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These Historic Figures Really Deserved the Bad Karma They Got

Khalid Elhassan March 9, 2022 37 min

19. The Decision to Visit Retributive Karma Upon Monsters

An Ottoman newspaper dated November 4th, 1918, announces that the Three Pashas who had led Turkey during WWI, left to right Djemal Pasha, Talaat Pasha, and Enver Pasha, had fled the country. Wikimedia

Disgusted at the miscarriage of justice, some members of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF), a nationalist party, decided to take matters into their own hands, and bring the guilty to account. The ARF passed a resolution called The Special Mission, to visit karma upon and punish the main perpetrators of the Armenian genocide. The result was Operation Nemesis, named after the ancient Greek goddess of divine retribution. Between 1920 – 1922, Armenian avengers stalked those responsible for the genocide throughout Europe and Asia and dealt them lethal doses of karma.

The first target claimed by the avengers of Operation Nemesis was the first prime minister of independent Azerbaijan, Fatali Khan Khoyski. He had played a prominent role in the massacre of tens of thousands of Armenians in Baku in 1918. Azerbaijan’s independence did not last for long, and the Bolsheviks overran and incorporated it into the Soviet Union in 1920. That April, Khoyski fled to Tiflis, Georgia, to escape the Red Army as it overran his country. On June 19^th, Armenian revolutionary Aram Yerganian opened fire on Khoyski in Tiflis’ Yerevan Square, and killed him on the spot.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.