no doubt or hesitation (şüphe ve tereddiit birak-madigindan) that the deportations were a cloak for massacres."

Bey's two accomplices fared better. Mehmed Tevfik was sentenced to 15 years in prison with hard labour. He was pardoned in 1923. Abdul Fayaz escaped, joined the Kemalists. He later became a Turkish deputy.[20]