Ludi's Travels: June 2026

Visit to Armenia: Reflections on the Genocide

Recognized as the first human rights atrocity of the 20th century, the Armenian Genocide (1915–1923) was the systematic erasure by the Ottomans of 1.5 million of its own citizens who were unjustly blamed by ruler Ismail Enver Pasha for the regime’s extensive WW1 military losses and defeat by the Russians at the 1915 Battle of Sarikamish (1).

After centuries of Ottoman discrimination, the Armenians (who were Christian) tried to gain equal rights and freedoms and, in the late 19th century, appealed to foreign powers for protection. When Western governments pressured the Ottomans to grant equal status to the Armenians, it was seen as an attack on Ottoman sovereignty and turned Armenians into convenient scapegoats for the regime’s misfortunes and decline.

In 1908, the Ottoman Young Turk (2) leadership openly embraced the belief that the Turkish homeland could only be saved through “liquidation of the empire’s Christian population” and resettlement of Muhajirs (Muslim refugees from the Balkans) in Armenian-inhabited areas.

Two decades before the official genocide, Armenians died in pogroms called the Hamidian massacres named after Sultan Abdülhamid II (1876-1909) who reasserted pan-Islamism to preserve his rule. Casualties ranged from 100,000 to 300,000 including 3,000 burned alive in 1894 in the cathedral of Urfa (modern day Şanlıurfa). Mobs of Kurdish tribesmen participated in the killings.

The Ottomans were intent on stealing Armenian land, wealth, and property; the ensuing genocide became a blueprint for what the Nazis did to the Jews a generation later.

Massacres

Beginning with the Ottoman killing of 250 intellectuals and community leaders on April 24, 1915, Armenian soldiers and doctors were sent to labor camps and killed in state-sanctioned executions while women, children, and seniors were deported from ancestral homelands, forced to convert, beaten, and raped. Thousands perished from starvation and disease during death marches to concentration camps in the Syrian Desert.

By the early 1920s, the Armenian presence in the empire was almost completely wiped out. When the international community failed to prosecute, Adolf Hitler saw this as a precedent to similarly eradicate Jews. In 1949, he asked, “Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?" At the Genocide Museum in Yerevan, there are photos of German and Turkish soldiers posing triumphantly with corpses and skulls of beheaded Armenians.

The Allies: Britain, France, Russia

On May 24, 1915, the three Allied states of Britain, France, and Russia issued a joint declaration accusing the Ottoman government of “crimes against humanity and civilization” — using the term for the first time in international diplomacy.

At the end of WW1, a 1919 conference was convened to tackle a new world order and its borders. Armenian representatives pushed for recognition of an independent state, a mandate, punishment of perpetrators and refugee resettlement — but the Allies were preoccupied with measures against a defeated Germany and with partitioning the sprawling empire. American President Woodrow Wilson was sympathetic to the Armenian cause but the question of a mandate did not win U.S. Senate approval.

When Armenian refugees tried to return to their former settlements in Cilicia, 1918-19, Ottoman forces attacked and drove them out, despite the presence of Allied troops. The 1922 ethnic cleansing of Christian populations — Armenian, Greek, and Assyrian (3) — at Smyrna (modern day Izmir) followed by a devastating fire, caused 150,000 Armenian deaths in the presence of the Allies. Dozens of Great Power battleships anchored in the harbor chose not to intervene. Smyrna, which used to be the center of Ancient Greek civilization in Asia Minor was destroyed while refugees were massacred and deported.

Documenting the Atrocities

The Armenian Genocide is perhaps one of history’s most documented crimes. Hundreds of foreigners, including diplomats, military officers, missionaries, travelers, and prisoners of war from dozens of nations, witnessed the atrocities up close and published detailed accounts. Their testimonies and letters are displayed at the Genocide Museum in Yerevan. Prominent witnesses included U.S. Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire Henry Morgenthau, French journalist Henry Barby, British politician Lord James Bryce and historian Arnold Toynbee, Russian orientalist Vladimir Gordlevsky, Italian diplomat Giacomo Gorrini, Persian writer Mohammad Ali Jamalzadeh, Arab lawyer Faiz el-Ghussein, missionaries Maria Jacobsen, Mabel Elliott, Alma Johansson, and many others.

