The assassination of Talaat

Shortly after the assassination of Talaat in March 1921, the "Posthumous Memoirs of Talaat" was published in the October volume of The New York Times Current History. In this memoir, he accepted that the deportation was not carried out lawfully everywhere. He claimed that in the region there was hatred among the Armenians and Kurdish who had a bitter history, that there were officials who abused their authority, and that the region became unlawful and people took preventive measures into their own hands. He accepted that the duty of the government was to prevent these abuses and atrocities, and claimed that as the minister of interior, he ordered the arrest and punishment of those who were responsible according to the law.

I admit that we deported Armenians from our eastern provinces, and we acted in this matter upon a previously prepared scheme. The responsibility of these acts falls upon the deported people themselves. Russians ... had armed and equipped the Armenian inhabitants of this district [Van] ... and had organized strong Armenian bandit forces. ... When we entered the Great War, these bandits began their destructive activities in the rear of the Turkish army on the Caucasus front, blowing up the bridges and killing the innocent Mohammedan inhabitants regardless of age and sex... All these Armenian bandits were helped by the native Armenians.

—Mehmed Talaat