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These Historic Figures Really Deserved the Bad Karma They Got

Khalid Elhassan March 9, 2022 37 min

16. Lethal Karma Catches Up With a Monster and With Another of Turkey’s Three Murderous Pashas

Karma Facts - Arshavir Shirakian — Arshavir Shirakian. Flickr

On April 17^th, 1922, karma caught up with Cemal Azmi and Behaddin Shakir. That day, Aram Yerganian and Arshavi Shirakian came upon the two murderers while they strolled Berlin’s Uhlandstrasse with their families. Shirakian opened fire and killed Azmi, but only wounded Behaddin, who ran for his life. Yerganian took off after the genocidier, caught up with him, and finished him with a bullet to the head. Neither shooter was apprehended. They were not the last prominent Turkish genocideiers dealt doses of lethal karma by Operation Nemesis. Ahmed Djemal Pasha was another of the Three Pashas who had ruled the Ottoman Empire in WWI. Also known as al Saffah, or the Blood-shedder, Djemal Pasha was one of the key participants in the Armenian Genocide.

Ahmed Djemal Pasha in 1915. New York Times

After the war, Ahmed Djamal fled to Germany, then to Switzerland. A Turkish court-martial sentenced him to death in absentia. In 1920, he headed to Afghanistan, where he worked on the modernization of its army. As the Bolshevik Revolution and the Russian Civil War roiled the neighboring USSR, Djemal headed to Tiflis, Georgia, to negotiate with the Soviets on behalf of Afghanistan. There, a trio of Armenian revolutionaries, Petros Ter Poghosyan, Atrashes Gevorgyan, and Stepan Dzaghigian, assassinated him and his secretary on July 21^st, 1922. He was the last major genocidier dealt his just dose of karma by Operation Nemesis.

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.