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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.