In 1919-20, Armenian Archbishop Zaven Ter-Yeghiayan, established an Information Bureau in Constantinople to collect evidence of human and material losses suffered by Armenians in the form of reports, letters, testimonies, and statistical data as well as official, diplomatic, and personal documents. These were painstakingly researched, verified, and photographed, and are now part of the historical record.

Ironically enough, the Ottoman Empire was the first state to officially document and recognize crimes against the Armenians with judicial proceedings against the regime’s Young Turk leaders and others. The main charges were deportation, mass murder, illegal personal enrichment, and dragging the Ottoman Empire into WW1. However, by the time the trials began, the main perpetrators had fled the empire to evade prosecution and were living in Germany and Italy.

Morgenthau vs. Talaat

In written testimony and photographic evidence at the Genocide Museum, Morgenthau describes conversations with the principal architect of the genocide, Ottoman Interior Minister Mehmet Talaat Pasha (4) who assured Morgenthau that the extermination policy was planned after “prolonged and careful deliberation” and asked why Morgenthau was defending Armenians when he himself was a Jew. “We are treating the Jews… alright. What have you to complain of,” asked Talaat, to which Morgenthau replied, “I am not here as a Jew but as an American Ambassador.” Talaat responded, “We have already disposed of three quarters of the Armenians… the hatred… is so intense that we have got to finish them. If we don’t they will plan their revenge.“

Another shocking testimony by Morgenthau describes Talaat’s coldblooded insistence that all life insurance money from dead Armenians be recovered by the state in the absence of claimants. “One day Talaat made what was perhaps the most astonishing request I have ever heard. The New York Life Insurance Company and Equitable Life of New York had for years done considerable business among the Armenians,” wrote Morgenthau. Talaat said, “I wish you would get the American life insurance companies to send us a complete list of their Armenian policy holders. They are practically all dead now and have left no heirs to collect the money. It of course all escheats (5) to the State. The Government is the beneficiary now.”

Humanitarian Relief

The genocide drew worldwide condemnation and many rallied to support survivors. Missionaries rescued thousands of destitute women from Ottoman harems and resettled them in Western countries. With the help of the Armenian Apostolic Church, the League of Nations rescued about 2,000 women and children from captivity. The rescue movement continued until the mid-1930s.

Morgenthau helped establish relief efforts headed by James Levi Barton (1855–1936) who, in 1915, co-founded the American Committee for Armenian and Syrian Relief which was, in 1919, chartered by the U.S. Congress as Near East Relief (NER). An American missionary and educator, Barton lobbied the U.S. government and public to finance emergency assistance and led campaigns that raised over $100 million to feed and shelter thousands of refugees, including setting up orphanage schools and medical clinics. He worked closely with missionaries on the ground whose first hand reports helped raise public awareness.

Through rallies, church collections, charitable organizations, and foundations, NER raised millions. Between 1915 and 1930, when it ended operations, it had administered $117 million of assistance and delivered food, clothing, and materials for shelter while also establishing refugee camps, hospitals, orphanages, and centers for vocational training. It cared for 132,000 Armenian orphans across the region, from Tbilisi and Yerevan to Beirut, Constantinople, Damascus, and Jerusalem. In the words of American historian Howard M. Sachar, NER "quite literally kept an entire nation alive."

Eyewitnesses: Hemingway, Kunal Sen, S.P. Sarbadhikari, Armin Wegner, Eitan Belkind

Writer Ernest Hemingway was in Smyrna in September 1922 as a correspondent for the Toronto Daily Star. Deeply disturbed by the suffering of Armenians and Greeks, his impressions were captured in the short story “On the Quai at Smyrna” included in his collection In Our Time. He writes, “The worst were the women with dead babies. You couldn’t get the women to give up their dead babies. They’d have babies dead for six days.”

