BETRAYAL: the Promise Never Kept
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BETRAYAL: The Promise Never Kept BETRAYAL: The Promise Never Kept ______________________ Genocide And The West’s Secret War For OIL Shahan Natalie Soghomon Tehlirian Armen Garo Sylva Natalie Manoogian Ara Khachig Manoogian For more information about this book and related documentation, please visit www.snff.org © 2019 Sylva Natalie Manoogian and Ara Khachig Manoogian All Right Reserved ISBN 978-1-950801-02-2 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or trans- mitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, in- cluding photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner. For further detail please contact: Shahan Natalie Family Foundation, Inc. 3727 West Magnolia Blvd., #215 Burbank, CA 91505 USA Email: [email protected] This book is dedicated to the memory of Shahan Natalie, Soghomon Tehlirian, Arron Sachaklian, all those who have invested their time and energy for the preservation of the Armenian people without any expectation of personal monetary gains, and to those who may one day choose to do the same. Contents INTRODUCTION ix Chapter 1: Ides of March 1 Chapter 2: The Birth of Nemesis 23 Chapter 3: Broken Promises of Reforms for the Ottoman Armenians 29 Chapter 4: Armenian Revolutionary Parties 37 Chapter 5: The Young Turks 43 Chapter 6: The Four Pashas 53 Chapter 7: Turks and Russians Vying for Armenian Support 63 Chapter 8: Turkish Resistance to the Young Turks 67 Chapter 9: German and Ottoman Genocidal Cooperation 73 Chapter 10: Russians Turned Bolshevik 81 Chapter 11: Secret Treaty 89 Chapter 12: Arming the Enemy 99 Chapter 13: Morgenthau 107 Chapter 14: Presenting the Armenian Case 133 Chapter 15: One Man Armenian Lobby 159 Chapter 16: British Spies 169 Chapter 17: ARF 9th General Assembly 181 Chapter 18: U.S. Mandate over Armenia 187 Chapter 19: The Treaty of Sèvres 191 Chapter 20: Wilsonian Armenia 201 Chapter 21: Joining the League of Nations 217 Chapter 22: Operation Nemesis 229 Chapter 23: Armen Garo 241 Chapter 24: Making deals with the Turks 259 Chapter 25: Soghomon 261 Chapter 26: Lausanne Treaties 273 Chapter 27: Chester Concessions 279 Chapter 28: Confession of a Rear Admiral 295 Contents Chapter 29: The Bankers 305 Chapter 30: The Colt Memos and Letter 317 Chapter 31: Theodore Roosevelt Letters 325 Chapter 32: An Open Letter to President Wilson 339 Chapter 33: Still Arming the Enemy 347 Chapter 34: Genocide Recognition 353 Chapter 35: Talaat’s Conclusion 369 Appendix I: The Murderous Beginnings of the Hunchakian Party 375 Appendix II: Patriotism Perverted 389 Appendix III: The A.R.F. Has Nothing To Do Any More 441 Appendix IV: The Young Turks 461 Appendix V: Maintenance of Peace in Armenia 471 Appendix VI: Interview With Tallat Pasha 581 Appendix VII: The One Hundred Names of Perpetrators 591 Appendix VIII: Project of a Railway System 597 Appendix IX: Why Armenia Should Be Free 617 Appendix X: Treary of Peace With Turkey Signed at Lusanne 659 Appendix XI: The Lausanne Treaty: Should the United States Ratify it? 669 Appendix XII: ARMENIA: A Leading Factor in the Winning of the War 699 Appendix XIII: Armenia and Her Claims to Freedom 735 APPENDIX XIV: The Treaty of Alexandropol 761 APPENDIX XV: H. RES. 220 763 ABOUT THE AUTHORS Shahan Natalie (1884-1983) 765 Soghomon Tehlirian (1896-1960) 773 Garegin Pasdermadjian (1873-1923) 777 Sylva Natalie Manoogian (1937- ) 783 Ara Khachig Manoogian (1965- ) 785 INTRODUCTION The genocide of the Armenian people, which took place from 1894 to 1923, included the forced conversion to Islam as well as the murder of approximately 2.5 million Christian Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire. It started with the orders of Sultan Abdul Hamid and continued under the leadership of the Committee of Union and Progress (C.U.P.), a well-organized group of revolutionaries conceived in the city of Salonica. This book will share what was told to me by my grandfather, Shahan Natalie, the man behind Operation Nemesis. His work halted the Armenian Genocide before it could erase from the map what we know today as Armenia. Operation Nemesis also saved the lives of the few Armenians who remained in modern day Turkey. In 1971, when my grandfather was 87 years old, he shared his extraordinary life story with my two brothers and me. I was 5 years old. This memorable experience was recorded on reel-to-reel tape by my father. It was the first time my grandfather would consent to making an incriminating recording of how he orchestrated the assassinations of some of the most powerful world leaders of that time. My father had convinced him to tell his story on tape, explaining to my grandfather that his enemies within the Armenian Shahan Natalie (1884-1983) community in the United States, Europe