Turkey: Organizer of Armenian Genocide commemorated with "endless respect"
Talat Pasha, an Ottoman official who is known as the organizer of the Armenian Genocide in 1915 and who was sentenced to death in absentia by the Ottoman Special Military Tribunal after he fled to Germany as a war criminal, was commemorated on the occasion of the anniversary of his death by a student society in Istanbul's Bogazici University (BU).
Anadoludaki Türk varlığının ve modern Türkiye'nin garantörü, hürriyet kahramanı, büyük Sadrazam Talat Paşa'yı, Berlin'de bir Ermeni terörist tarafından sırtından vurularak şehit edilişinin yıl dönümünde sonsuz saygı ve minnetle anıyoruz. pic.twitter.com/zZzzOxIiPR
— Boğaziçi Türk Araştırmaları Topluluğu (@BogaziciTAT) March 14, 2023
Bogazici University Turkish Studies Society (BUTAT) posted a statement on Twitter saying:
"On the anniversary of his martyrdom, we commemorate with endless respect and gratitude the Grand Vizier Talat Pasha, the guarantor of the Turkish existence in Anatolia and of modern Turkey, a hero of liberty, who was shot in the back by an Armenian terrorist."
While a Twitter user said in response that Talat Pasha was "the guarantor of all massacres in Turkey, nothing else," another user posted a clipping of The New York Times whose headline said on 15 March 1921, "Talaat Pasha assassinated by Armenian genocide survivor."
The son of the assassin Soghomon Tehlirian had told British journalist Robert Fisk in June 2016: " It was his mother – my grandmother – who was killed in the genocide, along with his oldest brother Vasken, who would have been my uncle and who had been a medical student in Beirut."
Fisk (died on 30 October 2020) had noted in the interview:
"So appalled was the German Weimar Republic's court by the evidence of the 20th century's first industrial holocaust, that it took jurors at Tehlirian's trial just two days to declare the Armenian assassin 'not guilty.'"
He added:
"Talaat’s own ashes lie today within a much visited mausoleum in central Istanbul. They were returned to the Turks in 1943 in a train decorated with the Nazi swastika, and on the orders of Adolf Hitler."
In a move devised to create a Turkish nation out of a multi-ethnic empire, Talat Pasha and other officials of the Party of Union and Progress led an annihilation campaign in 1915 that wiped out the entire Armenian People within the borders of the empire, except for a small community in Istanbul. The genocide had been preceded by 1907 Adana massacre that destroyed the Armenian population in the Cilicia region, and the Hamidian massacres in mid 1890s.
