Birth of Armen Garo (February 9, 1872)

Armen Garo was an active participant in the Armenian liberation movement, and a protagonist of some of its more important moments. Leader of the occupation of the Ottoman Bank, deputy to the Ottoman Parliament, organizer of the Nemesis Operation, first ambassador of the Republic of Armenia to the United States; these were just a few highlights of his public life, which ended prematurely.

He was born in Karin (Erzerum) on February 1872 as Karekin Pastermadjian. He was one of the first graduates of the Sanasarian College of his hometown in 1891. Three years later, he went to France to study at the Agricultural School of the University of Nancy. In this period, he became a member of the newly founded Armenian Revolutionary Federation.

His plan to return to his hometown after graduation was thwarted when massacres began in Zeitun (Cilicia), and he left his studies to help his compatriots. He soon found himself in Geneva, and then he was sent to Egypt to assist the resistance in Zeitun. Afterwards, he returned to the Ottoman Empire. Around this time, he took the nom de guerre Armen Garo.

 

He was one of the organizers of the takeover of the Ottoman Bank in Constantinople by a group of A.R.F. revolutionaries on August 26, 1896. When Papken Siuni, the group leader, was killed, Armen Garo took over for the rest of the standoff.

When the occupation of the bank ended and the group of revolutionaries was sent to Marseilles, French Foreign Minister Gabriel Hanotaux declared them as persona non grata and denied their stay in France. Armen Garo moved to Switzerland and studied natural sciences at the University of Geneva.

He continued his active participation in the A.R.F. and was on the delegate roster of the second General Assembly of 1898. He graduated in 1900 and received a doctoral degree in physical chemistry. In 1901 he founded a laboratory in Tiflis for chemical research.

The scientist could not leave aside the patriot, and Armen Garo organized the self-defense of the Armenians in Tiflis during the Armeno-Tatar conflict of 1905-1907 with a group of 500 volunteers.

After the situation in the Caucasus returned to normalcy, he was able to create a fairly prosperous life for himself. He secured the right to develop a copper mine, and worked towards a partnership with a large company.

After the Ottoman Revolution of 1908, Armen Garo was elected deputy from Erzerum to the Ottoman Parliament, representing the Armenian Revolutionary Federation. During his four-year mandate, he worked tirelessly for a railroad bill whose main goal was to build railroads in Western Armenia.

After he finished his mandate in 1912, he participated actively in the organization and implementation of the Armenian reforms in the six Eastern vilayets of the Ottoman Empire in 1913-1914. In the autumn of 1914, a month and a half before the Ottoman Empire entered the war, Armen Garo went to the Caucasus on a special mission after the A.R.F. 8^th General Assembly at Erzerum. He joined the committee that had been appointed by the Armenian National Council of the Caucasus to organize the Armenian volunteer units.

In November of the same year, Armen Garo accompanied the second battalion of Armenian volunteers, commanded by Dro (Drastamat Kanayan), as representative of the executive committee of Tiflis. When Dro was seriously wounded in combat, Armen Garo replaced him from November 1914-March 1915 until he returned to active duty.

He went to Van in the summer of 1915, becoming one of the first to enter the city after the Russian troops and the Armenian volunteer battalions liberated it following the Van resistance.

After the Russian Revolution of February 1917, Armen Garo and Dr. Hakob Zavriev were sent to Petrograd in the spring to negotiate about Caucasian affairs with the Russian provisional government. In June he left for America as a representative of the Armenian National Council of Tiflis, which in May 1918 would declare the independence of Armenia. In 1919 Armen Garo was designated ambassador of Armenia to the United States.

He settled in Washington D.C., where he engaged in political and diplomatic action. He published three pamphlets in English: Why Armenia Should Be Free (1918), Armenia and Her Claims to Freedom and National Independence (1919), and Armenia a Leading Factor in the Winning of the War (1919).



He would also engage in covert action, as one of the main leaders of the Operation Nemesis, along with Shahan Natalie and Aharon Sachaklian, ensuring the logistics and the organization of the liquidation of Turkish genociders from 1919-1922.

After the fall of the Republic of Armenia, Armen Garo returned to Europe in November 1922, heartbroken and sick. He passed away in Geneva on March 23, 1923. His memoirs, Days that I Lived, were first serialized in the monthly Hairenik (1923-1924) and posthumously published in 1948 (there is an English translation by Haig T. Partizian, published in 1990 as Bank Ottoman).

