Operation Nemesis  Operation Nemesis ( "Nemesis gortsoghut'iun") was a covert operation and an assassination campaign by the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (Dashnaktsutyun) carried out between 1920 and 1922, during which a number of former Ottoman political and military figures were assassinated for their role in the Armenian Genocide, as well as Azerbaijani figures for the 1918 massacre of Armenians in Baku. Shahan Natalie and Armen Garo are considered its masterminds. It was named after the Greek goddess of divine retribution, Nemesis. The Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF) was active within the Ottoman Empire in the early 1890s with the aim of unifying the various small groups in the empire who advocated for reform and a certain degree of autonomy within the empire. ARF members formed "fedayi" guerrilla groups that helped organize self-defense of Armenian civilians. In July–August 1914, the 8th congress of the ARF was a watershed event. Members of the Committee of Union and Progress requested from the party assistance in the conquest of Transcaucasia by inciting a rebellion of Russian Armenians against the Russian army in the event of a Caucasus Campaign opening up. The Armenians agreed to remain loyal to their government, but declared their inability to agree to the other proposal. Prominent ARF members were among the Armenian intellectuals targeted on April 24, 1915 in Constantinople. The arrested people were moved to two holding centers near Ankara under Interior Minister Mehmed Talat's , and mostly deported and killed. In 1919, after the Armistice of Mudros, Turkish Courts-Martials were convened in Constantinople, during which some of the principal perpetrators of the Armenian Genocide were convicted and sentenced to death. The UK seized some of the perpetrators from the Ottoman authorities in several of Istanbul's prisons, after their incompetency failed to hold fair trials, and transported them to the British colony of Malta. There, the Malta exiles (called so by Turkish sources) were, after Mustafa Kemal Atatürk's incarceration of Lord Curzon's relative, exchanged for British subjects detained by the Turkish government of Atatürk. Since there were no international laws in place under which they could be tried, the men who orchestrated the genocide traveled relatively freely throughout Germany, Italy, and Central Asia. On May 28, 1918, the Armenian National Council, a group of professionals based in Tiflis declared the independence of the First Republic of Armenia. Hovhannes Kachaznuni and Alexander Khatisyan, both members of the ARF, moved to Yerevan, Armenia to seize power and issued the official announcement of Armenian independence on May 30, 1918.