On this date in 1915, Ottoman major Cerkez Ahmed (often Ahmet) hanged in Damascus.
The officer had been an important figure months earlier in the opening campaigns of Armenian genocide in the eastern province of Van where he operated as a paramilitary chief that verged so close to a brigand that he was eventually treated as one. Most egregiously, when two reformist Armenian parliamentarians named Vartkes Seringulian and Krikor Zohrab were arrested and deported to Syria, it was Ahmed who ambushed and murdered them.* (He was also the assassin in the prewar years of opposition journalist Ahmed Samim, but he’d long since been amnestied for that horror.)
Although in this he was enacting the state’s own policy, his proclivity for gorging himself on the valuables of his victims provided an impetus — a pretext, really — to eliminate him. The official communiques between officials determining his fate (and that of an associate) paint a grim and cynical picture. The following quotes can be found piecemeal in a number of sources, but they’re marshaled comprehensively in the open source volume Documentation of the Armenian Genocide in Turkish Sources under the heading “The Case of a Special Organization Major”.
The brigands Halil and Ahmed visited me today. They stated that having completed the massacres in the Diyarbekir area, they came to Syria to do the same for which purpose they said they are ready to receive the orders. I have them arrested. Awaiting your excellency’s orders.
-Telegram from the governor of Aleppo to Cemal Pasha, one of the “Three Pashas” who ran Turkey as a triumvirate
I feel dishonored. I served my country. I desolated Van and environs. Today, you car’t find a single Armenian there … I killed off the Armenian Deputies Zohrab and Vartkes. I grabbed Zohrab, threw him down, took him under my feet and with a big rock crushed his head — crushed and crushed until I killed him off.
-Ahmed, complaining to the intelligence officer Ahmed Refik (according to the latter’s postwar account)
In as much as I am convinced that Cerkez Ahmed committed these crimes by the order of Diyarbekir governor Reshid,** do you still find the liquidation of Ahmed absolutely necessary? Or, should I be merely content with Halil? Kindly respond by tomorrow evening.
His liquidation in any case is necessary. Otherwise he will prove very harmful at a later date. Talat.
-Talat’s reply to Cemal (on September 15/28, 1915)
The verdict against Cerkez Ahmed is execution. The requisite step will be taken in Damascus tomorrow morning.
-Cemal’s order (on September 16/29)
And he was.
“Undoubtedly Cerkez Ahmed was a scoundrel who deserved to be hanged not once but nine times,” mused the historian Ziya Sakir — who published these ciphered messages in 1943. “With three words uttered by administrative chief Talaat, the life of this creature, who was exploited for the sake of fanatic partisanship, was snuffed out.”
Many years later, Cemal Pasha’s chief of staff Gen. Ali Fuad Erden would reflect on this affair in his memoirs,
Indebtedness to given executioners and murderers is bound to be heavy … those who are used for dirty jobs are needed in times of necessity [in order to shift] responsibility. It is likewise necessary, however, not to exalt but to dispose of them like toilet paper, once they have done their job.
* Reshid Akif Reshid, an Ottoman senator and briefly a state councilor during World War I, provided noteworthy testimony to the postwar Ottoman parliament about the Armenian genocide, detailing the systematic use of extralegal “brigand” paramilitaries in conducting the slaughter: official orders from Istanbul to a provincial official ordered various Armenian communities “deported”; simultaneously, the rulingCommittee of Union and Progress “undertook to send an ominous circular order to all points [in the provinces], urging the expediting of the execution of the accursed mission of the brigands. Thereupon, the brigands proceeded to act and the atrocious massacres were the result.”
** The governor referred to here is Mehmed Reshid, one of the genocide’s most enthusiastic agents and “the butcher of Diyarbakir” in Armenian memory. He was arrested after the war and might have been a candidate for this very blog but escaped the prospect of hanging by breaking out of prison and committing suicide when on the verge of recapture.
A Thai national named Navarat Maykha was hanged in Singapore on this date in 1995 for drug-smuggling.
