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the time, Lansing said that sovereign leaders should be immune from prosecution. "The essence of sovereignty," lie said, was "the absence of responsibility."" The United States could judge only those violations that were committed upon American persons or American property."
    If such a tribunal were set tip, then, the United States would not participate. In American thinking at that time, there was little question that the state's right to be left alone automatically trumped any individual right to justice.A growing postwar isolationism made the United States reluctant to entangle itself in affairs so clearly removed from America's narrow national interests.
    Even without official U.S. support, it initially seemed that Britain's wartime pledge to try the Turkish leaders would be realized. In early 1919 the British, who still occupied Turkey with some 320,000 soldiers, pressured the cooperative sultan to arrest a number of Turkish executioners. Of the eight Ottoman leaders who led Turkey to war against the Allies, five were apprehended. In April 1919 the Turks set up a tribunal in Constantinople that convicted two senior district officials for deporting Armenians and acting "against humanity and civilization." The Turkish court found that women and children had been brutally forced into deportation caravans and the men murdered: "They were premeditatedly, with intent, murdered, after the men had had their hands tied behind their backs."The police conmianderTevfik Bey was sentenced to fifteen years of hard labor, and Lieutenant Governor Kemal Bey was hanged. The court also convicted Talaat and his partners in crime in absentia for their command responsibility in the slaughter, finding a top-down, carefully executed plan: "The disaster visiting the Armenians was not a local or isolated event. It was the result of a premeditated decision taken by a central body;... and the immolations and excesses which took place were based on oral and written orders issued by that central body.""'
    Talaat, who was sentenced to death, was living peacefully as a private citizen in Germany, which rejected Allied demands for extradition. Conscious of his place in history,Talaat had begun writing his memoirs. In them he downplayed the scale of the violence and argued that any abuses (referred to mainly in the passive voice) were fairly typical if "regrettable" features of war, carried out by "uncontrolled elements." "I confess," he wrote, "that the deportation was not carried out lawfully everywhere.... Some of the officials abused their authority, and in many places people took the preventive measures into their own hands and innocent people were molested" Acknowledging it was the government's duty to prevent and punish "these abuses and atrocities," he explained that doing so would have aroused great popular "discontent," and Turkey could not afford to be divided during war. "We did all we could," he claimed, "but we preferred to postpone the solution of our internal difficulties until after the defeat of our external enemies" Although other countries at war also enacted harsh "preventive measures," he wrote,"the regrettable results were passed over in silence," whereas "the echo of our acts was heard the world over, because everybody's eyes were upon us" Even as Talaat attempted to burnish his image, he could not help but blame the Armenians for their own fate. "I admit that we deported many Armenians from our eastern provinces," he wrote, but "the responsibility for these acts falls first of all upon the deported people themselves""
    After a promising start, enthusiasm for trying Talaat and his henchmen faded and politics quickly intervened. With the Turkish nationalist leader Mustafa Kemal (later Atatiirk) rapidly gaining popularity at home, the Ottoman regime began to fear a backlash if it was seen to be succumbing to British designs. In addition, the execution of Kemal Bey had made him a martyr to nationalists around the empire. To avoid