15/3/1921 Justice catches up with Talaat Pasha

During the war Mehmed Talaat was one of the three paramount leaders of the Ottoman Empire. Together with Ahmed Djemal and Ismail Enver he brought Turkey into the war on Germany’s side and then played a leading role in directing a campaign of extermination against the empire’s Armenian community. Defeat has transformed Talaat into an exile.

Under Allied pressure Talaat and his fellows have been tried and sentenced to death in absentia by the Ottoman authorities, both for conspiring to bring the empire into a war that it could not win and for the mass killing and plundering of the Armenians. There seems little chance of the sentence being served on Talaat, who is now living in Germany. However, today a rough form of justice is served on him.

Armenian revolutionaries have been organising a campaign of assassination against leading organisers of the brutalities inflicted on their people. Their agents…