Kunal Sen, an officer in the Indian Postal Service, who served during WW1 in Egypt, the Gallipoli Peninsula, the Balkans, Mesopotamia, and Iraq, witnessed the desperate conditions of Armenian refugees, many of whom were dying from starvation and exhaustion. Sen documented these experiences along with his broader wartime service, in his memoir, Through War, Rebellion, and Riot, 1914-21. The work draws on diary entries, letters to colleagues and superiors written during his military service, and other materials.

Sisir Prasad Sarbadhikari served in Mesopotamia during WW1 as part of the British Ambulance Corps. While deployed in one of the war’s most intense theatres, he was captured by Ottoman forces. During his captivity, Sarbadhikari witnessed the brutal massacres of Armenians in Ras ul-Ain and encountered Armenian orphan boys. He incorporated his eyewitness accounts of the ArmenIan Genocide into his memoir On to Baghdad (Abhi Le Baghdad), published in Bengali (Calcutta, 1957). Notably, as early as 1918, he published an article titled “Thirty Months a Prisoner in Turkey” in The Calcutta Review, where he provided first-hand descriptions of Armenian massacres.

Armin Wegner, a WW1 German army medic, photographed scenes of massacres, deportees, and concentration camps to expose German society to the tragedy — but Germany (an Ottoman ally and complicit in the genocide) barred publication and destroyed his photos. Wegner smuggled out some negatives and, in 1919, after the war, lectured in German cities on Armenian suffering. He wrote an open letter to U.S. President Wilson raising questions of moral and material support for survivors and, in 1922, wrote “Cry from Ararat” about the Smyrna massacres. After the Nazis came to power, he condemned Jewish persecution in an open letter to Hitler, and was himself captured by the Nazis and imprisoned in concentration camps. Leaving Germany after his release, he lived in Italy. His photos are undeniable witness images at the Genocide Museum.

Eitan Belkind, a prominent early Zionist pioneer and Turkish military officer, was a founding member of the NILI espionage network which passed critical intelligence to the British against the Ottomans. Born in Ottoman Palestine, Eitan served in the Turkish army but, alongside other Jewish witnesses to the Armenian Genocide, defected to join the anti-Ottoman resistance. He leveraged his local knowledge and access to help the British secure control of the region. In 1917, his brother Naaman, also a NILI operative, was captured and hanged by the Ottomans. Eitan dedicated his life to honoring the memory of his brother. His memoirs and interviews remain primary historical sources about the genocide.

Lesser of Two Evils: Survival of the Armenian People

After WW1, the Treaty of Sèvres partitioned Ottoman lands and transferred vast areas of eastern Anatolia to Armenia. Infuriated Turkish Nationalists led by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk rejected this treaty and sought to establish a new border that favored Turkish control. In the fall of 1920, Armenia was invaded. Following swift military victories by Turkish forces in which 100,000 Armenians died, the conflict concluded with the Treaty of Alexandropol, drastically reducing Armenia's territory. Shortly after, the invasion of Armenia by the Soviet Red Army resulted in the partitioning of its remaining land and absorption into the Soviet Union.

The Soviet Red Army took control of a briefly independent Armenia on December 2, 1920 when the Armenian government accepted Soviet rule “to prevent total annihilation.” The leadership chose Soviet Russia as the "lesser of two evils" — to guarantee survival of what was left of the Armenian population and stave off imminent destruction by Turkish nationalist forces that already occupied large portions of its territory.

The borders between the Ottomans and Soviet republics were redrawn with the 1921 Treaties of Moscow and Kars. In a move to secure its strategic southern flank, regain control over former Russian Empire territories, and ally with Atatürk’s Turkish nationalist movement against Western powers, Lenin’s Bolshevik government in Moscow conceded vast historic Armenian territories to the Ottomans — a move that is still mourned by Armenians more than a century later!