Several organizational chapters have been named after him, including the AYF “Armen Garo” chapter (Racine, Wisconsin), the “Armen Karo” ARF Student Association of Canada, and the ARF "Armen Garo" committee (New York).

Death of Ara Sarkissian (June 13, 1969)

Ara Sarkissian is considered the founder of Soviet Armenian sculpture.

 

He was born in the suburb of Makrikeuy, near Constantinople, on April 7, 1902. He studied at the local Dadian School, and after 1914, when his family moved to the neighborhood of Pera, in the city, he attended the Essayan School. After working menial jobs during the war to make some money, he studied at the local Art School from 1919-1921 and then he moved to Rome to continue studies there, but after half year he entered the Vienna School of Masters (1921-1924). In both schools he already showed progress in sculpture, and the impact of World War I and the Armenian Genocide leaned him towards tragic subjects.

 

Still a student, in 1921-1922 he collaborated in Rome, Vienna, and Berlin in the logistics of the Operation Nemesis, at a time when the liquidations of former Ottoman Prime Minister Said Halim pasha and genocidaires Behaeddin Shakir and Jemal Azmi were being planned. Sarkissian appears as A.S. in the Armenian original of Arshavir Shiragian’s memoirs (1965), although his mention has been eliminated in the English translation. 

 

In 1924 Sarkissian was granted Soviet citizenship in Vienna and the next year he settled in Yerevan, where he would live the rest of his life. In 1926 he organized the Soviet Armenian chapter of the Association of Painters of Revolutionary Russia and was elected its president. Six years later he became the founding president of the Painters Union of Armenia until 1937. In 1945 he became the founding director of the Institute of Art of Yerevan (now the Art Academy of Yerevan) until 1959, and later he was head of chair and director of the atelier until his death.

 

In the 1920s and 1930s Sarkissian’s busts of Armenian writers and intellectuals were characterized by their expressiveness. During World War II, he sculpted busts of Armenian soldiers and various patriotic compositions. One of his best works, the statue of Bolshevik revolutionary Sergei Kirov, was installed in Kirovakan (formerly Gharakilise) in 1942, but after the fall of the Soviet regime and the renaming of Kirovakan into Vanadzor, it was retired in 1992. During his life he participated in many exhibitions in Yerevan, Tbilisi, and Moscow.

 

In 1949 he was elected corresponding member of the Soviet Academy of Arts and became a full member in 1958. In 1963 he earned the title of People’s Artist of the USSR.

 

Sarkissian’s most recognizable works are the statues of Hovhannes Tumanian and Alexander Spendiarian in front of the Yerevan Opera House (1957), which he co-authored with Ghugas Chubarian, and the statues of Mesrob Mashdots and Sahak Bartev in the courtyard of the main building of Yerevan State University.

 

Ara Sarkissian's participation in the Operation Nemesis and his involvement with the Armenian Revolutionary Federation had remained unknown in Soviet Armenia for obvious political reasons. However, in the last years it has been disclosed that his dismissal from the post of director of the Institute of Art in 1959 was due to the fact that he had a brother in Greece who was an A.R.F. leader and whom he met that year in Brussels. It is suspected that his sudden death on June 13, 1969, two days after being discharged from the hospital after a surgery for a broken foot, was linked to the previous discovery that the sculptor had been involved in the Operation Nemesis four decades before.

 

Ara Sarkissian was posthumously awarded the USSR State Prize (1971). The two-floor house that he shared with painter Hakob Kojoyan became a house-museum dedicated to both artists in 1973.

August 4, 1922: Killing of Enver Pasha

Enver Pasha

The Russian revolution of November 1917 that set the grounds for the Soviet Union was followed by a civil war. Bolshevik troops were sent into Central Asia to establish Soviet power in 1919-1920. A local movement headed by Muslim elements, known as the Basmachi revolt (the Turkic word basmachi originally meant “bandit”), took advantage of the blunders of the Soviet government in Tashkent (the current capital of Uzbekistan) to challenge its authority and set a movement of national liberation.

Enver Pasha, former Ministry of War of the Ottoman Empire and one of the main perpetrators of the Armenian Genocide, had become a fugitive of justice after his condemnation to death in absentia by the Ottoman court-martial in July 1919. He had first left Constantinople for Berlin in late 1918 and in 1919 had gone to Moscow, where he engaged in pro-Turkish activities among the Bolsheviks. After participating in the Congress of Eastern Peoples of Baku (September 1920), he tried to reenter Anatolia in 1921, but was rejected by Mustafa Kemal.

