Operation Nemesis: The Assassination Plot that Avenged the Armenian Genocide - Bogosian Eric - Страница 13

In 1896, twenty-five years before Talat’s assassination, and the year of Soghomon Tehlirian’s birth, the ARF established its international reputation by making a spectacular raid on the Imperial Bank Ottoman. The Tashnag attackers hoped that their frenzied attack on the bank would draw attention to the horrific massacres of Armenians at the hands of the sultan’s forces and his Kurdish Hamidiye in the eastern provinces.

Two dozen heavily armed fedayeen stormed the bank. They hurled bombs, shot and killed a guard, rounded up hostages, and occupied the building. The Armenian revolutionaries set dynamite charges on every floor and issued a list of demands, threatening to blow up the building if they were not met. In response, Sultan Abdul Hamid surrounded the bank with his troops, rolled in artillery batteries, and prepared to reduce the building to rubble. He seems to have had no qualms about killing the attackers, the employees, or the customers locked inside the bank.

As the sultan’s artillerymen primed their guns, foreign warships drifted into the great harbor of Constantinople. British diplomats then contacted Abdul Hamid’s Grand Vizier in his offices at the Sublime Porte and explained that if the sultan destroyed the European-owned bank, the sultan’s home, Yildiz Palace, would be shelled in turn. Communiques were quickly exchanged between the sultan’s secretaries and the Grand Vizier. Abdul Hamid blinked and stood down his guns. It was a three-way standoff.

One of the leaders of the Bank Ottoman takeover was the twenty-four-year-old firebrand Karekin Pastermadjian, best known by the revolutionary alias “Armen Garo.” Before joining the Tashnags, Garo, an Armenian born into a wealthy Erzurum family, had been studying abroad in Nancy, France. Shocked by the newspaper reports of massacres of Armenians in eastern vilayets, the idealistic young man had traveled to the Geneva ARF headquarters with a group of fellow students in tow to volunteer his services to the cause. Garo and three other students were instructed to move to Constantinople, where they would receive further orders. In Constantinople, Garo joined seventeen-year-old Babken Suni (Bedros Parian), who would lead the attack.

In the spectacular initial raid on the bank, 150 staff members and customers were held hostage. Two employees and four of the young Tashnags, including Suni, were killed. After the day-long stalemate, the British governor of the bank, Sir Edgar Vincent, brokered a truce between Garo and the authorities. The young revolutionaries were safely led out of the bank, past the Turkish troops surrounding the building, and escorted to Vincent’s yacht. After escaping Constantinople, they were transferred to a Greek freighter and finally ended up in Marseilles.

Sadly, the sultan’s spies had been aware of the Tashnags’ plans all along and used the attack as an excuse to punish the Armenian community. As soon as the bank was occupied, hundreds of armed white-turbaned Islamic students (softas) appeared as if on cue in the streets of the city. They had been provided with clubs studded with nails and attacked every Armenian they encountered. Thousands died before British troops entered the city to quell the rioting. Bodies were piled up “like offal in the scavenger carts.”16 The rioting against Armenians spread throughout the provinces, where thousands more died.

Armen Garo and most of his compatriots lived to fight another day (though a number of the Armenian “farm boys” who joined in the attack were deported from France to Argentina, never to be heard of again).17 Not one of Garo’s negotiated demands was met. The resulting deaths of thousands of Armenians were rationalized by the Armenian revolutionaries as collateral damage in the fight for a just cause. The ARF considered the bank raid a success because it put the Armenian conflict with the Ottomans, and the ARF itself, under an international spotlight. They believed that the world could no longer ignore their plight. Thus was born the revolutionary career of the man who, twenty-five years later, would found the Nemesis conspiracy. Armen Garo would become one of the most prominent and controversial forces within the ARF.

Despite the perceived success of the bank raid, the cause of Armenian rights made little progress in the years immediately following the assault. In 1905, almost ten years later, frustrated at the lack of progress, the Tashnags raised the ante and made plans to assassinate the sultan. Assassination had been a favorite tool of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation since its inception. In the late nineteenth century, spies, snitches, and government officials were routinely shot in the streets. These political assassinations were called deror, a word derived from the word “terror.” The killings were held sacred, a tool that would “elevate the spirit of the people.” In an 1892 publication, the “Program of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation,” in which the goals and means of the organization are laid out, it is clearly stated that the organization would strive “to stimulate fighting to terrorize government officials, informers, traitors, usurers, and every kind of exploiter… to expose government establishments to looting and destruction.”18

Gerard J. Libaridian, the former Tashnag archivist and official of the post-Soviet Armenian Republic, expands on this theme: “Revolutionaries struck down government officials as a show of power. More often than not these officials were the more cruel and unscrupulous; their elimination would provide relief to the populace on the local level. Such actions were also expected to spread fear among remaining functionaries who were thereby warned that their behavior would not go unpunished.”19 The ARF deployed their assassins as virtual weapons, unstoppable once they were set in motion.

The Armenians enlisted the aid of a Belgian anarchist, Edward Joris, to plan the assassination.20 After considering various options, including sniper fire and launching grenades at the royal entourage, they settled on deploying a time bomb. A custom-built coach was stuffed with the plastic explosive gelignite. The agents carefully monitored the sultan’s comings and goings and timed his movements with stopwatches, learning precisely when he would be at any particular point in his routine, and decided to attack during his observance of the Muslim Friday prayer ceremony, something he did every week.21

Because of his obsessive focus on security, Sultan Abdul Hamid was not an easy target. A thin, nervous man who chain-smoked, Abdul Hamid rarely drank alcohol and was extremely careful about what he ate, mainly because of his sensitive stomach, but also because he was morbidly afraid of being poisoned. He routinely fed morsels of his dinner to his dogs and cats to test for toxins and reportedly employed a eunuch to take the first puff of every cigarette. Hamid’s royal compound, Yildiz Palace, featuring thick twenty-foot-high walls, had been specifically designed and reinforced to withstand attack. Every night he slept in a different room, hoping to confuse potential assassins. He even avoided the use of telephones for fear that his enemies were eavesdropping. Bodyguards were ever present, and the sultan rarely appeared in public. According to James Burrill Angell, the president of the University of Michigan who was appointed minister to the Ottoman Empire by President McKinley in 1897, “The Sultan had suppressed the former mail service because he received so many threatening postal cards and because conspirators could by mail mature dangerous schemes.”22 The sultan’s spy network was vast; it was rumored that one person from every major household in the realm was spying for the palace.

Because of his role as caliph, or ceremonial leader of Islam, it was compulsory that the sultan attend the weekly public service at the Hamidiye mosque. He left the palace proper every Friday morning, accompanied by a large entourage of carriages and attendants. To keep his public exposure as brief as possible, Abdul Hamid had built the mosque within the palace grounds. After the assassinations of the king of Italy and an attack on the shah of Persia in Paris, European visitors were forbidden to attend the ceremony without official permission. Unaccompanied Armenians were not allowed onto the grounds at all. To get around these prohibitions, the conspirators pretended to be young couples seeking a blessing for their marriage vows.