The final boundary shifted significantly and was established along natural river markers. The Ottomans gained the town of Iğdır and Mount Ararat, a cultural symbol for Armenians, while Soviet Azerbaijan gained the historically disputed Nakhchivan region.

Return to Soviet Armenia

Following WW2, thousands of Armenians returned to Armenia now controlled by the Soviets. New towns and districts were established to accommodate them. But the wave of Stalinist repression did not spare repatriates. A significant number of them were labeled “enemies of the people” and deported to remote areas of the Soviet Union, particularly the Altai region. It was a new ordeal for genocide survivors and their descendants who had returned to their homeland with great hope for the future!

Over time, repatriated Armenians adapted to life in Soviet Armenia and made a substantial contribution to the country’s economy and culture as doctors, engineers, linguists, musicians, and craftsmen. Between 1921 and 1973, approximately 200,000 Armenians immigrated to Armenia.

Survivors of the Armenian genocide who fled to other countries have also become (more than a century later) a thriving global diaspora of entrepreneurs, intellectuals, and artists with strong emotional, cultural, and familial ties to the mother country.

Raphael Lemkin

A Polish-Jewish law scholar, Raphael Lemkin (1900–1959), who coined the term "genocide" in 1944, fled the Nazi invasion of Poland while nearly 50 of his family members perished in the Holocaust. He dedicated his life to lobbying the newly formed United Nations, resulting in the U.N. General Assembly adopting, in 1948, the landmark Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Until his death, Lemkin worked tirelessly to encourage states to accede to the Convention which provides a legal framework for the international community to recognize, prosecute, and attempt to prevent atrocities in places like Rwanda, Bosnia, and Darfur.

Lemkin’s writings contain numerous references to the Armenian Genocide including two manuscripts. He was convinced that the impunity of Ottoman leadership for crimes committed against the Armenians established a dangerous precedent, paving the way for subsequent atrocities, including the Nazi genocide of the Jews.

Revenge on Talaat

Meanwhile, arch villain Mehmet Talaat Pasha — one of the “Three Pashas” primarily responsible for Armenian killings along with Ismail Enver Pasha and Ahmed Djemal Pasha — was tried in absentia at a tribunal convened in Constantinople by the post-war Ottoman government, found guilty of capital crimes including massacre, and condemned to death.

Talaat had reportedly fled on a torpedo boat from Constantinople to Berlin in 1918 where he lived under an assumed name. Although Germany refused to extradite him, he was gunned down in 1921 by Soghomon Tehlirian, an Armenian whose entire extended family had been wiped out from his native town of Erzinjan during the genocide.

Talaat's killing was part of Operation Nemesis (7), a revenge plan of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation against members of the Ottoman government who had been sentenced to death. When it became clear that justice would not be forthcoming and that perpetrators would continue anti-Armenian activities in exile, Operation Nemesis (named after the Greek Goddess of Revenge) was set up to assassinate them.

Tehlirian had already killed fellow Armenian traitor, Harutian Mgrditichian, who worked for the Ottoman secret police and compiled the list of Armenian intellectuals deported in 1915; he now convinced Nemesis operatives to entrust him with the high profile-killing of Talaat. The assassination in broad daylight on a Berlin street caused a furor and the trial became a major media circus exposing Germany’s knowledge and complicity in the genocide — which had been kept from the German public during the war.

Tehlirian's defense attorneys deliberately used the courtroom as an international platform to expose the Armenian Genocide and its influence on Tehlirian's mental state. Hearing eyewitness testimony from German officers who had seen evidence of the massacres, the jury acquitted Tehlirian (in just over an hour of deliberations) on June 3, 1921, on grounds of diminished responsibility due to severe psychological trauma from his family being massacred. His defense was, "I have killed a man, but I am not a murderer."

German writer Armin Wegner who testified at the trial, bore witness to the scope and horror of the Armenian experience. Trial documents were collected in a book, Avenger of the Armenian Genocide: The Trial of Tehlirian — Wegner authored the preface.

