Prosecution of Ottoman war criminals after World War I
After
Since there were no international laws in place under which they could be tried, the men who orchestrated the Armenian genocide escaped prosecution and traveled relatively freely throughout Germany, Italy, and Central Asia.[4] This led to the formation of Operation Nemesis, a covert operation conducted by Armenians during which Ottoman political and military figures who fled prosecution were assassinated for their role in the Armenian genocide.[5]
Background
Allied reactions to the massacres, 1915–1917
Following the reportage by
In the view of these ... crimes of Turkey against humanity and civilization ... the Allied governments announce publicly ... that they will hold personally responsible ... all members of the Ottoman Government and those of their agents who are implicated in such massacres.[6]
Turkish courts martial, 1919–1920
Just as de-Nazification became a guiding principle of Allied policy in Germany after the Second World War, cleansing Turkey of the CUP and punishment for the Unionist crimes weighed heavily on British – and Allied – thinking after the conclusion of the armistice at Mudros.
Andrew Mango, Atatürk[7]
The initial prosecution of war criminals was established between 1919 and 1920 by the Turkish
The court sat for nearly a year, from April 1919 through March 1920, although it became clear after just a few months that the tribunal was simply going through the motions. The judges had conveniently condemned the first set of defendants (Enver, et al.) when they were safely out of the country, but now, with Turkish lives genuinely on the line, the Tribunal, despite making a great show of its efforts, had no intention of returning convictions. Admiral Sir Somerset Gough-Calthorpe protested to the Sublime Porte, took the trials out of Turkish hands, and removed the proceedings to Malta. There an attempt was made to seat an international tribunal, but the Turks bungled the investigations and mishandled the documentary evidence so that nothing of their work could be used by the international court.[10][11]
Admiral John de Robeck replaced Admiral Gough-Calthorpe on August 5, 1919, as "Commander in Chief, Mediterranean, and High Commissioner, at Constantinople".[10] In August 1920, the proceedings were halted, and Admiral John de Robeck informed London of the futility of continuing the tribunal with the remark: "Its findings cannot be held of any account at all."[12] According to European Court of Human Rights judge Giovanni Bonello, "quite likely the British found the continental inquisitorial system of penal procedure used in Turkey repugnant to its own paths to criminal justice and doubted the propriety of relying on it". Or, possibly, the Turkish government never came round to hand over the incriminating documents used by the military courts. Whatever the reason, with the advent of power of Atatürk, all the documents on which the Turkish military courts had based their trials and convictions were "lost".[1][3]
Prosecution in Malta
Malta exiles
The
- A: for people suspected of having taken part in massacres
- B: for people suspected of having tolerated massacres
- C: for people who were not suspected of having taken direct action in massacres
The competing
The release of the Turkish detainees in Malta was accomplished in exchange for 22 British prisoners held by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.
Legal foundation
In 1918 an American list of 11 "outlaws of civilization" was drawn up to be targeted for "condign punishment":
The list included the three leading Young Turk leaders, comprising the Ittihad triumvirate. A similar, but larger list, was prepared in 1917 in France by Tancrede Martel, an international law expert, who argued that the men he indicated deserved to be tried as common criminals by ordinary civil and criminal courts of the Allied countries because of the type and scope of the atrocities they were accused of having perpetrated. In its final report, completed on March 29, 1919, the commission on Responsibilities through Annex 1, table 2, identified thirteen Turkish categories of outrages liable to criminal prosecution.[18]
The
The Allied authority to proceed with any prosecutions was created as part of the
Article 230 of the Treaty of Sèvres required the Ottoman Empire:
... to hand over to the Allied Powers the persons whose surrender may be required by the latter as being responsible for the massacres committed during the continuance of the state of war on territory which formed part of the Ottoman Empire on August 1, 1914.
As a signatory to the treaty, the Ottoman Empire specifically recognized the right of the Allies to convene international tribunals to conduct war crimes trials.[20]
By 1921 the British High Commission had gathered a body of information from its Greek and Armenian sources about the Turkish prisoners held at Malta, and about 1000 others, all alleged to have been directly or indirectly guilty of participation in massacres.[21] The Allies had "a mountain of documents" related to the Armenian genocide, but these were mostly general and did not clearly implicate specific individuals.[22]
Suspension of prosecution
According to the former judge at the European Court of Human Rights Giovanni Bonello the suspension of prosecutions, the repatriation and release of Turkish detainees was amongst others a result of the lack of an appropriate legal framework with supranational jurisdiction, because following World War I no international norms for regulating war crimes existed, due to a legal vacuum in international law; therefore contrary to Turkish sources, no trials were ever held in Malta.
