Death of an Enemy

We are all aware that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has demanded that Armenians cease using the image of Ararat and the word “enemy” in our national anthem. As humiliating as this is and as idiotic as it sounds, it is but a lesser offense in the history of subjugation and atrocities by the Turks against our people. While Erdogan would, no doubt, rather see the word “master” or “conqueror” (actually he would prefer we not have a national anthem at all), the word “enemy” fits best from our perspective. Erdogan is just another in a long line of Turks who are enemies of the Armenian people.

There was another enemy of the Armenians. His name was Kiazim Karabekir. In the February 26, 1948 issue of the Hairenik Weekly there was a front page article titled, “His Death Came Not Too Soon’: TURK KARABEKIR DIES OF A HEART CONDITION.” The article was written by “a Staff Writer of the Hairenik Weekly.”

Who was Kiazim Karabekir? 

At the time of his death he was president of the Turkish National Assembly. He was a pasha, a general, a military man from a military family. Born in 1882, Karabekir was the son of a general, Mehmet Emin Pasha. He fought in Gallipoli against the French and in Iraq against the British. In 1916, he was appointed to the command of the II Corps stationed in Diyarbakır and the acting commander of the Second Army. In 1918, he captured Erzerum and Erzincan from the Armenians and Russians. He also fought in Azerbaijan against the British, and that same year he was made a general.

As a general, he pledged his loyalty to Mustafa Kemal, who made him chief of staff. In 1919, he was made commander of the Turkish Third Army section. Though he didn’t always agree with Kemal, Karabekir served the Republic of Turkey throughout the remainder of his life.

Karabekir led an attack against the fledgling Armenian Republic in 1920. Per the Weekly article:

The Turk attack started on September 20, 1920. Karabekir first struck Olti and Bardiz; his forces then fanned out all over the Kars-Ardahan sector against the valiant opposition of a vastly outnumbered Armenian army. The Turks drove on to Alexandropol, where Karabekir ordered the wholesale murder of more than 15,000 Armenians. For this he has been hailed by his Turkish eulogists as ‘the guardian of the Caucasus.’

Alexandropol (soon to be Leninakan and now Gyumri) was the largest city in Armenia at the time. Karabekir met with an Armenian delegation there to negotiate a treaty. Negotiation was hardly the word, though, as Karabekir had the upper hand. The Armenian delegation, led by Alexander Khatisian, had no leverage. As a result, the Treaty of Alexandropol, signed on the eve of the Soviet takeover of the Armenian Republic, was not favorable at all to the Armenians.  Kars and Ardahan went back to Turkey. 

Karabekir did not want to stop there.  As Vahakn Dadrian wrote in his 2003 book The History of the Armenian Genocide: Ethnic Conflict from the Balkans to Anatolia to the Caucasus:

In his massive two volume book ‘Our War for Independence,’ Karabekir reiterates again and again the theme that Armenia is both a threat and obstacle for Turkey’s paramount need to establish contiguous frontiers with Azerbaijan and other Turkic countries in the Caucasus… He berates Halil Kut, the commander of the Army Groups East at the time, for hindering his plan to capture Zankezour at the end of World War I and to establish a link with Azerbaijan.

In Volume II of his book, Karabekir wrote:

The aim of all Turks is to unite with the Turkic borders. History is affording us today the last opportunity. In order for the Muslim world not to be forever fragmented it is necessary that the campaign against Karabagh be not allowed to abate. As a matter of fact, drive the point home in Azeri circles that the campaign should be pursued with greater determination and severity.

In the Weekly article from 1948 on Karabekir’s passing, the Staff Writer wrote:

Newspapers of the nation, in reporting the demise of this violent man, failed to establish fully his place in history.  But had the gentlemen of the press done any honest research into the life of this man, they would have been constrained to observe that his death came not to soon, and that his heart attack probably followed upon the growing poison fed into his body by an irritated conscience… that is if we may imagine that Turks have consciences.

The Staff Writer (James Mandalian? James Tashjian?) was pretty gentle on “this violent man.”  There is no other word to describe Karabekir. He was an enemy of the Armenian people. Erdogan and Aliyev are his political heirs, working to fulfill the goal Karabekir shared with Enver Pasha. These are the people we faced then and did not take seriously enough after the end of the first Artsakh war in 1994. These are the people we are “negotiating” with today. When it comes to the Armenians, I cannot imagine either of them having a conscience.

===

First published in The Armenian Weekly, July 30, 2024