‘Operation Nemesis,’ by Eric Bogosian
By JOSEPH KANON
APRIL 16, 2015
On March 15, 1921, a 25-year-old Armenian in Berlin, Soghomon Tehlirian, shot and killed Mehmet Talat Pasha, who had been the Ottoman minister of the interior during World War I. After the Ottomans’ collapse, Talat had fled into secret exile and was now plotting a return to power with the other Young Turks (or, formally, the Committee for Union and Progress) who had led Turkey into its disastrous wartime alliance with Germany. To Tehlirian, however, Talat was something infinitely worse than simply one of the leaders of a defeated empire. He was a member of the central committee, with a key role in authorizing the Armenian genocide, the series of deportations and massacres in 1915-16 that under the fog of war had murdered much of Tehlirian’s family and some one and a half million other Armenians.
In the sensational trial that followed the assassination, Tehlirian, apparently a lonely misfit seeking to avenge his mother’s death (he said he had seen her beheaded), played David to Talat’s Goliath. And as the world (and the German jury) learned more about the horrors of the period, Tehlirian began to seem not so much a murderer (though he freely admitted killing Talat) as an agent for justice. Talat, after all, had been tried in absentia for war crimes and sentenced to death. Tehlirian was avenging not just his family but an entire people. After a stunning verdict to acquit was reached, The New York Times ran a headline that read “They Simply Had to Let Him Go.”