Operation Nemesis used Talaat’s shocking public assassination and trial strategically — to raise international awareness of the genocide and Talaat's role as the orchestrator of mass murders, rapes, deportations, abductions, evictions, thefts, and looting of Armenian citizens.

Considered a national hero by Armenians, Tehlirian moved to America and settled in California. He passed in 1960, aged 64. As for Talaat's remains, they were returned to Istanbul in 1943 by Nazi Germany — and buried with full honors!

Over the next several months, former Minister of the Navy Ahmed Djemal Pasha, Minister of War Ismail Enver Pasha, and former Grand Vizier Said Halim Pasha, were eliminated by members of Operation Nemesis. All had been linked to genocidal policies or mass killings.

Trial Helped Create International Human Rights Law

The sensational trial had a profound global impact, deeply influencing legal scholar Raphael Lemkin and many others. In the 1920s, international law was governed by strict concepts of state sovereignty: a government could treat its people as it wished within its borders, and foreign courts had no jurisdiction to intervene. Lemkin, who closely followed trial reports, was struck by the idea that a state could exterminate its own citizens and argued against this, asserting that "sovereignty cannot be conceived as the right to kill millions of innocents."

The shock of Tehlirian’s acquittal proved to the world that, if international courts refused to hold sovereign leaders accountable for mass murder, the moral order would collapse into vigilante justice. The outcome paved the way for the Nuremberg Trials (1946-49) in which the Allied powers successfully prosecuted Nazi leaders for WW2 and the Holocaust.

Though Tehlirian was tried under a standard murder charge, the Berlin court allowed the defense to introduce evidence, eyewitness accounts, and official wartime telegrams detailing Ottoman atrocities. By transforming a local murder trial into an international tribunal on state crimes against humanity, the case served as an early blueprint for “Universal Jurisdiction” — the legal principle that allows any country to prosecute individuals for genocide, torture, or war crimes, regardless of where the crime was committed or perpetrator’s nationality.

The trial also made it clear that a legal system that punishes a man for killing one person but protects a dictator for killing more than one million, is badly flawed! Modern laws that hold heads of state legally accountable for crimes against humanity are a direct result of the Tehlirian trial.

History Repeats Itself!

According to a display at the Yerevan Genocide Museum, the “failure of the international community to respond adequately to the Armenian Genocide and to hold its perpetrators accountable” is the reason that genocides continue well into the 21st century! The absence of justice and effective punishment has created “a climate of impunity that emboldened future perpetrators of mass crimes with devastating consequences for humanity.”

Throughout the 20th-21st centuries, numerous other genocides have been committed, including “the Holocaust of the Jews, the genocides of Rwanda, Bangladesh and Cambodia, the extermination of indigenous peoples in several countries of Central and South America, in former Yugoslavia, in Darfur (Sudan), and the Yezidis in Iraq and Syria.”

The prevention of genocide and other mass atrocity crimes can only be made possible “through the concerted and unified effort of the international community grounded in remembrance, accountability, and the firm rejection of impunity.”

Denial by Turkey

Although a majority of historians, genocide scholars, and international institutions classify the 1915 slaughter as a genocide, the Republic of Turkey — despite the plethora of documented evidence and eyewitness accounts — continues to deny that a genocide took place.

Turkey argues that the deaths were the result of a national security crisis, internal rebellion, and the collapse of the empire, and that relocations were a military necessity to secure borders against separatists — not an attempt to wipe out the Armenian people. They also insist that ethnic Turks and Muslims died during the same period due to disease, starvation, and attacks by Armenians!

More than 30 countries including the European Parliament and various international bodies officially recognize the genocide. Turkey, Azerbaijan and Pakistan do not!

Similar to WW2 Jewish Holocaust deniers, Turkey proactively lobbies against acceptance of the term genocide and pushes its allies to dispute and disavow it! Turkey’s rationale is to avoid paying restitution and financial reparations, or return stolen property to Armenian descendants who might make claims. Admitting there was a genocide would also risk national honor!

