Istanbul trials of 1919–1920

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:

In view of these new crimes of Turkey against humanity and civilization, the Allied Governments announce publicly to the Sublime Porte that they will hold personally responsible for these crimes all members of the Ottoman Government, as well as those of their agents who are implicated in such massacres".[9][10][11][12][13][14][15]

The front page of the Ottoman newspaper İkdam 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."[16]

In the months leading up to the end of World War I, the Ottoman Empire had undergone major restructuring. In July 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.[17] 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.[18]

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.[17]

In November 1918, Britain appointed Admiral Sir Somerset Gough-Calthorpe as High Commissioner and Rear-Admiral Richard Webb as Assistant High Commissioner in Constantinople.[19] A French brigade later entered Constantinople on 12 November 1918, and 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 (a founding member of the Freedom and Accord Party. 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 (later to be) 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 (CUP). While between 160 and 200 people were arrested, another 60 suspected of participating in the massacre of Armenians remained at large.[19]

A session of the Turkish courts-martial on 3 April 1919

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.[20][21][22]

The Ottoman Government in Constantinople (represented by Damat Ferid Pasha), 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.[23][24] The trials helped the Freedom and Accord Party root out the Committee of Union and Progress from the political arena.[25] 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.[18]^: 248

At that time Turkey had two competing governments in Constantinople (now Istanbul) and Angora (now 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 (4 March – 2 October 1919 and again 5 April – 21 October 1920) stood behind the prosecuting body, the government of Grand Vizier Ali Riza Pasha (2 October 1919 – 2 March 1920) barely made a mention of the legal proceedings against the war criminals.[26] 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 Angora that would be led later on by Atatürk.[27]

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 (Enver, et al.) 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.[28]

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'.[19] Admiral John de Robeck replaced Admiral Gough-Calthorpe on 5 August 1919 as "Commander in Chief, Mediterranean, and High Commissioner, at Constantinople".[28] 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."[29]

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.[30] 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.[31] 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.[32]

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 eliminate the Armenian civilian population of the Ottoman Empire.

On 8 April 1919, Mehmed Kemal, former Kaymakam of Boğazlıyan, Yozgat, was sentenced to death and hanged on 10 April 1919.[33] Prior to their executions, every condemned individual received a fatwa issued by the Shaykh al-Islam in the name of Mehmed VI, in accordance with the legal requirement that no Muslim could be put to death without such a decree from the Sultan-Caliph.[5]

These legal proceedings and accompanying fatwas also functioned as vehicles for Mehmed VI to manifest his dissent towards the condemned individuals and justify his position, both within the context of his domestic affairs concerning the Muslim population within his empire and in response to the Western powers that had emerged victorious in World War I.[5]

Abdullah Avni, the commander of the gendarmerie in Erzincan was sentenced to death during the Erzincan trials and hanged on 22 April 1920.[33]

Behramzade Nusret, the Kaymakam of Bayburt, was sentenced to death on 20 July 1920 and hanged on 5 August 1920.[33]

On 5 July 1919, the court reached a verdict which sentenced the organizers of the massacres, Talat, Enver, Cemal and others to death.[1][2] 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:[34]

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.

An exhibition dedicated to Operation Nemesis at the genocide museum in Yerevan, Armenia

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.