Enver decided to return to Moscow and won over the trust of Soviet authorities. Lenin sent him to Bukhara, in Soviet Turkestan, to help suppress the Basmachi Revolt. He arrived on November 8, 1921. Instead of carrying his mission, he made secret contacts with some rebel leaders and defected along with a small number of followers. He aimed at uniting the numerous rebel groups under his own command and taking the offensive against the Bolsheviks. He managed to turn the disorganized rebel forces into a small well-drilled army and establish himself as its supreme commander. However, David Fromkin has written, “he was a vain, strutting man who loved uniforms, medals and titles. For use in stamping official documents, he ordered a golden seal that described him as 'Commander-in-Chief of all the Armies of Islam, Son-in-Law of the Caliph and Representative of the Prophet.' Soon he was calling himself Emir of Turkestan, a practice not conducive to good relations with the Emir whose cause he served. At some point in the first half of 1922, the Emir of Bukhara broke off relations with him, depriving him of troops and much-needed financial support. The Emir of Afghanistan also failed to march to his aid."

Operation Nemesis had succeeded in the liquidation of several of Enver’s colleagues in European capitals. An Armenian group assassinated Ahmed Djemal Pasha on July 25, 1922, in Tiflis under the very sight of the Cheka, the Soviet secret police. Ten days later, Enver would find his own Armenian nemesis in Central Asia.

Hakob Melkumian

Yakov Melkumov (Hakob Melkumian), born in Shushi (Gharabagh) in 1885, was a decorated career officer who had participated in World War I and after the revolution had entered the Red Army. After fighting in Bielorrusia (Belarus) in 1918, he became a cavalry brigade commander in Turkestan in late 1919, and from 1920-1923 he was involved in the suppression of the Basmachi revolt.

On August 4, 1922 Melkumian’s brigade launched a surprise attack while Enver had allowed his troops to celebrate the Kurban Bayrami holiday, retaining a 30-men guard at his headquarters near the village of Ab-i-Derya, near Dushanbe. Some Turkish sources claimed that Enver and his men charged the approaching troops, and the Turkish leader was killed by machine-gun fire. Melkumian published his memoirs in 1960, where he stated that Enver had managed to escape on horseback and hid for four days in the village of Chaghan. A Red Army officer infiltrated the village in disguise and located his hideout, after which the troops stormed Chaghan, and Melkumian himself killed Enver in the ensuing combat.

After seven decades in Ab-i-Derya, Enver’s remains were taken to Turkey in 1996 and buried at the Monument of Liberty cemetery in Istanbul. Melkumian was decorated with the second order of the Red Army for killing Enver and defeating his forces. The Armenian officer continued his military career until 1937 in Central Asia. He was arrested in June 1937, during the heyday of the Stalinist purges, and charged with participated in the “military-fascist conspiracy.” He was sentenced to 15 years in prison and 5 years of deprivation of civil rights. After the death of Stalin, he was freed in 1954 and rehabilitated. He died in Moscow in 1962.

Assassination of Djemal Pasha (July 21, 1922)

The Nemesis Operation, approved by the Armenian Revolutionary Federation in its 9th World Assembly, held in Yerevan in September-October 1919, had a long list of Turkish leaders responsible for the Armenian Genocide among its targets.

One of them was Ahmed Jemal, minister of Marine of the Ottoman Empire and member of the leading triumvirate of the Committee of Union and Progress (Ittihad), together with Talaat, minister of Interior, and Enver, minister of War. Jemal had taken the command of the IV Ottoman Army, based in Syria, and had overseen the execution of the second phase of the genocide, when the survivors of the caravans of deportees were dispatched and killed in the  camps along the Euphrates River. He had also been in charge of the assimilation of Armenian orphans.

Some targets of the operation, such as Talaat and former grand vizier Said Halim, Behaeddin Shakir (leader of the Special Organization) and Jemal Azmi (the “monster of Trebizond”), had been liquidated in Berlin and Rome, under the supervision of the special body created by the A.R.F. (Enver would be killed by a Bolshevik Armenian in August 1922, in Central Asia.) Jemal Pasha was also in Berlin, but had been able to avoid the Armenian avengers.