Adding insult to injury, Turkey built its own Genocide Memorial and Museum to commemorate Muslim and Turkish citizens who were killed by Armenian forces in the eastern city of Iğdır near the Armenian border — which serves as a symbol of Turkey's official disinformation narrative. Historians note that the monument was deliberately built to counter global recognition of the Armenian Genocide, is highly suspect, and in poor taste! At its opening in 1999, it was claimed that Armenians killed 80,000 people in Iğdır between 1915-1920 — another example of blatant historical revisionism!

Turkey has also supported the building of a related monument, the Baku Turkish Martyrs’ Memorial in Azerbaijan that honors Ottoman soldiers who died fighting alongside Azerbaijani forces against Bolshevik-Armenian coalitions in 1918.

U.S.-Armenia Ties

While the massacre of Armenians has never occupied as central a place in American political and cultural discourse as the Holocaust, U.S. assistance to Armenian victims during and after the genocide was critical in supporting a massive humanitarian campaign that is still praised by Armenian Americans!

Although the crimes of 1915 faded from view, they were back in focus after WW2 and the Holocaust when Raphael Lemkin defined the crime of genocide and applied his definition to events in Armenia. The 1948 U.N. Convention drew the attention of the international community while a critical role was played by the commemoration of the Shoah: Israel's day of remembrance for the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust by Nazi Germany and its allies. For the first time, Armenians throughout the diaspora saw the genocide as an issue impacting their emotional and cultural identity and demanded political redress.

Turkey vehemently opposed any type of recognition and reparation for the crimes committed by its predecessor, the Ottoman Empire. The denial intensified and increased polarization between Armenians in the diaspora and successive Turkish governments. The 1960s-70s witnessed attempts to gain official recognition of the genocide by the U.S., a process complicated by the fact that Turkey was a major NATO ally, having joined in 1952.

Until five years ago, despite the best efforts of the U.S. Armenian lobby and counter pressures by the Turkish lobby, U.S. Administrations maintained an ambiguous position of non-recognition, non-denial.

Former U.S. Senator Bob Dole (R-KS) led the decades-long legislative struggle to officially recognize the Armenian Genocide in the U.S. Senate. Dole was a loyal friend and consistent supporter of Armenia. His special relationship was the result of close ties with Dr. Hampar Kelikian, an Armenian-American surgeon who helped him recover from grave World War II injuries. In 1990, Dole and Armenian activists led a long, tough, and acrimonious battle to pass Senate Joint Resolution 212, which faced fierce opposition from the Turkey lobby, the U.S. Administration, and Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV), the President Pro Tempore of the Senate. The resolution was eventually rejected.

On Armenian Remembrance Day, 24 April 1990, Dole said the genocide must be fully acknowledged because “one reason six million Jews were slaughtered was Hitler’s conviction that no one remembered the Armenian Genocide” and because “it is right. It is right historically. It is right morally.”

U.S. Recognition

After decades of refusal — on April 24th, 2021, Armenian Remembrance Day — U.S. President Joe Biden did what no American President had done before: he recognized the 1915 atrocities committed against the Armenian population by the Ottoman Empire as genocide. Using the term genocide explicitly and breaking with decades of euphemism, was widely seen as a moral and historical correction and an acknowledgment that strategic considerations should not override the truth. Previous U.S. administrations had weighed historical truth against the risk of losing military access to Turkish bases.

The primary impetus for recognition was a bipartisan congressional mandate that ended decades of geopolitical reluctance, an effort to realign foreign policy with global human rights, and (perhaps most importantly) deterioration of bilateral ties with Turkey's purchase of Russian missile systems and general democratic backsliding. In late 2019, both the House and Senate passed resolutions explicitly recognizing the genocide. This bipartisan consensus stripped away obstacles that had previously stopped the executive branch from taking a stand. The recognition also placed political pressure on Turkey and offered a moral sense of redress through the recognition of the victims’ dignity.

