This second part provides an outline of past attempts to address justice in the wake of the genocide, especially acts of retributive justice. Any and all feedback--reflections, questions, constructive critiques, what have you--from you, my dear readers and friends, would be much appreciated. This feedback may be used in a future paper for this class, and so I would ask for you to include a line specifically giving me permission to use your feedback in that paper. As always, it remains a blessing to write for you. Thank you! ~E.A.
How can restorative justice act as a possible solution for myself and for the millions of other diasporic and native Armenians, especially when the crime itself—the Armenian Genocide—remains denied by the descendants of the original perpetrators, to the extent that the depth and repetition of this denial necessitates referring to genocide deniers as perpetrators themselves?
A note
before getting into the prerequisites for a process of restorative justice:
after the First World War ended, the Ottoman Empire conducted a two years-long
series of courts martial in 1919 and 1920 to try many of its former leaders on
the war crimes of massacring civilians—not only the Armenians, but the Greek Genocide,
which took place prior to, and simultaneously with, the Armenian Genocide—as well
as wartime profiteering, and subversion of the Ottoman Constitution of 1876.
These courts martial sentenced the Ottoman triumvirate most closely associated
with the Armenian Genocide—Enver Pasha, Talaat Pasha, and Djemal Pasha—to death,
having found that the intent of the genocide was to physically eliminate the
Ottoman Empire’s Armenian populace.[1]
Because
of a lack of international law and extradition protocols, however, all three
men were able to easily escape Turkey, and none returned to face sentence. This
spurred the creation of Operation Nemesis—an explicitly retributive mission
undertaken by the Dashnaktsutyun, or
Dashnak for short, which translates roughly into the Armenian Revolutionary
Foundation—to assassinate the main perpetrators of the Armenian Genocide. For
the purposes of comparison, the nature and spirit of this mission was not
unlike the later Operation Wrath of God undertaken by the Israeli Mossad in
retribution for the 1972 massacre of Israeli athletes by Palestinian terrorists
at the Summer Olympics in Munich and later made famous by the Steven Spielberg
film, Munich.
Under
the auspices of Operation Nemesis, both Talaat Pasha and Djemal Pasha were
assassinated by Armenian operatives in 1921 and 1922, respectively (Enver Pasha
was killed in combat in 1922). Soghomon Tehlirian, Talaat’s assassin, murdered
his target in broad daylight in the heart of Berlin, but was acquitted of
charges of murder by a twelve-person jury after little more than an hour of
deliberations[2]
and became a folk hero to Armenians, with a number of statues and monuments to
him being erected not just in Armenia, but at his gravesite in Fresno,
California, right here in the United States as well.[3]
I want
to be as emphatically clear as I can: the assassinations of Talaat Pasha and
Djemal Pasha, while perhaps sympathetic on a Falstaffian, spleen-like level,
have no place in any sort of restorative justice framework. My own religious
objections to capital punishment aside for a moment, a sentence of death does
not empower a populace at large to execute said sentence any more than, say, a sentence
of imprisonment upon somebody entitles a vigilante to imprison that somebody
themselves in their basement, and justice that is purely retributive, however
good it may feel to our more reptilian id’s, simply does not serve the ends of
a restorative justice framework.
There
are similar comparisons in more modern times to which the Talaat Pasha
assassination may be viewed against—the capture and extraction of Adolf
Eichmann from Argentina, or the assassination of Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan.
Eichmann, however, was taken alive and afforded substantive due process, even
if he too, in the end, was executed. In the case of the assassination of Bin
Laden, the rules of engagement were such that, per then-CIA Director Leon
Panetta, if Bin Laden surrendered and represented no threat to the American
SEALs, he was to be captured rather than killed.[4]
And yet, both operations—the Eichmann capture and the Bin Laden assassination—raised
serious questions of legality under international law (the full analysis of
which is beyond the scope of this paper, and on which this paper takes no
formal position—however, if the Eichmann or Bin Laden raids were extralegal,
then the Talaat Pasha assassination surely was, noble though its cause may have
been, and continue to be, for Armenians worldwide).
The
comparison to Eichmann and Bin Laden is more than a detail—Eichmann’s trial was
a worldwide sensation, acting almost as a second Nuremburg to allow Israel to
put on full display the horrors of the Shoah. Bin Laden’s assassination
prompted outpourings of jubilation and celebration in America, which I must
confess to sympathizing with, perhaps against my Christian spirituality. Both
men were war criminals, and targeted as war criminals, just as Talaat Pasha
was, but of the three, only the Eichmann operation did not result in
assassination, and thus, only the Eichmann example offers any real path for
restoration, even though all three men may well have been so far from wanting
any restoration that none would have been possible in any case. That
potentiality must be left open as well.
In
addition to the assassinations of Talaat Pasha, Djemal Pasha, and other Ottoman
governmental leaders, the transition of the Ottoman Empire into the modern
Republic of Turkey under Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, which was made complete with
the end of the Turkish War of Independence in 1923, provided something of a
historical buffer for the contemporary Turkish state that allows them, and the
academics, scholars, and advocates who agree with them, to essentially create
another philosophical obstacle to restorative justice by asking, essentially, “Look,
the modern state of Turkey is not responsible for the war crimes of the First
World War, why make them apologize for something they did not do?”
Asking
such a question, though, ignores two crucial points: First, Ataturk was himself
a military officer of World War I, as were a great many other Turkish
revolutionaries who remade the state in the early 1920s. The First World War,
and by extension, its individual events and atrocities—including the Armenian
Genocide—still acted as a crucial factor in the formation of the modern Turkish
state. And secondly, the Republic of Germany stands as a stark rebuke and
counterexample to this line of reasoning. Not only has the German government
been revamped twice since the Third Reich—once under the denazification
procedures following World War II, and again following reunification in the
wake of the collapse of East Germany and the Soviet Union in the early 1990s—but
both West Germany and the current German state have for decades remained
unequivocal about Germany’s culpability for the Nazi Holocaust. Turkey, quite
simply, has not.
Image of the forget-me-not logo of the Armenian Genocide recognition campaign courtesy of armeniangenocide100.org
Image of the forget-me-not logo of the Armenian Genocide recognition campaign courtesy of armeniangenocide100.org
[1]
Gerald Libaridian, Modern Armenia:
People, Nation, and State, Transaction Publishers, 2007, 134-5.
[2] Chris
Bohjalian, “The Forgotten Hero Who Killed the Armenian Genocide’s Mastermind,” The Fresno Bee, April 20, 2016, last
accessed August 4, 2016. http://www.fresnobee.com/opinion/opn-columns-blogs/article72770707.html
[3]
Ibid
[4] "The authority here was to kill bin Laden," he said. "And
obviously, under the rules of engagement, if he had in fact thrown up his
hands, surrendered and didn't appear to be representing any kind of threat,
then they were to capture him. But they had full authority to kill him,” from
Matt Apuzzo and Adam Goldman, “Bin Laden Was Unarmed When SEALs Stormed Room,” The Associated Press, May 3, 2011, last
accessed August 2, 2016. http://archive.sltrib.com/story.php?ref=/sltrib/world/51742983-68/bin-laden-seals-compound.html.csp
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