Beirut to L.A. — the Armenian death axis

Press, 27 September 1982, Page 20

Beirut to L.A. — the Armenian death axis

From ANDREW WILSON, in London

In Ankara's Military Court No. 3 a sallow, unshaven Armenian, Leon Ekmekjian, stands charged with murdering nine people, including an American woman and a German engineer, at Ankara international airport last month. According to the Turkish press, he has already confessed and “voiced his repentance" for the killing. An accomplice was shot dead by security guards after holding 23 other people hostage for an hour in the airport restaurant. Ekmekjian’s evidence, given in halting Turkish, has thrown little light on the organisation for which he operated, the Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia (A.S.A.L.A.).

Finally, on August 7, they entered the terminal building and opened fire on security guards and a group of waiting passengers. It was the first time that A.S.A.L.A. had taken its campaign of violence into Turkey itself.

A.S.A.L.A. appears to have features in common with the Irish Republican Army. Intelligence sources suggest that it has a relatively small membership — perhaps 300 young men' (but not, apparently, women). It is under the direction and inspiration of a handful of sexagenarian veterans whose memory of the "massacre” of 1915 can at best be inherited from an even older generation.

Described as “of Lebanese nationality” the 24-year-old Armenian has told the court he joined A.S.A.L.A. only in May this year. He then received paramilitary training at a camp near Beirut.

The movement is organised in a system of cells, in which few members know the identity of their immediate superiors. It has no fixed headquarters but "swims" in a sea of Armenian exiles most militantly active in Los Angeles and Beirut.

Ten days after the Israeli attack on Lebanon he was asked if he was ready to go to Turkey, and agreed. He was given an Egyptian passport in the name of Samir Suleyman Yusuf and sent to Damascus, where he obtained a Turkish visa from the Turkish consulate.

Most of its attacks have been on Turkish diplomats overseas, of which the latest was. the murder earlier this year of the military attache in Ottawa. The series began in January, 1973, with the murder of the Turkish Consul-General and his deputy in Los Angeles. In October, 1975, the Ambassador in Paris was murdered, together with his driver; in June 1977, the Ambassador to the Vatican; in June. 1978, the wife and brother-in-law of the Ambassador in Madrid were killed. 1979 saw two more murders: the son of the Ambassador at the Hague and an adviser to the Embassy in Paris. In 1980 an attache in Athens was murdered, together with his 14-year-old daughter. Later the same year the terrorists killed the Consul-General in Sydney and his bodyguard, and

After being introduced to his accomplice, whom he knew only under a pseudonym, he returned to Beirut and flew to Ankara on July 27. Next day the two men had a rendezvous.

For three days they waited, spending evenings in a night club. On August 2 the accomplice left the hotel where they were staying and returned with weapons. Ekmekjian did not know from where.

Twice in the next five days they went to the airport but for various reasons aborted their mission. Once they were stopped by police, who failed, however, to search their car.

then the labour attache and another diplomat in Paris. In 1981 came the killing of the Consular secretary in Geneva and an Embassy guard in Paris, followed this year by another Los Angeles murder — that of the Consul-General, Kemal Ankan — and the killing of an honorary Consul-General in Boston.

the assassins arrested. A.S.A.L.A.’s actions are said to be in revenge for the events of 1915 when the Ottoman Government, suspecting the Armenians of sympathy with Tsarist Russia (with whom the Sultanate was at war), deported the entire Turkish Armenian population of 1.5 million from its homeland near Mount Ararat to the deserts of .Syria. The Armenians claim that 900,000 were massacred. The Turks admit only that "there were deaths" — and these as a

Nearly all these killings have involved the shooting of the victims in their cars or in the street. In only two instances — at Geneva in 1981, and at Ankara airport — were any of.

result of attacks by local tribespeople, starvation and disease, in conditions that affected the whole country.

population in this large area.) By the same token, the majority of Armenians, including the’small Armenian com-

munity remaining in Turkey

A.S.A.L.A. claims to have a itself, appear to have little or political programme — the no sympathy with a campaign restoration of an Armenian that can only risk putting the State in five of Turkey’s east- Turkish Armenians under susern provinces. To the vast picion. majority of Armenians It may be of significance dispersed in the West, this goal that A.S.A.L.A. refers to the must seem quite extravagant Armenian population across and unrealistic. (Nor could it the border in the Soviet Union be claimed that the Armenians, as having been “liberated.” — however roughly treated, ever Copyright, London Observer formed the majority of the Service.