Armenian Secret Army For The Liberation of Armenia - Origins

Origins

Over 60 years had passed since the Ottoman Empire had embarked on the campaign to exterminate its Armenian population, which was largely concentrated in its eastern provinces and referred to at the time as Western Armenia. The survivors of the massacres and deprivations commonly seen in the death marches found refuge in countries in the Middle East and in Western Europe and the USA. While the key ringleaders of the genocide were executed in the 1920s by Armenians (see Operation Nemesis), the Ottoman Empire's successor, the Republic of Turkey, effectively took a hold of all the possessions Armenians left behind and for decades vociferously insisted that a genocide had not taken place. It actively campaigned against any and all attempts to publicise the events and bring forward recognition in the West. It, in fact, blamed Armenians for instigating the violence and alleged that Armenians had massacred thousands of Turks, prompting the commencement of their deportations. In 1965, Armenians around the world publicly marked the 50th anniversary and began to campaign for world recognition. As peaceful marches and demonstrations failed to move an intransigent Turkey, the younger generation of Armenians, resentful at the denial by Turkey and the failure by their parents' generation to effect change, sought new approaches to bringing about recognition and reparations.

In 1973 two Turkish diplomats were assassinated in Los Angeles by Gourgen Yanikian, an elderly man who survived the Armenian Genocide. Behind this act of retribution lay a national reawakening among the scattered Armenians in the world, which had begun in the end of the 1960s and early 1970s. This event might have been progressively forgotten, had it not initiated a chain of events which turned it, and its perpetrator, into a symbol representing the end of the conspiracy of silence which since 1915 had surrounded the Armenian Genocide. ASALA was founded in 1975 in Beirut, Lebanon during the Lebanese Civil War by Hagop Hagopian (Harutiun Tagushian), pastor Rev. James Karnusian and Kevork Ajemian, a prominent contemporary writer, with the help of sympathetic Palestinians. At the beginning, ASALA bore the name of "The Prisoner Kurken Yanikian Group". Consisting primarily of Lebanese-born Armenians of the Diaspora (whose parents and/or grandparents were survivors of the Armenian Genocide), the organization followed a theoretical model based on leftist ideology. The apex of group's structure was the General Command of the People of Armenia (VAN). The group's activities were primarily assassinations of Turkish diplomats and politicians in Western Europe, in the United States and the Middle East. Their first acknowledged killing was the assassination of the Turkish diplomat, Daniş Tunalıgil, in Vienna on October 22, 1975. A failed attack in Geneva on October 3, 1980, in which two Armenian militants were injured resulted in a new nickname for the group, the 3 October Organization. The ASALA's eight point manifesto was published in 1981.

ASALA, trained in the Beirut camps of Palestine Liberation Organization, is the best known of the guerrilla groups responsible for assassinations of at least 36 Turkish diplomats. Since 1975, a couple of dozen Turkish diplomats or members of their families had been targeted in a couple of dozens of attacks, with the outcome that the Armenian revenge, as well as the background to the Armenian struggle, have made it through the world press. These notable acts, while practically carried out by a small group, were successful in conveying the Armenian Genocide and its silence to the forefront of international awareness.