and the Middle East had their own version of Operation Nemesis and his role in it. They would lie about him in order to conceal their own misdeeds, which led to the murder of thousands of Armenians. Although found guilty in a Turkish court for the mass murder of Armenian, Greek and Assyrian Christians, as well as respected Islamist leaders who opposed them, it was crystal clear to my grandfather that the western powers who claimed to want to hand down justice to the C.U.P. leaders were, in fact, making backroom deals with these convicted murderers. These western powers were not alone. Even the newly formed Armenian Government, led by the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (A.R.F.), said they were not interested in holding these convicted murderers accountable. They reasoned that as a government they could no longer behave as a militant political movement and use their past methods. It was later discovered that this newly formed Armenian government had foolishly made secret deals with C.U.P. leaders in exchange for promises that were never fulfilled. Shahan Natalie was a writer, poet, journalist, human rights activist and revolutionary. Although he loved literature from a very young age, and would have preferred a career as a writer, he felt compelled into revolutionary x BETRAYAL: The Promise Never Kept politics. In 1895, at the age of 11, Shahan Natalie’s father and a dozen family members were murdered in the Hamidian massacres (so named after Sultan Abdul Hamid). Shahan and his mother dragged the body of his beheaded father to the family cemetery. With his bare hands the 11-year-old clawed out a shallow grave, wearing down the ends of his fingernails, cracking them open and causing them to bleed. On his father’s open grave, Shahan’s mother imposed on him an oath to restore the family’s honor and avenge the death of his beloved father, so that others would not experience the pain he would carry with him for the rest of his life. My grandfather was my mentor. Before he died on April 19, 1983, when I was seventeen, he inspired me to continue his oath and carry on the spirit of his work. My first step to fulfilling my commitment was as a human rights activist. Out of necessity I added investigative journalism to my repertoire, which I have been engaged in for more than 16 years. I discovered that most journalists wouldn’t or couldn’t cover controversial subjects. This skill has become particularly useful after finally gaining access to my grandfather’s private archive, which contains volumes of unpublished memoirs documenting the lives of the Armenian people before, during and after the Armenian Genocide. This book will present a concise history of the Armenian people that I believe has never been told before. It will not resemble anything I have seen which is publicly available today. It will not only address the atrocities my grandfather witnessed first-hand when he was eleven years old and the actions he took to end the Armenian Genocide, but will also present my own findings derived from decades of research made possible thanks to many clues my grandfather left me and that I’ve built on with information discovered in the most unlikely of places. Most historians present the Armenian Genocide as a crime carried out by the Turks, Kurds and Germans. Although there is truth to this, their conclusion that it was a hate crime between religious groups is not entirely accurate. The mass murder of the Armenian, Greek and Assyrian Christians of the Ottoman Empire was a crime built to order by Western Powers who had little to lose and much to gain. Like so many millions of Christians, I believe many Ottoman Muslims were victimized, as they had their culture, language—indeed, their alphabet— stolen from them. They also found themselves criminally liable for the genocide against the Armenian people. A genocide, like most, that the masses didn’t gain from, but rather a few corrupt officials and those powers in the world who supported them, become wealthy and almost immune from the crime that they in fact orchestrated. In the pages that follow, I will present evidence that will prove that the Armenian people were driven from the land they lived on for thousands of years, not because of ethnic and religious strife, but because the land they inhabited was believed to have one-sixth of the world’s crude oil reserve and other valuable natural resources. European powers and the United States were INTRODUCTION xi competing for these resources, having entered into concession agreements with the Sultan, Abdul Hamid II, and then later with the corrupt ruling powers of the C.U.P. The push for the creation of an autonomous Armenian state within the Ottoman Empire as allowed by its constitution would have spoiled these deals that promised the C.U.P.