However, with President Trump in office — and in a reversal of earlier progress — the U.S. is once again avoiding the word “genocide” and replacing it with more neutral language in official statements. But recognition of genocide is not merely symbolic: it carries legal, moral, and political weight, affirming that what occurred was not simply tragedy or chaos, but a systematic attempt to eliminate a people. According to the Lemkin Institute, “Avoiding the term does not change the facts. But it does change the signal.”

States cannot Infringe on the Federal Government’s Power to Manage Foreign Affairs

The Trump Administration’s decision to drop the word "genocide" from its official statements does not change how the issue is viewed in the U.S. Courts, nor does it revoke the historical legal framework established by Congress. However, the ability of survivors and their descendants to claim legal redress in U.S. Courts remains severely restricted due to prior Supreme Court precedents.

The U.S. government first officially recognized the genocide in a written submission to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in 1951, long establishing it in the judicial archives. But the avenue for survivors and their heirs to seek financial restitution remains blocked due to a long-standing roadblock built by federal courts regarding foreign affairs.

In 2012, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals struck down a California law that extended the statute of limitations for survivors to sue for unpaid insurance policies. The court ruled that states cannot pass specific laws targeting foreign historical atrocities because doing so unconstitutionally infringes on the federal government’s exclusive power to manage foreign affairs.

In 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to review the 9th Circuit's ruling, effectively closing the door on using state legislation to bypass regular statutes of limitations for genocide-era claims. Without an explicit, treaty-backed mandate from Washington, litigants will continue to fail as they lack the jurisdiction to resolve private property and insurance claims arising from overseas conflicts.

Visit to NYC by Armenian President Levon Ter-Petrosyan, September 1990

I cannot end without briefly mentioning the official U.S. visit in September 1990 by Armenian President Levon Ter-Petrosyan, the newly elected Chairman of the Supreme Council/acting leader of Soviet Armenia, who visited New York City and stayed at the Plaza Hotel. The visit laid the groundwork for his subsequent official presidential trips (November 1991 and August 1994).

President Ter-Petrosyan met with lifelong champion of the Armenian community Sen. Bob Dole and was honored at a massive $10,000-per-ticket Armenian Assembly benefit dinner held at the hotel. He also visited the New York Times editorial board to advocate for the West’s recognition of Armenia's democratic movement, push for humanitarian aid following the 1988 Spitak earthquake, and raise international awareness about the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.

I had just joined the IFC/WB and was tasked with attending, representing, and facilitating at the conference, dinner, meeting with Sen. Dole, and the long walk on Manhattan streets from the hotel to the New York Times Editorial Board with U.S. Secret Service jostling astonished New Yorkers off the sidewalks! I recall the rather curious questions the NYT lobbed at the Armenian head of state! I wasn’t even covering the region but my colleague who did couldn’t go and I wasn’t passing up an opportunity to attend a high-level visit, mingle with VIPs, and stay at the iconic Plaza!

Ludi Joseph

Washington D.C.

June 14, 2026

Notes:

1. Battle of Sarikamish

The WW1 Battle of Sarikamish, January 1915, was a catastrophic Ottoman defeat. The campaign was led by Enver Pasha whose strategic goals included capturing oilfields at Baku and threatening British India. Poorly equipped for the Caucasian winter, the regime suffered immense casualties. During this period, the regime began its policy of deporting Armenians, leading to widespread atrocities.

2. Young Turk

“Young Turk” refers to the late-19th century Ottoman political reform movement by military officers and students to limit the absolute power of Sultan Abdülhamid II and replace it with a constitutional government. While they successfully forced the Sultan to restore the 1876 constitution and hold elections, their rule also resulted in the dissolution of the Ottoman state and perpetration of the Armenian genocide.

