Latest / The Story of Armenia: Survival Through Empires and Genocide — Fexingo History / The Armenian Genocide Trials: Justice in Constantinople 1919
Transcript
- Lucas: So we've talked a lot about the genocide itself — the deportations, the massacres, the resistance at Musa Dagh and Van. But one thing I've always found striking is what happened right after the war, when the Ottoman government itself put the perpetrators on trial. Luna: They actually held trials? I thought the Young Turks all escaped. Lucas: Most of them did escape, yes. Talaat, Enver, Djemal, the top three — they fled on a German warship in November 1918, just days before the armistice. But the new Sultan's government, desperate to distance itself from the CUP, decided to prosecute those they could catch. So in early 1919, they set up military tribunals in Constantinople. Lucas: The main venue was the old Turkish Parliament building, and the judges were all Ottoman military officers. They called it the Divan-ı Harb-i Örfi — the Extraordinary Martial Court. And they had a lot of evidence to work with. Luna: What kind of evidence? Lucas: Aram Andonian, an Armenian journalist, had managed to collect a cache of official documents — telegrams, orders, coded messages — that showed the central government's direct involvement. There were orders from Talaat himself, from the head of the Special Organization, Behaeddin Shakir. The court also had survivor testimonies, eyewitness accounts, and captured CUP records. It was a remarkably thorough dossier. Lucas: The trials began in February 1919 and ran on and off for over a year. They indicted something like 130 people — military governors, party officials, police chiefs. The charges included mass murder, deportation, and conspiracy against the state. The prosecution argued that the CUP had planned the destruction of the Armenian population as a matter of party policy. Luna: And anyone actually convicted? Lucas: Yes — but it's complicated. The court handed down death sentences for a handful of mid-level officials, like the governor of Trebizond, Cemal Azmi, and the director of the Special Organization's deportation bureau, Abdullah Avni. Three men were hanged in public in Constantinople in 1919. But the really big fish — Talaat, Enver, Djemal, Shakir — were all tried in absentia and sentenced to death. Of course, they were safely in Berlin or Moscow by then. Luna: So it was mostly symbolic. Lucas: Symbolic, but also politically charged. The trial transcripts show the court trying to establish a legal narrative. The chief prosecutor, a man named Sami Gökçen, gave a long opening statement where he said, quote, 'The deportation was not a measure of war but a project of annihilation.' That's an extraordinary admission from an Ottoman prosecutor in 1919. Lucas: The British occupation authorities in Constantinople supported the trials at first. They even handed over some suspects. But by 1920, the political winds shifted. The Turkish nationalist movement under Mustafa Kemal was gaining strength, and the British grew worried about alienating potential allies. So they stopped pushing for prosecutions, and the new nationalist government in Ankara essentially shut the courts down. Luna: And the failure of those trials — does that get cited today as a missed chance for justice? Lucas: Absolutely. Historians like Taner Akçam argue that the Constantinople trials were a foundational moment for international criminal law — they predate Nuremberg by more than twenty years. But because they were cut short and the verdicts never enforced, they set a precedent for impunity. The Armenian survivors who had testified — and there were many — saw their killers walk free. Lucas: One consequence was Operation Nemesis, the Armenian secret retribution campaign. In 1921, a young Armenian named Soghomon Tehlirian assassinated Talaat Pasha on a Berlin street. At his trial, Tehlirian's defense was that he was acting as the arm of justice. The jury acquitted him. That trial, in turn, caught the attention of a young Polish-Jewish lawyer named Raphael Lemkin, who later coin the word 'genocide'. Luna: So the Constantinople trials echo all the way to the UN Genocide Convention. Lucas: Exactly. And that's why they matter beyond just Armenian history. The courts established that a government could be held criminally liable for destroying a population. They created a record. The transcripts, the Andonian documents — they're still primary sources for scholars today. But the fact that the trials collapsed also taught the world how easily accountability can be derailed by power politics. Lucas: And you know, that's a thread we've seen in other episodes — how fragile justice is when it depends on the goodwill of the victors. It reminds me of why we do this show the way we do, without ads or sponsors. Luna: Yeah, we've never run a single ad. It's a deliberate choice to keep the conversation independent and focused on the history itself. Lucas: Right. If you appreciate that — if you like not being interrupted by commercials — you can support us at buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. It's a small way to keep these episodes ad-free and allow us to dig into overlooked things like the Constantinople trials. Luna: Exactly. No pressure, but it helps. Lucas: So back to 1919: the trials dragged on into 1920, but by then the nationalists had taken over the justice ministry. They released most of the remaining detainees. The final session, in July 1921, actually convicted a few more people — but they were already gone. The whole thing petered out. Luna: And what about the British? Did they ever try anyone themselves? Lucas: They held a handful of suspects on Malta for about three years — the so-called 'Malta exiles' — but in 1921 they exchanged them for British prisoners held by the Ankara government. So that was that. No international tribunal, no lasting accountability. Lucas: The irony is that the Ottoman courts themselves had proved, on paper, that the genocide was a state-organized crime. But the political will to enforce that conclusion evaporated. And so the narrative of denial was able to flourish in the new Turkish Republic. Luna: It's a sobering case study. The evidence was there, the law was there — but justice still failed. Lucas: It did. And the historian Taner Akçam sums it up well: the trials showed that the legal tools existed, but they also showed that without a strong international mechanism and sustained political pressure, those tools are toothless. It's a lesson that resonates today. Luna: Absolutely. Thanks for walking us through that — I had no idea the trials were so detailed. Lucas: They're a crucial chapter. If you want to read more, the transcripts were published in Ottoman Turkish and later translated by scholars like Akçam and Vahakn Dadrian. The Andonian documents are available online too. It's not easy material, but it's important.