“An impoverished and uneducated woman, and also deeply religious, she swore until her death that she was unaware of the heroin that was hidden in the lining of a suitcase given to her by a Nigerian friend,” is the sad summation of this 2005 article about Singapore’s death penalty — which goes on to quote her attorney Peter Fernando on the injustice of the island
“It’s heartbreaking sometimes,” said Fernando during a recent interview from his office in Singapore. “If you are an addict, and you are simply sitting at home with more than 15 grams of heroin and you cannot prove with scientific accuracy that a portion of the drugs are for personal use, you will hang.”
This wasn’t the particular form of heartbreaking that applied to Navarat Maykha, who was persuaded by the aforementioned Nigerian friend to bring some clothes to a pal in Singapore. The luggage encasing said wardrobe had 3.19 kilos of heroin sewn into it.
Cuban patriot Eduardo Facciolo Alba was garroted on this date in 1852.
The 23-year-old was the typographer of the magazine La Voz del Pueblo Cubano — subtitle: Organo de la Independencia — a profession for which he had apprenticed with his parents since dropping out of elementary school. As for his political course, the stirring popular sentiment for Cuban independence perhaps catalyzed with the execution of poet Gabriel de la Concepcion Valdes, when Facciolo was all of 15 years old. Within a few years he had found his way into the confidence of radical circles sufficient to recommend him for producing an underground newspaper.
The man was interrupted in the performance of his duties by police officers in the performance of theirs, while running copies of the fourth edition off the printing press.
The publisher Juan Bellido de Luna Guzmán managed to evade authorities and escape to exile in the United States. He’d later write a manifesto of their shared perspective on Cuba’s future upgrading its imperial overlordkl, La anexation de Cuba a los Estados Unidos — which goes some way to explaining the minimal public remembrance this martyr enjoys in present-day Communist Cuba.
Below follows the full text the gallows ephemera by which print culture recalls for posterity a domestic tragedy of colonial Boston … whose arch phrasing (“sorry for any rash Expressions I have at any time uttered since my Condemnation … I have had more comfort and satisfaction within the Walls of this Prison, than ever I had in the ways of Sin”) strongly implies that it was foisted on her others or
My read of the “September 26” date that appears at the end is that the witnesses notarized the statement on the day prior to the execution.
The Declaration, Dying Warning and Advice of Rebekah Chamblit:
A Young Woman Aged Near Twenty-Seven Years, Executed at Boston September 27th. 1733. According to the Sentence Pass’d Upon Her at the Superiour Court Holden There for the County of Suffolk, in August Last, Being Then Found Guilty of Felony, in Concealing the Birth of Her Spurious Male Infant, of Which She Was Delivered When Alone the Eighth Day of May Last, and Was Afterwards Found Dead, as Will More Fully Appear by the Following Declaration, Which Was Carefully Taken From Her Own Mouth
BEING under the awful Appehension of my Execution now in a few Hours; and being desirous to do all the Good I can, before I enter the Eternal World, I now in the fear of GOD, give this Declaration and Warning to the Living.
I Was very tenderly brought up, and well Instructd in my Father’s House, till I was Twelve Years of Age; but alass, my Childhood off in vanity. However, as I grew in Years, my Youth was under very sensible Impressions from the SPIRIT of GOD; and I was awakened to seek and obtain Baptism, when I was about Sixteen Years of Age; and lived for some time with a strictness somewhat answerable to the Obligations I was thereby brought under. But within two or three Years after this, I was led away into the Sin of Uncleannes, from which tie I think I may date my Ruin for this World. After this, I became again more watchful, and for several Years kept my self from the like Pollution, until those for which I am now to suffer.
And as it be necessary, so doubtless it will be expected of me, that I give the World particular account of that great Sin, with the aggravations of it, which has brought me to this Shameful Death: And accordingly in the fear of GOD, at whose awful Tribunal I am immediately to appear, I solemnly declare as follows:
That on Saturday the Fifth Day of May last, being then something more than Eight Months gone with Child, as I was about my Houshold Business reaching some Sand from out of a large Cake, I received considerable hurt, which put me into great Pain, and so I continued till the Tuesday following; in all which time I am not sensible I felt any Life or Motion in the Child within me; when, on the fatal Tuesday the Eighth Day of May, I was Deliver’d when alone of a Male Infant; in whom I did not perceive Life; but still uncertain of Life in it, I threw it into the Vault about two or three Minutes after it was born; uncertain, I say, whether it was a living or dead Child, tho, I confess its probable there was Life in it, and some Circumstances seem to it. I therefore own the Jutice of GOD and Man in my Condemnation, and take Shame to my self, as I have none but my self to Blame and am sorry for any rash Expressions I have at any time uttered since my Condemnation; and I am verily perswaded there is no Place in the World, where there is a more strict regard to Justice than in this Province.
