Operation Nemesis

Armenian Remembrance Day

It’s striking that there hasn’t been a feature film about Operation Nemesis, one of the more dramatic semi-true stories of the 20th Century: the carefully targeted vengeance that Armenian survivors carried out in the early 1920s on the highest-ranking Young Turk politicians responsible for the Armenian genocide 110 years ago more or less today.

In general, I’m not enthusiastic for revenge and am more of a let-bygones-be-bygones kinda guy. On the other hand, the date May 1, 2011 will always be a satisfying memory for me.

And the Armenian genocide was roughly 300 9-11s.

Operation Nemesis would be particularly interesting as a movie because the central event, the 1921 assassination in Berlin of Talaat Pasha, who was somewhere between being the Hitler and Himmler of the Armenian Genocide, was almost as carefully scripted as any silent movie. (The Armenian Genocide itself was more chaotic.)

A young Armenian, Soghomon Tehlirian, who had had scores of kin murdered was cast as the agent of retribution.

He was given careful instructions to create a maximally effective tableau of just vengeance, like a modern dress version of some stern Roman Republican legend painted by Jacques-Louis David: You blow up the skull of the Number 1 nation-murderer and you don’t try to flee. You stand there, your foot on the corpse and surrender to the police, who will come and handcuff you.

But after shooting Talaat, Tehlirian went off-script and ran for his life. He was hunted down and captured by irate bystanders outraged that some swarthy foreigner had disrupted the lawful order of Berlin’s streets by shooting some other swarthy foreigner.

But then the international Armenian conspiracy got back into gear. They hired three excellent defense lawyers who proceeded to turn the two day trial into a trial of the dead man, with dramatic testimony about the massacres, most of it true, but some of it punched up the way a competent screenwriter would rewrite the first draft. (The assassin, for example, was not exactly a survivor on the Genocide like said he was, waking up under his brother’s corpse. Instead, he’d been a volunteer in the invading Russian army. But the overall picture was true.)

The Berliners on the jury returned after an hour’s deliberation with a not guilty verdict.

Tehlirian died in Fresno, CA in 1960, where he is commemorated with a statue of an eagle hunting a snake.