INTRODUCTION
The growth of the incidence and importance of terrorism in the contemporary international system has been mirrored by a prodigious outpouring of literature on the subject. Precious little, however, has appeared about the Armenian terrorist attacks against Turkish diplomats and property, a campaign recently termed by United States Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Fred Ikle as "one of the most dangerous and most neglected of all terrorist movements…" and by a journalist who interviewed one of the terrorist leaders as "the most mysterious and best-organized armed formation operating in the Middle East and Europe."

Outraged over the alleged genocide of some 1 1/2 million Armenians by the Turks during World War I and the resulting loss of their ancestral homeland, Armenian terrorists in the past decade have murdered 30 Turkish diplomats or members of their immediate families, including 4 in the United States. In addition, some 34 non-Turks have been murdered and over 300 wounded because they happened to be in the terrorists' line of fire.

 

The Turkish Airlines (THY) offices in Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Frankfurt, Geneva, London, Milan, Paris, and Rome have been bombed too, making good a terrorist threat against "any Turkish institution that lies within its striking limits." Foreign governments have been cautioned to "lift the protection thus far accorded" to Turks and Turkish property or else be "held responsible for the innocent victims within their own personnel [sic]," while travelers have been advised against using any form of Turkish transportation "because they might become the innocent victims of our rage."

Furthermore, non-Turkish air-lines or their offices, such as Air France, Alitalia, British Airways, El Al, KLM, Lufthansa, Pan Am, Sabena, Swissair, and TWA, have been hit because of their commercial relations with Turkey.

Indeed, even foreign governments such as Canada, France, Italy, Portugal, Sweden, and Switzerland have been threatened because they tried to apprehend Armenian terrorists within their jurisdictions. After seriously wounding Kani Gungor, the Turkish commercial attache in Ottawa, Canada, for example, a message from ASALA menacingly declared: "We warn the Canadian authorities against all initiatives against our compatriots as well as the utilization of any kind of force or violence against them." In another overt threat, this time to French authorities, ASALA warned that unless political asylum was granted to four terrorists who seized and occupied the Turkish Consulate in Paris, "there is no doubt there will be a confrontation between them and us."' ASALA also threatened to attack "all Swiss diplomats throughout the world" unless that government released two Armenians held after a bomb they were preparing exploded prematurely in their hotel room in Geneva. Lufthansa offices in Rome were bombed "as a punishment for the German government which helps Turkish fascism." Even the Vatican and the Pope specifically have been threatened with a "hit" because of their support of Ansha, an affiliate of the World Council of Churches that helps Armenians emigrate from Soviet Armenia and thus, in the words of ASALA, aids in "the traffic of Armenian emigrants."

In the United States the Turkish State Folk Dance Ensemble performances in California were canceled because of threats and a bombing, the Ataturk Centennial night organized by the American-Turkish Association of Houston was disrupted, and in January 1982 Armenian extremists broke up a Turkish history class at the University of California - Los Angeles being conducted by Stanford J. Shaw, a prominent professor of Ottoman studies. In addition, Professor Shaw's home was bombed, his office at the university broken into and ransacked, and frequent verbal and written threats of violence hurled at him. Finally, he was forced to cancel his regularly scheduled classes and go into hiding. The apparent reason for this harassment was the pro-Turkish views he expressed in his History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey, 1977. Replying to an inquiry concerning this matter, William D. Schaefer, the executive vice chancellor at UCLA, wrote: "Because an international terrorist organization is involved, the University's power to remedy the situation is limited."

On August 7, 1982, striking for maybe the first time on Turkish soil itself, Armenian terrorists indiscriminately slew ten passengers at the Ankara (Esenboga) International Airport, while wounding seventy-one others. Illustrative of the hatred motivating them, Levon Ekmekjian, one of the terrorists captured during the Ankara raid, declared, "It wasn't enough," when police told him how many had been killed and wounded. In reference to the massacres of Armenians by the Turks in 1915, one of the gunmen yelled, as he fired at his victims: "More than a million of us died! What's the difference if 25 of you die?"" As Michael J. Arlen, Jr., a measured Armenian critic of the present terrorist campaign has explained elsewhere: "It was as if a particular poison had entered the Armenian system several generations back, and had remained within it: a poison that one might up to a point live with but that caused the limbs suddenly to twitch, or the mouth-perhaps in mid-sentence to grimace grotesquely."

Although their present terrorist activities began only in the 1970s, Armenian terrorism itself is nothing new. Neither is the strategy behind it or even the international support it has elicited. To decipher the roots of the current Armenian terrorist movement, it is necessary to analyze briefly its historical origins in the nineteenth century as the "Armenian Question" and the deportations and massacres that the Armenians suffered during World War 1.

Then, with this necessary background understanding, the main analysis can commence. Specific attention will be given to the beginnings, in the 1970s, of the current terrorism, the terrorist ogranizations involved, their modus operandi, transnational connections, the question of Turkish harassment and counterterror, and finally the conclusions that can be drawn and the recommendations that can be made for terminating the terrorism. It is hoped that what follows will help everyone to better understand objectively an issue which has for too long been wrapped in subjective polemics.

 First of all, there is no doubt the Armenians suffered a great wrong. No matter what the Turkish apologists argue, the fact remains that the Turkish Armenians virtually ceased to exist in their ancient homeland after World War I. Although the numbers of Armenians who died at this time are greatly exaggerated by the Armenians - and, in addition, many of the Armenians who were killed during this era died because the Armenians waged war against practically every nation they were physically able to come in contact with, including not only the Turks but also, after 1918, the Russians, Georgians, and Azerbaijanis - there is still no doubt that several hundred thousand Armenians perished during 1915. That even more Turks also died during World War I is both true, but largely irrelevant to the argument here because most of the many Turkish deaths resulted from hostilities against the Allies, not the Armenians. Gallipoli, the Russian invasion in the East, the English drive from the South, and the starvation and disease resulting from wartime conditions in general were the main factors contributing to the Turkish deaths. 

Professor Michael Gunter

The Armenian claim that they were victims of a premeditated genocide does not ring true, however. Rather, what appears more likely is that there was an honest, though inaccurate belief among the Turkish leaders that they were faced with a widespread and coordinated Armenian uprising from within at the very time their state was in mortal danger from without. Decades of what the Turks saw as Armenian provocations and even treason during previous wars, armed revolutionary activity between the wars, the creation of Russian-Armenian guerrilla groups in the invading Russian army during the present war, the defection of certain Ottoman Armenians to the enemy, the armed resistance to conscription on the part of Armenians in Zeytun, incidents of revolutionary acts and sabotage in the countryside, and the Armenian uprising in Van in reaction to the unjustified but probably unofficial policies of the local governor-all led the Turks to conclude they were in real danger from a fifth column. (Similarly, a much better organized U.S. government unjustly interned its citizens of Japanese descent at the start of World War II.)

Indicative of the Turkish confusion here is a report at the start of the war in 1914 that "the Russians have provoked Armenians living in our country, by promises that they will be granted independence in territories to be annexed from Ottoman land…that they have stored arms and ammunition in many places to be distributed to Armenians and moreover, the…Russian General Loris-Melikov went to the Van region for the same purpose." Turkish fear of the famous Russian-Armenian commander in the War of 1877-78 is understandable but misplaced, since he had been dead since 1888.