On March 16, 1921, the
In relation to prisoner exchange Article 2 under the Agreement For the Immediate Release of Prisoners reads:
The repatriation of Turkish prisoners of war and interned civilians now in the hands of the British authorities shall commence at once, and shall continue as quickly as possible. This will not apply, however, to persons whom it is intended to try for alleged offences in violation of the laws and customs of war, or for massacres committed during the continuance of the state of war in territory which formed part of the Turkish Empire on 1st August, 1914 ...[24]
British Foreign Secretary Lord Curzon said the subsequent release of many of the Turkish prisoners was "a great mistake", and wrote:
The less we say about these people [the Turks detained at Malta] the better ... I had to explain why we released the Turkish deportees from Malta skating over thin ice as quickly as I could. There would have been a row I think ... The staunch belief among members [of Parliament is] that one British prisoner is worth a shipload of Turks, and so the exchange was excused ...[25]
Aftermath
Separate Turkish domestic prosecutions resulted in the convictions and sentencing to death of many of the masterminds of the Armenian genocide. As many of the principal architects of the genocide had managed to escape prior to sentencing, the
, and others, including several Armenians.Some of those accused as war criminals led politically influential lives in the nascent Turkish state.
Armenian historian
Peter Balakian—referring to the
In 1926, Kemal had six genocide perpetrators, including
Purging of evidence
A
See also
- Istanbul trials of 1919–1920
- Young Turks
- Committee of Union and Progress
- Outline and timeline of the Greek genocide
- Turkish war crimes
- War crimes in World War I
References
- ^ a b c d e f Bonello 2008.
- ISBN 978-0-8050-8665-2.
- ^ a b c d Turkey's EU Minister, Judge Giovanni Bonello and the Armenian Genocide – 'Claim About Malta Trials Is Nonsense'. The Malta Independent. 19 April 2012. Retrieved 10 August 2013
- ^ Power, Samantha. "A Problem from Hell", p. 16-17. Basic Books, 2002.
- ISBN 978-1610693646.
- ^ a b William S. Allen, The Nazi Seizure of Power: The Experience of a Single German Town 1922–1945, Franklin Watts; Revised edition (1984). Also see: William A. Schabas, Genocide in International Law: The Crimes of Crimes, Cambridge University Press, 2000, pp. 16–17
- ^ Kieser 1999, p. 203.
- ^ Taner Akçam, Armenien und der Völkermord: Die Istanbuler Prozesse und die Türkische Nationalbewegung (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 1996), p. 185.
- ^ Dadrian V.N. in Genocide as a problem of national and international law, p.281–291; Dadrian V.N. (1986), "The Naim Andonian documents on the world war I destruction of Ottoman Armenians: the anatomy of a Genocide". International Journal of Middle East Studies, Cambridge, Mass., 18 (3) 338–355; Helmreich P.C. op. cit., p.236. These sources use the documents: Britain FO 371/5091, E 16080/27/44; 371/6509, E 5141 f.130; E 8562 f.13; E 10662 f.159; 371/7882, E 4425 f.182; as a source to reach their judgements
- ^ ISBN 978-1597974967, p.211-212
- ^ Vahakn N. Dadrian "The History of the Armenian Genocide: Ethnic Conflict from the Balkans to Anatolia to the Caucasus" page 308
- ISBN 1-57181-666-6.
- ^ JSTOR 163884.
- ^ Detlev Grothusen, Klaus (197). Die Türkei in Europa: Beiträge des Südosteuropa-arbeitskreises der… (in German). Berghahn Books. p. 35.
- ISBN 978-1-4411-3578-0.
- ISBN 978-0-8050-7932-6, p. 354
- ^ Türkei By Klaus-Detlev. Grothusen.
- ^ Vahakn N. Dadrian "The History of the Armenian Genocide: Ethnic Conflict from the Balkans to Anatolia to the Caucasus" page 314
- ^ British foreign archive: FO 371/5091/E15109 Malta Internees, 8 November 1920
- ^ M. Cherif Bassiouni "Crimes Against Humanity in International Criminal Law" page 67
- ^ Vahakn N. Dadrian; The History of the Armenian Genocide: Ethnic Conflict from the Balkans to Anatolia to the Caucasus page 310.
- Akcam, Taner. A Shameful Act. 2006, page 358.
- ^ from Taner Akcam "The Investigations and Prosecution of the War Crimes and Genocide" p 358
- ^ British National Archives CAB 24/127
- ^ British Foreign Office Archives, FO 371/7882/E4425, folio 182
- Akcam, Taner. A Shameful Act. 2006, page 362.
- Akcam, Taner. A Shameful Act. 2006, page 363.
- ^ Dadrian, History of the Armenian Genocide, pp. 310—11.
- ^ On April 24, the world must remember victims of Armenian genocide, Times Union Archived 2020-05-26 at the Wayback Machine
- ISBN 978-0-85771-930-0.
- ^ AAE. "The Executions of Some of the Arch-perpetrators of the Armenian Genocide by the Ittihadists and Kemalists, 1915-1926". Retrieved 2023-08-24.
- ^ a b Barsoumian, Nanore (10 September 2011). "WikiLeaks: Stepping Out of Ottoman Archives, Diplomat Says 'We Really Slaughtered Them!'". The Armenian Weekly.
Books
- ISBN 978-99932-7-224-3. Archived from the originalon 2018-07-10. Retrieved 2015-03-24.
- Ata, Ferudun (2018). The Relocation Trials in Occupied Istanbul. Offenbach am Main: Manzara Verlag. p. 357. ISBN 9783939795926.
- Uluç, Gürkan (2024). Understanding the Armenian Question: Malta Tribunal (1919-1921). Offenbach am Main: Manzara Verlag. p. 304. ISBN 9783911130004.