On July 26, 1922, The New York Times published a dispatch of the Associated Press, with byline Tiflis:

“Djemal Pasha, former Minister of Marine in the Turkish Unionist Government, Chief of Staff of the Afghan Army, has been assassinated here. Two Armenians are charged with the crime.

“Djemal Pasha was accompanied by two aides, who were also shot dead. He was traveling to Kabul from Berlin, where he had made important purchases from [sic] the Afghan Army."

The Central Committee of the A.R.F. in Georgia still operated, although clandestinely, after Georgia had become a Soviet republic in March 1921. It organized the killing, according to Simon Vratzian:

“At the initiative of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation’s Central Committee of Georgia, on July 21, 1922, in Tiflis and in broad daylight, the last surviving member [of the Ittihad triumvirate] and friend and accomplice of the Bolsheviks, Jemal Pasha, was assassinated. The incident had a shocking effect on everyone. The Cheka made innumerable arrests but did not dare to violent measures for fear of retaliations. Dro got permission from Moscow and quickly left for Tiflis, where all the distinguished Dashnaktsakans had been arrested. Dro’s prestige in the eyes of both the Dashnaktsakan comrades and the Bolsheviks was so great that it was possible for him to get the members of the Central Committee and other prisoners out of jail with conditions acceptable to both parties.”

Little is known about the details of the operation. The name of Stepan Dzaghigian (who would later die in Siberia, exiled during the Stalinist purges) has been mentioned as one of the executors, helped by Petros Ter Poghosian and Ardashes Gevorgian. A fourth name, Zareh Melik-Shahnazarian, has also been mentioned as their collaborator in the last years, with the archives still waiting to yield their secrets.

March 15, 1921: Assassination of Talaat Pasha

On March 16, 1921, one of the headlines of The New York Times read: “Talaat Pasha Slain in Berlin Suburb.” After giving the details of the killing the day before, the report noted: “Talaat, whose name was on the second Entente list of Turkish war criminals, left Constantinople two years ago and had been living as a fugitive ever since under assumed names, first in Switzerland and later in Germany. He evidently feared the fate which has now overtaken him, for he had frequently changed his address in Berlin and at the time of his death was living at a pension in the West End.” The correspondent for the American newspaper added that the killer had been identified as an Armenian student (“Solomon Tellirian,” according to the Associated Press) and that “it is assumed that the deed was an act of revenge for the massacres of his compatriots.”

In July 1919, the Turkish martial court of Constantinople had condemned to death in absentia, among others, the “Three Pashas,” the members of the Young Turk triumvirate that had led the Ottoman Empire during the war: Talaat (Minister of Interior and Great Vizir in 1917-1918), Enver (Minister of War), and Djemal (Minister of Navy). The three had already fled Turkey, and the sentences were never carried out either by Turkey or by the allies.

The 9th General Assembly of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation convened in Yerevan, the capital of the Republic of Armenia, between September and October 1919, and adopted a resolution to punish those responsible for the genocide. A list of 200 names was prepared. The secret operation received the code name “Nemesis” (the name of the Greek god of vengeance). It was led by Shahan Natalie (Hagop Der-Hagopian, 1884-1983) and Armen Garo (Pastermadjian, 1873-1923), the latter being the Armenian ambassador to the United States.

On the front page of the daily paper, Chakatamart, dated friday March 18, 1921, the headline in Armenian below the banner reads, "An Armenian student kills Talaat Pasha."

The number one target of the operation was Talaat, who the U.S. Ambassador Henry Morgenthau had called the “Big Boss” of Turkey and already considered responsible of the extermination in his memoirs.

Soghomon Tehlirian

Soghomon Tehlirian (1897-1960), a 23-year-old student who had survived the Armenian Genocide in Erzinga, was selected to execute the mission. Some of the personnel in the Armenian diplomatic mission in Berlin gave logistic support, and other A.R.F. members worked from outside. Once Talaat’s whereabouts were established, Tehlirian arrived in the German capital in December 1920. For the next three months, he carried a surveillance task with his associates. He rented an apartment near the Turkish leader’s house in order to study his everyday movements. Talaat was killed by Tehlirian with a single shot on March 15, 1921, as he came out of his house in the Charlottenburg district. The assassination took place in broad daylight and led to Tehlirian’s immediate arrest by German police.