3. Assyrians

Estimates vary but more than 250,000 Assyrians were killed by the Ottoman Empire during WW1 in what is known as the Assyrian Genocide, or Sayfo (from the Aramaic word for “sword”). Assyrians are a distinct ethnic group of about 5 million globally with ancient Mesopotamian roots. They practice various branches of Syriac Christianity and speak Neo-Aramaic dialects, perhaps close to what Jesus spoke! The ancient Assyrian civilization (21st to 7th century BCE) built cities like Nineveh and Assur, and was a dominant power in the region covering modern day Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Turkey. The indigenous population survived after the empire fell but, after centuries of persecution including the Ottoman Sayfo, the majority now live in the West.

4. Mehmet Talaat

Mehmet Talaat Pasha (1874-1921), one of the Ottoman Empire’s most influential politicians, was primarily responsible for the Armenian Genocide as Minister of the Interior. Orders for the eviction and deportation of Armenians carried his signature. He organized their removal, plundered their properties, and ordered the killing of young Armenian orphans. In 1917, he was promoted to Grand Vizier (Prime Minister) and gained the title of Pasha. Aware that the Allied Powers intended to hold him and his associates responsible for the killing of Armenians, he resigned in 1918 and fled to Germany.

5. Escheat

Escheat is a legal process that allows a state to take ownership of property and hold it indefinitely when an owner cannot be located, has abandoned it, or dies without leaving a valid will or known legal heirs.

6. Ottomans vs. Turks

At its height, the Ottoman Empire ruled vast territories across Southeast Europe, Western Asia, and North Africa. While the name Turk referred to the broader ethnic and linguistic family, the Ottomans saw themselves as a multi-ethnic dynasty. The military-administrative elite identified themselves as "Ottomans" (Osmanlı) while the word “Turk" was a disparaging label used for rural, uneducated peasants. In the early 20th century, as the Ottoman Empire collapsed, the regime’s upper classes adopted Turkish nationalism to unify the population. When Mustafa Kemal Atatürk established the Turkish Republic, he redefined "Turk" to encompass all citizens of the new nation, transforming it into a badge of identity. Following the WW1 Ottoman collapse and Atatürk’s successful War of Independence, the Ottoman Empire formally transitioned on October 29, 1923 into the modern Republic of Turkey (now called Türkiye).

7. Operation Nemesis

Operation Nemesis’ retribution against several high-level former members of the Ottoman government, sparked debate over vigilantism versus moral imperative, with Armenian accounts framing it as necessary justice for unpunished mass murder and Turkish perspectives decrying it as terrorism. Operational records substantiate the targeted nature of the hits on documented culprits.

Others targeted by Operation Nemesis were Bahaddin Shakir, Cemal Azmi, and two from Azerbaijan: Fatali Khan Khoyski, the former Prime Minister and Behbud Khan Javanshir, Internal Affairs Minister — for their role in the September 1918 massacre of Armenians in Baku.

No Armenian operative involved in Nemesis was ever legally punished or imprisoned. While captured assassins were legally acquitted by sympathetic courts, all other assassins managed to successfully disappear.

Besides Tehlirian, another assassin, Misak Torlakian, was captured, tried, and released. He had killed Behbud Khan Javanshir (former Azerbaijan Internal Affairs Minister) in Istanbul in 1921, was captured by British occupation forces, and tried by a British Military Tribunal that handed down a verdict of "guilty but not responsible" due to his mental state (epilepsy and trauma linked to seeing his family massacred). Torlakian was expelled to Greece, freed upon arrival, and later moved to America.

The international community's response was conflicted, which is why the operatives avoided prison. While the scale of the genocide was known, the post-WW1 powers were more focused on realpolitik and maintaining sovereign borders than enforcing justice. The Ottoman perpetrators had fled into exile and foreign governments were unwilling to extradite them. The Tehlirian Trial served as a kind of reckoning and awakening from apathy. By shifting the focus from Talaat’s assassination to atrocities committed by Talaat, the defense persuaded the jury to return a not guilty verdict, further jolting the world’s moral compass! At the time, there was no legal framework or international tribunal to prosecute leaders for mass murder of their own citizens. The absence of formal laws convinced Armenians they had no other way of getting justice except as a self-appointed avenging force to awaken the conscience of the international community!