And now as a Soul going into Etern, I most earnestly and solemnly Warn all Persons, particularly YOUNG PEOPLE, and more especially those of my own Sex, the Sins which their Age peculiarly them to; and as the Sin of Uncleanness has brought me into these distressing Circumstances, I would with the greatest Importunity Caution and Warn against it, being perswaded of the abounding of that Sin in this Town and Land. I thought my self as secure, a little more than a Year ago, as many of you now do; but by woful Experience I have found, that Lust when it has conceived bringeth forth Sin, and Sin when it is finished bringeth forth Death; it exposes the Soul not only to Temporal, but to Eternal Death. And therefore as a Dying Person, let me call upon you to forsake the foolish and live: Do not accompany with those you know to be such, and if Sinners entice you do not consent. I am sensible there are many Houses in this Town, that may be called Houses of Uncleanness, and Places of dreadful Temptations to this and all other Sins. O shun them, for they lead down to the Chambers of Death and Eternal Misery.
My mispence of precious Sabbaths lies as a heavy burden upon me; that when I might have gone to the House of GOD, I have been indifferent, and suffer’d a small matter to keep me from it. What would I now give, had I better improv’d the Lord’s Day! I tell you, verily, your Sabbath will sit heavy upon you, when you come into the near prospect of Death and Eternity.
The Sin of Lying I have to bewail, and wou’d earnestly caution against; not that I have took so great a pleasure in Lying; but I have often done so to conceal my Sin: Certainly you had better suffer Shame and Disgrace, yea the greatest Punishment, than to hide and conceal your Sin, by Lying. How much better had it been for me, to have confess’d my Sin, than by hiding of it to provoke a holy GOD, thus to suffer it to find me out. But I hope I heartily desire to bless GOD, that even in this way, He is thus entring into Judgment with me; for I have often thought, had I been let alone to go on undiscovered in my Sins, I might have provok’d in to leave me to a course of Rebellion, that would have ripened me for a more sudden, and everlasting Destruction; and am fully convinc’d of this, that I should have had no solid ease or quiet in my mind, but the Guilt of this undiscover’d Sin lying upon my Conscience, would have been a tormenting Rack unto me all my Days; whereas now I hope GOD has discover’d to me in some measure the evil of this, and all my other Sins enabled me to repent of them in Dust and Ashes and made me earnestly desire and plead with Him for pardon and cleansing in the pecious Blood of the REDEEMER of lost and perishing Sinners: And I think I can say, I have had more comfort and satisfaction within the Walls of this Prison, than ever I had in the ways of Sin among my vain Companions, and think I woud not for a World, nay for ten Thousand Worlds have my liberty in Sin again, and be in the same Condition I was in before I came into this Place.
I had the advantage of living in several religious Famlies; but alass, I disregarded the Instructions and Warnings I there had, which is now a bitterness to me; and so it will be to those of you who are thus favoured, but go on unmindful of GOD, and deaf to all the Reproofs and Admonitions that are given you for the good of your Souls. And I would advise those of my own Sex especially, to chuse to go into religious Families, where the Worship and Fear of GOD is maintained, and submit your selves to the Order and Government of them.
In my younger Years I maintain’d a constant course of Secret Pray for some time; but afterwards neglecting the same, I found by experience, that upon my thus leaving GOD, He was provoked to forsake me, and at length suffer’d me to fall into that great and complicated Sin that has brought me to this Death: Mind me, I first left GOD, and then He left me: I therefore solemnly call upon YOUNG PEOPLE to cherish the Convictions of GOD’s Holy SPIRIT, and be sure keep up a constant course of fervent Secret Prayer.