The young avenger was tried for murder on June 2-3, 1921. The three German defense attorneys focused on the influence of the genocide on Tehlirian’s mental state. When asked by the judge if he felt any sort of guilt, Tehlirian remarked, “I do not consider myself guilty because my conscience is clear … I have killed a man. But I am not a murderer.” It took the jury slightly over an hour to render a verdict of “not guilty.”

Operation Nemesis, which continued until 1922, went totally unnoticed at the time. The partial story of Talaat’s liquidation was told by Tehlirian in his memoirs, published in 1953. The main details of the operation were not uncovered until the 1980s.

Assassination of Jemal Azmi and Behaeddin Shakir - April 17, 1922

An April 18, 1922 dispatch from Berlin, published the next day in The New York Times, reported that “the criminal police arrested today fifteen Armenians in a big round-up, seeking to destroy what is alleged to be a secret murder organization whose headquarters, the Berlin police say, is in America, whence the Berlin branch is financed.”

Aram Yerganian

Arshavir Shiragian

The reason for these arrests was that on April 17, a double “political murder” had been committed. Two of the main Turkish executors of the Armenian genocide, Dr. Behaeddin Shakir, a member of the Committee of Union and Progress (Ittihad ve Terakke) and head of the Special Organization (Teshkilat-i-Mahsusa), and Jemal Azmi, former Turkish governor of Trebizonda, were passing through Uhlandstrasse, a fashionable district, with their wives and the widow of Turkey’s former Minister of Interior, Talaat Pasha (assassinated in March 1921 by Soghomon Tehlirian), when “two slim, undersized, swarthy men lurking in a doorway rushed out, thrust the women aside and fired several rounds pointblank at the two objects of their vengeance and made their escape under cover of revolver fire which was directed at the Turkish party by confederates across the street,” the newspaper added.

The police had offered an unusually large reward of 50,000 marks for the apprehension of the killers. However, they were not found, and the fifteen arrested Armenians were released.

The German police were on the right track, but were unable to follow through. The “secret murder organization” directed from America was in charge of Operation Nemesis, that was created by the Ninth General Congress of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation in Yerevan (1919) to liquidate the chief Turkish leaders responsible for the Armenian Genocide. The details of the operation and its various ramifications, from Constantinople to Rome and from Berlin to Tiflis, started to come to light some thirty years later, in the memoirs of the commandos who were entrusted with the mission. Their identity and the code name of their operation would become more widely known after the publication of Operation Nemesis by the French journalist Jacques Derogy in 1986. It was published in English under the title Resistance and Revenge, in 1990.

The two so-called “swarthy men” entrusted with the second Berlin operation were Arshavir Shiragian (1900-1973) and Aram Yerganian (1900-1934). In March 1920, Shiragian had assassinated Vahe Ihsan (Yesayan), an Armenian informant who had helped draw up the list of prominent Armenians arrested and deported in April 1915. He followed up with the assassination of Said Halim Pasha, former Great Vezir of the Ottoman Empire, in December 1921. In June 1920, Aram Yerganian assassinated Fatali Khan Khoyski in Tiflis, former Prime Minister of Azerbaijan, who was mainly responsible for the Baku massacres of September 1918. In Berlin, Shiragian’s fire killed Jemal Azmi and wounded Behaeddin Shakir, and Yerganian finished the job.

After disappearing from the scene, the Armenian avengers took different routes and had quite divergent fates. Aram Yerganian moved to Austria, Bulgaria, and Romania, and finally settled in Buenos Aires (Argentina) in 1927, where he married and had a daughter, Maria. He continued to be actively involved in public life, but nobody knew at the time about his exploits. He contracted tuberculosis in 1931 and moved to the Argentinean city of Cordoba looking for a cure, but passed away three years later at the age of 34. His memoirs of the operation, «Այսպէս սպաննեցինք» (“We Killed in This Way”), were posthumously published by Shahan Natalie (1884-1983), one of the main organizers, in 1949. In 1959 Yerganian’s remains were exhumed and reburied at the A.R.F. “Antranig” Club of Cordoba.

Arshavir Shiragian married and moved to New York in 1923, where he had a daughter, Sonia. He also was active in public life in the New York/New Jersey area. He published his memoirs in 1965 with the title «Կտակն էր նահատակներուն» (“It Was the Legacy of the Martyrs”), later translated into French (La dette du sang, 1982 and 1984) and into English (The Legacy, 1976, by Sonia Shiragian). In his later years he was recognized and honored as a national hero. He passed away in 1973 and was buried in New Jersey’s Hackensack Cemetery.