Institute for Development and Diplomacy - IDD (31 May 2023)

Maxime GAUIN

Troubling support for Armenian terrorism has been ongoing since the end of nineteenth century. Since 1991, it has enjoyed various forms of justification and glorification by the Armenian state itself, including in two noteworthy but contradictory instances that have taken place very recently (April and May 2023)—i.e., in the midst of the active phase in the peace negotiations between Yerevan and Baku.

The Nemesis Monument in Yerevan

On 25 April 2023, Armenpress announced: “On April 25, the ‘Nemesis’ monument dedicated to the heroes who organized and carried out the ‘Nemesis’ operation in 1919 was opened with great pomp in Yerevan’s Ring Park.” The background is as follows: Nemesis was a terrorist network established at the end of 1919 by the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF), to assassinate former Ottoman officials, former Azerbaijan Democratic Republic (ADR) officials, and loyal Ottoman ethnic-Armenians. Among other victims, Nemesis assassinated Vahe Ihsan (who worked for the Ottoman police during the First World War, then for the Kemalist intelligence service from 1919 to his death), Fatali Khan Khoyski (a former ADR prime minister) and Hasan-bey Aghayev (a former vice-president of the ADR parliament) in 1920; Talat Pasha (Ottoman interior minister, 1913-1917; Grand Vizir 1917-1918), Sait Halim Pasha (Ottoman Grand Vizir, 1917-1918), Behbud Khan Javanshir (former ADR interior minister) in 1921; and Cemal Pasha (a former Ottoman navy minister) in 1922.

The name of Javanshir’s assassin, an ethnic-Armenian named Misak Torlakian, is inscribed on the Nemesis monument unveiled in Yerevan. Torlakian was arrested by the British authorities in July 1921 (the assassination had taken place in Istanbul during its occupation), but the judges received death threats from the ARF: as a result, the criminal was judged to be mentally insane and then released in November of the same year. Torlakian later worked as an agent of the Nazi Germany military intelligence service, from 1942 to 1945, as he explains himself in his posthumously published memoirs, printed in Tehran in 1982. […]

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