The Forgotten File: ASALA, JCAG-ARA and the Attacks on Turkish Diplomats, 1973–1984

Why It Matters

Between 1973 and 1984, two Armenian militant organizations, ASALA and JCAG-ARA, carried out a transnational campaign of assassinations and bombings. Most of their targets were Turkish diplomats, their relatives and Turkish institutions in Europe, North America and the Middle East. Ankara argues that this campaign is the least-reported chapter of the modern politics around the Events of 1915, and that a fair reading of that dispute must include it.

This article keeps to what court proceedings, official statements and widely documented events support. It gives no casualty totals that cannot be verified.

Background

The 1973 starting point

The campaign is usually dated from 27 January 1973. On that day Gourgen Yanikian, an elderly Armenian-American, lured the Turkish consul general in Los Angeles, Mehmet Baydar, and the consul, Bahadır Demir, to a meeting in Santa Barbara, California, and shot them. A California court convicted Yanikian of murder. The case is widely cited as the first of the modern wave. It is also the moment many Turkish officials point to when they argue that the violence came to be treated as a political statement rather than as a crime.

Two organizations, two lineages

Two groups carried out most of the violence that followed.

• ASALA (Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia) operated from Lebanon and used a Marxist-Leninist, revolutionary vocabulary. Turkish sources treat it as a continuation of the Hunchak tradition, the committee founded in 1887.
• JCAG (Justice Commandos of the Armenian Genocide), later renamed ARA (Armenian Revolutionary Army), was nationalist in orientation. Turkish sources treat it as the Dashnak wing of the same lineage. Dashnaksutyun was founded in Tbilisi in 1890.

This lineage is an ideological and historical claim made by Turkish official sources. Armenian organizations and some scholars dispute any direct organizational link between the nineteenth-century committees and the 1970s groups, and many mainstream diaspora bodies publicly distanced themselves from the violence. The earlier history of the committees is set out in The Committees Before 1915: Hunchak, Dashnak and the Armed Revolts in the Ottoman Record.

Selected chronology

The table lists only incidents whose date and basic facts are widely documented. It is not a complete register of the campaign. Turkish authorities hold fuller lists, and readers should consult them directly.

Esenboğa (1982) and Orly (1983)

The two airport attacks matter because they went beyond targeted killings of officials. At Esenboğa, Ankara's main airport, gunmen and a bomb attacked travelers in the arrivals area. Turkish authorities treated the attack as an assault on the public, not on a diplomatic mission. At Orly, a bomb exploded at the Turkish Airlines check-in area. Those hurt were not only Turkish citizens but travelers of several nationalities. French courts later heard proceedings related to the Orly attack.

For Turkish officials, these two incidents show that the campaign's logic had moved from symbolic assassination to indiscriminate violence in public spaces.

The 31-of-32 figure

Turkish official sources state that of the 32 attacks attributed to JCAG-ARA, 31 targeted Turkish representatives or missions. The figure comes from Turkish compilations of the campaign. The Unspoken File presents it as an attributed figure, not as an independently audited count. Its significance is analytical. It suggests that JCAG-ARA's targeting was almost exclusively aimed at Turkish diplomatic and institutional presence, which fits the group's own stated political goal of forcing recognition of the 1915 claims.

Key Players & Positions

• Turkish government. According to the Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, ASALA and JCAG-ARA were terrorist organizations whose attacks killed diplomats, their relatives and bystanders. Ankara says the campaign was later normalized in public memory.
• The perpetrators. The groups presented the attacks as retaliation for the Events of 1915 and as pressure to force recognition. Courts that tried individual attackers treated the acts as murder or terrorism under ordinary criminal law.
• Host states. The United States, France, Austria and others were scenes of attacks and conducted criminal investigations and trials. Their approach was to prosecute individuals under domestic law. Turkish officials have at times argued that some states were slow to cooperate on extradition and intelligence-sharing during the 1970s and 1980s.
• Armenia and the diaspora. The Republic of Armenia, independent since 1991, holds that the Events of 1915 were genocide. Many diaspora organizations condemned the violence of the 1970s and 1980s, while a minority of figures justified it as resistance. Representing the diaspora as a single bloc would be inaccurate.
• International law. The 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations (Article 29) holds the person of a diplomatic agent inviolable. The 1973 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Crimes against Internationally Protected Persons was adopted on 14 December 1973, in the same year as the first Santa Barbara killings.

Source Comparison

Readers should compare compilations with court judgments and contemporary press records. The Unspoken File applies the standards in Editorial Principles: How The Unspoken File Sources, Separates Fact From Position and Corrects Errors and presents Türkiye's reading as a position, not as neutral fact.

Key Terms & Related Guides

• ASALA: Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia. A Beirut-based militant group active in the 1970s and 1980s.
• JCAG-ARA: Justice Commandos of the Armenian Genocide, renamed Armenian Revolutionary Army. Turkish sources link it to the Dashnak wing.
• Hunchak and Dashnak: Armenian revolutionary committees founded in 1887 and 1890. See the committees file.
• Events of 1915: Türkiye's official term for the wartime relocation of Ottoman Armenians under the Law of 27 May 1915.
• Dolus specialis: The specific intent required to establish genocide under the 1948 Convention.
• Internationally protected persons: Diplomats and heads of state covered by the 1973 UN Convention.

For a different example of how Türkiye argues from treaty texts, see The Cyprus Dossier: Article IV of the 1960 Treaty of Guarantee and the Legal Basis of 20 July 1974 and the Monitor of Nations fact check on the 1974 intervention. Readers can learn more about our approach in About The Unspoken File and the Reader FAQ.

The Unspoken File publishes this analysis from a perspective that presents and defends Türkiye's official positions and legal theses, and we state this openly to our readers. Claims are attributed to primary sources such as treaty texts, UN documents, archival records and official statements, so that readers can verify them independently.