Operation Nemesis: The Assassination Plot that Avenged the Armenian Genocide - Bogosian Eric - Страница 70

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In the late 1980s, a series of major events ushered in a new era for Armenia. A massive earthquake hit the country, leaving at least thirty thousand people dead; war broke out with Azerbaijan over the disputed territories; and Gorbachev’s policies of glasnost and perestroika stimulated the birth of freedom movements all over the Soviet sphere, especially in Armenia. Seemingly overnight, the Soviet Union came to an end in 1991, as it broke up into its constituent pieces. The Republic of Armenia was reborn.

As the Nemesis killings receded deeper into the past, the conspirators began to publicly discuss those events more brazenly. Aram Yerganian’s memoir, We Killed This Way, had been posthumously published in Armenian by Shahan Natali in 1949. Tehlirian’s memoir was published in 1953. Misak Torlakian’s The Course of My Life was published in Beirut in 1963. In 1964 Natali published an extended article explaining in impossibly lyrical language how Operation Nemesis assassinated Talat. In 1965 Arshavir Shiragian, by this time a successful American businessman (reputed to have made millions selling parachute silk to the U.S. government during World War II), appeared on American Armenian television and, speaking in Armenian, described his involvement. Also around this time, Lindy V. Avakian, the son of a close friend of Tehlirian’s, published The Cross and the Crescent, a loose account of the conspiracy, much of it written in the first person, in Tehlirian’s voice. This was followed by the publication of The First Genocide of the 20th Century by James Nazer in 1968, a disturbing collection of photographs and articles exposing the crimes against the Armenians. The book concludes with portraits of Shiragian, Misak Torlakian, Yerganian, and Tehlirian, labeling each an “Armenian National Hero.” In 1976, a few years after his death, Arshavir Shiragian’s The Legacy was published in Armenian, French, and English by the Tashnag organization. It describes in detail how Shiragian’s assassinations were committed. Other memoirs would follow, mostly published in Armenian, some translated. In 1986 the eminent French journalist Jacques Derogy researched Nemesis thoroughly, augmenting Tehlirian’s account in his Armenian autobiography with details gleaned from the secret ARF archives in Watertown, Massachusetts, to which he had gained access through the archivist Gerard Libaridian. In 1991 Edward Alexander, a former U.S. diplomat, would publish A Crime of Vengeance, making Tehlirian’s story accessible to the English-speaking American public. Not all the details in these memoirs jibed, but the cat was out of the bag. Armenians had confessed to a campaign of assassination against Turkish leaders in the 1920s.

Although Tehlirian had kept a relatively low profile in the years after he moved to the United States, he continued to consort with fellow Nemesis commandos. According to Vartkes Yeghiayan, who has published a translation of the Tehlirian trial transcript, The Case of Soghomon Tehlirian, “the three of them [Tehlirian, Torlakian, and Shiragian] always sat together at the functions [at the Armenian Center in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district], and without exception always occupied the last row of seats at the very back of the hall.… [T]hey were very unassuming, inconspicuous and modest to the point of timidity, and acted as if they were unaccustomed to socializing.”¹³

Nemesis had been disbanded and its agents were either aged or dead, but its spirit continued to inspire new avengers. The persistent Turkish denial of the genocide became intolerable for certain survivors and their descendants. Some Armenians decided to go beyond the annual protests held around the world each year on April 24 and organized new violence. Young men in southern California and Lebanon, furious that the tragedy of their murdered grandparents had been forgotten, found one another as their collective anger compressed into a powder keg of pent-up fury. All that was missing was the spark.

That spark was provided in 1973 by a seventy-seven-year-old Californian, a survivor of the genocide named Gourgen Yanikian. In many ways, Yanikian’s story was similar to Tehlirian’s. He was from the same region of Asia Minor and, like Tehlirian, was born during the waning decades of the Ottoman Empire. He had lost many members of his family during the genocide. After the war, he settled in Iran. On moving to the United States, Yanikian found that life did not get any easier. In January 1973, sickly and out of funds, Yanikian made the decision to avenge the Armenian Genocide on his own.

On January 27, 1973, Gourgen Yanikian contacted the Turkish consulate in Los Angeles and, impersonating an Iranian expat, claimed to have in his possession a painting that had been stolen from the sultan’s palace more than a century earlier. Yanikian offered to make a gift of the painting (and other items) to the Republic of Turkey, but insisted that the consul general, forty-seven-year-old Mehmet Baydar, meet him in person to accept the items. Baydar and his thirty-year-old vice consul, Bahadir Demir, agreed to the rendezvous with Yanikian.

Once Yanikian was alone with the two diplomats in his room at the Santa Barbara Biltmore Hotel, he confessed that he was originally from Turkey and that he was an Armenian. He argued with the men, produced a Luger pistol, and shot them both several times. As the two diplomats lay wounded on the floor of his hotel room, Yanikian calmly opened a dresser drawer, removed a Browning pistol, and fired two more shots into each man’s head.

As reprehensible as his actions were, Yanikian’s arrest and trial became a cause celebre for many Armenians, serving as a focus for the frustration that had built up over decades of nonrecognition of a major crime against humanity. (This bitterness had only been compounded by the sorrowful recognition accorded to the Jewish Holocaust after World War II.) Many Armenians found a certain satisfaction in the fact that because of Yanikian, people were finally talking about the genocide. The killings were appalling, but to many Armenians they seemed not that different from the endless horror stories all had heard from their grandparents. Few could condone Yanikian’s actions, but weren’t these violent deaths just one more consequence of the genocide?

During his trial, echoing the attitude of his hero Soghomon Tehlirian,¹⁴ Yanikian admitted to killing the men but said he did not feel that he was guilty of any crime. Claiming that his actions were designed to bring attention to the genocide, he noted that other victimized peoples had had “their Nuremberg” but the Armenians had not. He was indifferent to the fact that his victims were too young to have had anything to do with the deportations. Yanikian had come “to view the men not as human beings, but as symbols of decades of injustice.”¹⁵ Before killing the diplomats, he posted a letter to an Armenian-language paper urging Armenians to wage war on Turkish diplomats.¹⁶

Yanikian was found guilty on two counts of first-degree murder and received a life sentence. While he was incarcerated, his cause was adopted by a new wave of terrorists. Originally calling themselves the Prisoner Gourgen Yanikian Group, ASALA (the Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia) consisted primarily of Lebanese-born Armenians dedicated to terror bombings and the assassination of Turkish diplomats and politicians. Their first victim was Danis Tunaligil in Vienna on October 22, 1975. By the mid-1970s, ASALA had launched a worldwide wave of terror bombings and shootings. Before long it was competing with other Armenian terrorist groups, particularly the Armenian Revolutionary Army, or Justice Commandos, a group believed to have been created by the ARF in response to ASALA.

By the time the killing ended in the 1990s, thirty-six Turkish diplomats and those close to them (including wives, children, bodyguards, and drivers) had been murdered. Dozens of others were injured. Four killings took place in the United States, while other attacks occurred in Paris, Belgrade, Ottawa, Tehran, and Sydney. One of the best-known incidents took place at the Turkish Airlines check-in desk at Orly Airport in 1983, where a half kilo of Semtex plastic explosive attached to bottles of gas packed into a suitcase exploded prematurely, killing eight and injuring fifty-five others. Most of the victims had no relationship to Turkey or Armenia. The Orly bombing created a schism within the ASALA organization as disagreements broke out over objectives and the underlying rationale for extremely violent acts.

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