And now I am just entring nto the Eternal World, I do in the fear of GOD, and before Witnesses, call upon our YOUNG PEOPLE in particular, to secure an Interest in the Lord JESUS CHRIST, and in those precious Benefits He has purchased for His People; for surely the favour of GOD, thro’ CHRIST, is more worth than a whole World: And O what Comfort will this yield you when you come to that awful Day and Hour I am now arriving unto. I must tell you the World appears to me vain and empty, nothing like what it did in my past Life, my Days of Sin and Vanity, and as doubtless it appears now to you. Will you be perswaded by me to that which will yield you the best Satisfaction ad Pleasure here, and which will prepare you for the more abundant Pleasures of GOD’s Right Hand for evermore.
Sign’d and Acknowleg’d in the Presence of divers Witnesses, with a desire that it may be publish’d to the World, and read at the Place of Execution.
Through “the professional zeal and personal militancy of its director” (quoth historian David Ruiz) this paper emerged as an essential organ of the rising Asturian working class in the fraught years running up to the Spanish Civil War. Repeated bannings (of the newspaper) and imprisonments (of Bueno) only enhanced his stature; “you attract the pyrotechnic rays of our enemies,” Indalecio Prieto wrote him admiringly.
The revolutionaries freed him in 1936, two years deep in a life sentence, and Bueno went back to agitation in the pages of Avance before taking to the front lines himself. Franco’s victory in 1939 found him in Madrid, working at another radical paper, Claridad. Bueno faced a snap military tribunal with no more than a pro forma pretense of defense.
From a New York Times report of Nov. 13, 1852, corroborated by other press by foreign and domestic.
On September 25, 1852, in Athens, Greece, the unnamed assassin of Korfiotaki, one of King Otto of Greece‘s cabinet ministers, was executed under circumstances peculiarly horrible. Another murderer was guillotined under his eyes in order to lend and additional horror to his punishment. Nevertheless he managed, by some slight [sic] of hand, to throw off his chains, to draw a long knife, and to throw himself upon the executioner. The latter however dealt him a stunning blow just in time which knocked him backwards on the drawn knife of one of the executioners assistants. Between them both they speedily finished the condemned. The ceremony proper took place. His lifeless body suffered decapitation. The crowd had taken his side in his fight with the executioner and encouraged him by a volley of bravos, while the latter was saluted with a shower of hisses and execrations.
Robert Anthony Buell, a former Akron city planner, was executed by lethal injection on this date in 2002.
He’d been condemned for abducting 11-year-old Krista Lea Harrison from a park in July 1982, raping, and strangling her to death. It wasn’t until an adult woman escaped his captivity and went to police that he came into focus for the case, and the evidence against him in that pre-DNA moment was sufficiently circumstantial that Buell continued to insist his innocence all the way to the end. Even his final words were a plea of innocence addressed to Krista Lea’s parents: “Jerry and Shirley, I didn’t kill your daughter. The prosecutor knows that . . . and they left the real killer out there on the streets to kill again and again and again. So that some good may come of this, I ask that you continue to pursue this to the end. Don’t let the prosecutor continue to spin this out of focus and force them to find out who really killed your daughter. That’s all I have to say.”
He didn’t have many takers, particularly after a posthumous DNA test years after his execution also incriminated him in the abduction and murder of 12-year-old Tina Harmon — a crime for which he was long a suspect but never prosecuted.
His last meal was a single black olive. (Perhaps a tribute to hanged kidnapper Victor Feguer?)
In mid-July, both houses of the Iraqi parliament ratified a bill amending Law No. 51 of the 1938 Criminal Code. Under the 1938 law, communist or anarchist activity was defined as a criminal offence for which the punishment ranged from seven years’ imprisonment, to death. The new amendment included Zionist activity in the category of criminal activity. It stipulated that the sworn testimony of two Moslem witnesses would suffice to incriminate any Jew, whatever his standing. Under the amended law, numerous Jews, and particularly the prosperous, were arrested. The detention of rich Jews in particular and others as well, was now an everyday occurrence, initiated by government officials, judges and the police, with the aim of extorting money from them.
