Maxime Gauin JTW Columnist printable version send your friend

Thursday, 30 June 2011

One of the clearest pieces of evidence that the Armenian nationalist parties have no right to present themselves as promoting human rights is the practice of terrorism by Armenians against other Armenians. However, this is not the most studied and best known aspect of the Armenian issue.
Inter-Armenian terrorism appeared in 1878, with the creation of the Black Cross Society in the city of Van (eastern Anatolia). The group had chosen this name because of one punishment that was reserved for “traitors”, death, and in this case, the eventual victims had their names inscribed on a black cross. The Black Cross Society merged with other Armenian groups from Russia and the Ottoman Empire to create the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF-Dashnak) in 1890. The main concurrent of the ARF, the Hunchak party created in Geneva in 1887, also practiced terrorism extensively against other Armenians.

The design to exterminate the contradictors


In a paper presented at the Annual Middle East Studies Association Meeting in November 1983, Gerard L. Libaridian, currently in charge of Armenian studies at the University of Michigan and by no means an enemy of the revolutionary parties, explained that the ARF and Hunchak parties assassinated 105 people, including “56 Armenian informers”, 17 other Armenians, and 32 Ottoman or Russian officials (some of which could have been Armenians) in only three years from 1904 to 1906.

This means that literally hundreds of Armenians were killed by Armenian terrorists from 1878 to 1914. Their two main reasons for killing others were: 1) being loyal to the Ottoman Empire, especially in cases of participation within the administration; 2) the refusal to give material or moral support to a nationalist-revolutionary party. As a result, the most targeted were civil servants, wealthy businessmen, and churchmen. Internal disputes within the ARF or Hunchak sometimes led to murder.

The chief of police in Bitlis (eastern Anatolia), an Armenian, was assassinated by the ARF in 1898. This case demonstrates that Abdülhamid II did not refrain, even after the bloody interethnic clashes of 1894-1896, from choosing loyal Armenian citizens for sensitive positions; and that the restrictions on non-Muslims posessing weapons were no more strictly applied after the Tanzimat (1839-1856). The ARF and Hunchak parties pursued their wealthier targets far beyond the borders of the Ottoman Empire. In December 1909, the Hunchakist Bedros Hampartzoumian was executed in Sing Sing Prison’s electric chair (New York) for the murder of H. Tavshanjian, a businessman. The millionaire Isahag Jamharian was assassinated in Moscow by the ARF in 1902. Arsen Vartabed, abbot of the Akhtamar monastery, was butchered together with his secretary in 1904 by the Dashnak terrorist Ishkan and his gang, who wanted to control the income and property of the monastery. These crimes provide some insight behind the ARF’s vitriolic reactions in 2010, when a mass was celebrated in the renovated church at Lake Van’s Akhtamar Island, with organizational assistance from Turkish authorities.
However, the most significant murder was probably the one of Bedros Kapamaciyan Effendi, a wealthy merchant of Van elected in 1909 as mayor of the city, thanks to the support of the Committee Union and Progress (CUP). He was killed by the ARF in December 1912. After Kapamaciyan’s assassination, virtually no Armenian dared to support the Ottoman government in province of Van, both because of the cumulative effect of the numerous murders and because of the notoriety of the victim.

The continuation of terror

The assassinations followed after World War I. The ARF continued to attack Armenians that remained loyal. Several were killed in Istanbul from 1920-1921 for the help they provided Ottoman authorities during WWI. For example, S. Thelirian, the assassin of Talat Pasha in March 1921, also killed Harootiun Mugerditchian one year before this murder, who had established the list of the suspects arrested on April 24, 1915. But the Ottoman Empire — and soon modern Turkey — was no more the main field of activities for inter-Armenian terror. In 1918, the ARF assassinated Hampartzoum Arakelian, a journalist from Tiflis (Tbilisi), because of his numerous articles criticizing the Dashnaks. With a typically Dashnak conception of courage, armed terrorists killed this 70-year old unarmed man in his bed during the night. Two Hunchakist intellectuals, one Ramkavar journalist, and two dissidents of the ARF were assassinated from 1926 to 1933. The culmination of this campaign was the murder of Archbishop Leon Tourian, chief of the Armenian Church in North America. Tourian was killed in the Armenian Holly Cross Church, on December 24, 1933, during a Christmas ceremony. The two main perpetrators were sentenced to death (commutated into life imprisonment by the governor of New York); the seven accomplices received between ten and twenty years of prison sentences. The defendant’s legal fees were assumed by the ARF, who presented the perpetrators as “victims”. The Dashnaks paid for this crime with more than thirty years of solitude in the Armenian American community. Probably in reprisal, an ARF leader in the United States was hit (and killed) by a car in Providence; two others, General Sebouh and Reverend Martougessian, escaped attempts of assassination by sheer luck.

