A Cry for Bloody Vengeance

Armenian terrorists conduct a fearsome campaign of violence

The hatred is venomous, relentless and overwhelming. When Armenian Terrorist Levon Ekmekjian was told by Turkish police that his two-man murder squad had succeeded in killing nine people and wounding 72 others, he cried out furiously, "It wasn't enough!"

The terrorists had exploded a bomb in the middle of the crowded check-in area at Ankara's Esenboga Airport on Aug. 7, then opened fire with submachine guns on passport-control officers and passengers, mostly Turkish workers returning to jobs in West Germany and The Netherlands after a holiday. One of the gunmen was reported to have yelled at his victims as he fired, "More than a million of us died! What's the difference if 25 of you die?"

The airport killers were members of the Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia (ASALA), one of several underground groups that are eager for vengeance against Turks for the murder of more than 1 million Armenians in 1915. Though Armenians had borne their grievance peaceably for decades, terrorists began in 1973 to carry out systematic assassinations of Turkish envoys. Their goal: forcing the Turks to acknowledge committing the act of genocide, to pay reparations to the descendants of the victims, and to grant autonomy to the former Armenian-dominated provinces in northeastern Turkey or give them up altogether so they might become a separate nation. The Marxist, Beirut-based ASALA and another group called the Justice Commandos of the Armenian Genocide have killed 22 Turkish diplomats or members of their families and staffs, and have wounded 15 other envoys or their dependents. In addition, there have been 70 casualties, including four deaths, among people who, though not Turkish, were in the terrorists' line of fire. Four of the killings have taken place in the U.S. The most recent: the murder in Somerville, Mass., last May of Orhan Gunduz, a Turkish gift-shop owner, who was also honorary Turkish consul general for New England.

France, which is home for 300,000 Armenians, has been the major battlefield for the extremists' war against the Turks. Terrorists have launched over 40 attacks on Turks or Turkish facilities and killed four diplomats. Last September, Armenian terrorists killed a security guard, wounded the vice consul and held 51 people hostage while they occupied the Turkish consulate for 15 hours.

France's inability to protect the Turkish diplomatic community from terrorist attack has outraged the Ankara government. Turkish-French relations were further strained last April by a speech that French Interior Minister Gaston Defferre gave at a ceremony in Marseilles honoring the Armenians who died in 1915. Said Defferre: "The French government recognizes the genocide of which the Armenian people have been victim." The Turkish Foreign Minister protested that Defferre was "contributing to an atmosphere that encourages Armenian violence."

The majority of the world's 6.5 million Armenians* deplore the terror tactics of the extremist groups, who experts believe have less than 1,000 members. Last week the Armenian Patriarch in Istanbul, Shnork Kaloustian, issued a plea to Armenians everywhere to "disown these misguided and fanatical elements." Still, hatred for the Turks has festered over the years in the face of indifference in most parts of the world to the Armenian national tragedy.

During World War I, the Turks exterminated or deported virtually their entire Armenian population because they held the unfounded suspicion that members of the ethnic group were disloyal. The decision to undertake the genocide was communicated to the local leaders by the Interior Minister, Talaat Pasha, in 1915. One of his edicts stated that the government had decided to "destroy completely all Armenians living in Turkey. An end must be put to their existence, however criminal the measures taken may be, and no regard must be paid to age, or sex, or to scruples of conscience."

The Turkish authorities rounded up all able-bodied men in the Turkish army and bludgeoned them to death. Intellectuals and community leaders in Istanbul were herded aboard ships, then drowned at sea. Armenian babies were thrown live into pits and covered with stones. Women, children and old people were forced to march hundreds of miles, over mountains, presumably to a place of deportation in Syria, but actually to their deaths. Forbidden supplies of food and water, they were waylaid by brigands. Turkish gendarmes raped and sometimes disemboweled or cut the breasts off women before finally killing them. While the horrified U.S. Ambassador to Turkey, Henry Morgenthau Sr., appealed in vain to the Turks to stop the slaughter, hundreds of thousands of Armenians could be seen, as Morgenthau put it, "winding in and out of every valley and climbing up the sides of every mountain."

Survivors of the holocaust fled throughout the world, mostly to parts of the Middle East, Western Europe and the U.S. Still others joined Armenians in Russia, where they founded an independent Armenian republic in 1918.

But by 1920, the leaders of the new republic were ousted and replaced by a Soviet regime. Badly battered and widely dispersed, Armenians in the West have usually led quiet, industrious lives, little noticed in their host countries. In recent times, there has been a renaissance of Armenian history and culture, which has helped spawn a small band of extreme nationalists, inflamed by old passions and grievances.

The extremists' attack in the Ankara airport, their first assault on Turkish soil since beginning their crusade, deeply shook the government. Four members of Turkey's five-man junta attended the solemn state funeral for three policemen and the airport manager who had been slaughtered in the action.

After the bloody Ankara airport assault, ASALA threatened to carry out terrorist attacks in the U.S., France, Britain, Canada, Switzerland and Sweden if Armenian prisoners were not released within seven days. Other extremists would like to see Turkish lands formerly inhabited by Armenians joined to the Soviet Armenian Republic. Such unrealistic demands, made in the name of a lost cause, seem likely to lead to nothing but more violence and vengeance in the future.

* Of these, 3.5 million live in the Soviet Union, 400,000 in Western Europe, 675,000 in the U.S., 500,000 in the Middle East and 150,000 in Turkey.

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