On 10 August 1948, the Iraqi government announced that all Jews who had left the country for Palestine since 1939 and had not returned, would henceforth be considered criminals who had defected to the enemy and would be tried in absentia by a military tribunal … the government issued a stringent edict dismissing all Jewish employees of government offices on the grounds that official secrecy must be protected … Young Jews who had completed their university studies encountered difficulties in finding employment. Jewish physicians were no longer accepted into government service nor were they granted licences for private practice. Various restrictions were imposed on entry of Jewish students into high schools and universities. (The Jewish Exodus from Iraq, 1948-1951, by Moshe Gat)
Driven by such incentives, no small portion of Iraq’s Jewry began to contemplate flight abroad — an inclination that an Israel hungry for settlers keenly supported. And the piece de resistance in those terrible months was the September 23 hanging of the businessman Shafiq Ades.
Wealthy and well-connected, Ades could have done for the poster child of Jewish assimilation in Iraq — a fact that made him exceptionally well-suited to become the unwilling star of a show trial. (Ades realized it too late, spurning advice to flee the country in the mistaken belief that he had too much pull for the fate that befell him.)
Ades had his fortune by virtue of an arrangement to act as the Ford Motor Company agent in Iraq, but his prosecution was based on a different business deal he’d done for remaindered British army equipment after World War II. Some of this stuff he had sold onward to Italy; he’d be charged with having used the pretense of export to clandestinely supply it to the Israeli Zionists who had in turn deployed it against Ades’s own countrymen in the late war.
Since it was a military court that delivered this verdict it would have been unthinkably dangerous for Iraq’s regent, ‘Abd al-Ilah, to exercise his theoretical prerogative of mercy.
And so Shafiq Ades hanged in front of his own Basra mansion on September 23, 1948, before a jubilant mob, the body gibbeted for hours thereafter.
Despite the atmosphere of genera persecution, Ades appears to be the only Iraq Jew actually executed during this dangerous moment; directly post-Ades, the official heat on this community was dialed back noticeably, albeit not entirely. The on-brand site IraqJews.org provides us a comment of the judge asserting a perspective of what one might call utilitarian philanthropy in his unjust sentence upon Ades: “I have ruled for the death sentence, since I was aware that the Iraqi people were seeking a sacrifice. If Ades were not hanged, pogroms would have taken place against the Jews, and who knows how many people would have been killed. By hanging Ades, I have saved the Jews from a massacre”
September 22 is the feast date of early Christian martyr Saint Maurice, and of the legendary all-Christian Theban Legion which he commanded.
This legion raised from Egypt is supposed to have converted en masse to Christianity, and suffered the persecution of Diocletian when it was deployed to Gaul and there refused to sacrifice to pagan gods or harass local Christians. The hagiography — and the earliest source is Eucherius of Lyon, a century and a half after the supposed events — holds that the legion stood a decimation to punish its fidelity, and then another, and then another … and then finally they dispensed with the fractional increments and killed the entire remaining 72.9% of them.
Ancient Christian martyrologies of course boast quite a few soldiers but in their day, from late antiquity all the way to Early Modern Europe, Maurice and the Theban Legion had star treatment on the relic-and-pilgrimage circuit. Many bygone political concerns adopted Maurice as a patron: Burgundy, the French Merovingian and Carolingian dynasties, and their successors the Holy Roman Emperors; the House of Savoy; the Lombard kingdom; and of course such cities as Saint-Maurice, Switzerland, St. Moritz, Switzerland.
Whatever the reason, the black Maurice quickly became the dominant image in Germanic central Europe, which in turn redounded to a reputation as “the first black saint”. For that reason, Maurice is a seminal figure in European artistic representation of black Africans.
Italian artillerist Amos Pampaloni, the real-life model for the title character of the novel and film Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, miraculously survived execution on this date in 1943.
It occurred at the outset of the Cephalonia Massacre on September 21, 1943, which began a dayslong slaughter on that Greek island by German soldiers of their former Italian comrades. With some 5,000 victims, it’s one of the largest POW massacres of the Second World War.
Captain Pampaloni was among 500-odd officers deployed with the 12,000-strong Acqui Infantry Division. This formation had been part of fascist Italy’s invasion of Greece in 1940-41; after victory in that campaign, the Acqui Division occupied several Greek islands over the succeeding years, where German troops were also stationed.