Nevertheless, the revival of Armenian terrorism against Turkey (1973-1991), then against Azerbaijan (1988-1994), did not fail to assault moderate Armenians either. A striking example is Jan Vahe Tosunyan, who was born in Istanbul in 1907 but immigrated to Paris in 1925, becoming a well-known jeweler specializing in diamonds. He expressed pro-Turkish views when the allegations of an “Armenian genocide” appeared, and was silenced in 1974 by the death threats of fanatic Armenians. On March 26, 1982, the Armenian Secret Army for Liberation of Armenia (ASALA) bombed an Armenian movie theater in Beirut, Lebanon because the boss refused to give money to the ASALA and frequently showed Turkish films; two people were killed and sixteen injured —all Armenians. “Hay Baykar”, the ASALA newspaper edited in Paris, shamelessly attributed this attack to the Lebanese Phalanges (Maronites). Actually, the ASALA ran a gangster-styled racket. Vicken Tcharkhutian was sentenced in 1987 by the Californian justice system to twelve years of jail for not only the bombing of several Canadian and Swiss targets in California, but also for racketeering against the Armenian-American owner of a Hollywood flooring store. The four ASALA terrorists sentenced in 1984 in Canada for the attempted assassination of Kani Güngör, a commercial attaché at the Turkish embassy (left paralyzed by the shooting), were initially arrested for racketeering against a rich Canadian-Armenian.
More recently, in winter 2008-2009, the association of ASALA veterans threatened with death —successfully — Armen Gakavian, an Australian-Armenian scholar who wanted to launch a petition of apologies for anti-Turkish Armenian terrorism and the war crimes of Armenian volunteers in the Russian army during WWI, a reciprocal gesture for a Turkish apologies petition.

The responsibilities of the forgetting

Not surprisingly, the ARF maintains a policy of denial. The US branch of the ARF still denies any involvement in the assassination of Tourian, and maintains against all evidence that its seven activists were wrongly sentenced. In 2007, the Euro-Armenian Federation for Justice and Democracy (EAFJD), the Dashnak lobby in Brussels, claimed on its web site that the murderers had been “expelled from the [Dashnak] party”. Needless to say, that is pure fiction. In its September 16, 1933 issue, the Dashnak daily “Hairenik” (Boston, USA) claimed with pride that the ARF’s activities are “very similar to the underground methods of modern racketeering” from the 1890’s to 1914. Such bragging has been replaced by prudent discretion regarding these crimes. Only the assassination of Armenian “traitors” from 1920-1921 is still a matter of pride.

Ramkavar, an Armenian party created in 1921 by the merging of several other organizations, carries a special responsibility. During the decades, Ramkavar activists denounced the ARF as a fascist and terrorist organization — not without reason in this case. However, in 1972, Ramkavar members in the USA accepted creating a common structure with the ARF, the Armenian Assembly of America (AAA). The Dashnaks left the AAA some years later to create the Armenian National Committee of America (ANCA), but despite some tactical divergences, the AAA and ANCA frequently act in cooperation against Turkey. In addition, the AAA includes representatives of the Hunchakists, despite the direct practice of terrorism against Armenians by their party before 1914, and more recently, its open support of the ASALA. Speaking shortly after the Orly attack (1983), Larry Cretan, former director of the Ramkavar-dominated Armenian Assembly of America (AAA), said “I am disturbed by those kinds of acts because I feel they’re counterproductive,” — so not because they were criminal — and added he could “understand the motivations behind them” (The California Courrier, August 4, 1983, p. 2). Mr. Cretan failed to even mention the attacks of the ASALA against some Armenians.

In the United Kingdom and France, things are simpler: almost all Armenian associations, Dashnak and non-Dashnak, are under the same umbrella. The current co-chairmen of the Coordination Council of France’s Armenian Associations are Jean-Marc “Ara” Toranian, former spokesman of ASALA, and Franck Mourad Papazian, a Dashnak who wrote many articles in the 1980s to support the ARF’s terrorist branch (JCAG/ARA).

To be conclusive however, it is necessary to question the Turkish response. Some of the first books of Turkish historiography answering the “genocide” charge dealt with internal Armenian violence, but most were never translated into any language. It was not until 2002 that a specific study was devoted to Bedros Kapamaciyan, in both Turkish and English. According to Google Maps, there is no street, avenue, or square named after Bedros-Kapamaciyan. Since 1973 (when the memorial of Van-Zeve was inaugurated), monuments have been erected in eastern Anatolia for Muslim victims who were murdered by nationalist Armenian committees. Why not also pay homage to a non-Muslim Ottoman patriot, assassinated for his loyalty to his country?