Krikor Zohrab §

Krikor Zohrab was an Ottoman Armenian lawyer, writer and parliamentary deputy, one of the most prominent Armenian public figures in late Ottoman Constantinople. As a constitutionalist he believed, like many reformist Armenians after 1908, that Ottoman legality could protect equal citizenship. That belief was destroyed in 1915. Zohrab was arrested after the April round-up, deported eastward and murdered en route in June 1915. His fate is analytically sharp because he was not an armed revolutionary or provincial insurgent, but a parliamentarian and jurist whose life embodied the possibility of Ottoman Armenian participation in shared public law. His murder signalled that legal status, education and loyalty to constitutional politics offered no protection once the CUP state converted Armenians into an internal enemy category.