The Pact of Steel uniting these powers melted abruptly in early September of 1943, when the Allies forced Italy into an armistice. For Italian forces standing in the field cheek-by-fascist epaulette, this forced a sudden and dangerous reckoning. Some units had barely even heard of the new situation before they were under German guns; in a best-case scenario, they had to decide within a few hours or days between radically different attitudes towards their up-to-now comrades-in-arms.
The Acqui on the Ionian island of Cephalonia (Kefalonia) was a case in point. In the days following the Italian armistice, the much larger German force presented its commanders an ultimatum to decide among three alternatives:
Continue fighting alongside the Germans
Fight against the Germans
Surrender, disarm, and repatriate
While the last of these might seem the obvious course, disarming was contrary to the Italian high command’s ambiguous order neither to initiate hostilities with Germans, nor to cooperate with them. Moreover, the Cephalonia division got some reports in those confused days that the Germans weren’t always repatriating units that surrendered. The soldiery was polled on the options, and went for resistance.
Unfortunately the Italians were thoroughly outgunned in this fight, and the Allies refused to permit dispatching reinforcements from Italy that might easily be captured by the Germans. Within days the Acqui had been roughly brought to heel.
Outnumbered and suffering under accurate mortar fire, Pampaloni decided to surrender. The captain protested that it was against the rules of war when his men were systematically robbed of their wallets and watches, only to be told by the German commanding officer that those rules applied to prisoners, not to traitors.
The officer then shot the captain through the back of the neck, and the rest of his men, including the wounded, were mown down with machine gun fire. Miraculously still alive, Pampaloni remained conscious as a German soldier removed his own watch from his apparently lifeless body.
Captain Pampaloni was not, in fact, the only soldier from his company to survive. “The mule handlers were spared, because every mule responds best to his own master,” he said. “Ten minutes after the massacre the German soldiers left, singing.”
Captain Pampaloni went on to fight for a year with the Greek resistance on the mainland. Having witnessed the brutality of the conflict on Cephalonia, he was still shocked by the sight of partisans slitting the throats of German prisoners with their daggers — ammunition was too precious to be wasted on executions.
Numerous summary executions disgraced the German victory. (There’s a monument to the victims in Verona.) Our man Amos Pampaloni faced his on the first day of the general massacre; according to a 2001 profile in the Guardian,
Outnumbered and suffering under accurate mortar fire, Pampaloni decided to surrender. The captain protested that it was against the rules of war when his men were systematically robbed of their wallets and watches, only to be told by the German commanding officer that those rules applied to prisoners, not to traitors.*
The officer then shot the captain through the back of the neck, and the rest of his men, including the wounded, were mown down with machine gun fire. Miraculously still alive, Pampaloni remained conscious as a German soldier removed his own watch from his apparently lifeless body.
Captain Pampaloni was not, in fact, the only soldier from his company to survive. “The mule handlers were spared, because every mule responds best to his own master,” he said. “Ten minutes after the massacre the German soldiers left, singing.”
Captain Pampaloni went on to fight for a year with the Greek resistance on the mainland. Having witnessed the brutality of the conflict on Cephalonia, he was still shocked by the sight of partisans slitting the throats of German prisoners with their daggers — ammunition was too precious to be wasted on executions.
In the novel Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, Pampaloni’s fictional imitator survives thanks to a noble comrade who hurls his body in front of the fusillade.
Pampaloni didn’t appreciate Mandolin all that much, owing to its hostile depiction of the Communist partisan movement that he joined after surviving his execution. For those seeking alternative literatures, there’s also a 1960s novelization of the Greek resistance on Cephalonia by Marcello Venturi; written in Italian (as Bandiera bianca a Cefalonia), it’s long out of print in English as The White Flag.
* Prior to the Italian armistice, the Italian forces on the island were working on an arrangement to obey German command structures; hence, the brutal treatment of Italian prisoners who could be conceived as not merely prisoners of war, but traitors or rebels unprotected by any law of war. A German directive had explicitly demanded as much: “because of the perfidious and treacherous behaviour on Kefalonia, no prisoners are to be taken.”
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