Long Memories

Armenians settle old scores

The two Ford Escorts moved unobtrusively down a quiet, tree-lined avenue in Restelo, an affluent suburb of Lisbon. One stopped outside the driveway of the Turkish embassy; the other turned sharply, burst through the compound's 3-ft.-high iron gates and jolted to a halt. An armed man advanced on the embassy, wounded a police sentry in a burst of fire and was in turn shot dead by a Turkish security guard. As Portuguese policemen hurried toward the scene, four other intruders raced into the adjacent ambassador's residence and seized its only occupants, Cahide Mihc,ioglu, 42, the wife of the embassy's charge d'affaires, and her son Atasay, 17.

For almost an hour, the gunmen held the Turks hostage in a room around which they had planted plastic explosives. Then, just as Portuguese security forces began cordoning off the area, a violent explosion blasted the windows out of the first-floor room. As a wounded Atasay slid down the residence staircase to safety through the billowing smoke, security policemen, accompanied by the distraught charge, dashed into the damaged building. On the ground floor, they found the fatally burned Cahide Mihc,ioglu; upstairs, a Portuguese policeman lay dead not far from the charred corpses of the four assailants.

The attack, the third such incident in less than a month, forcibly reminded West Europeans of the fierce convictions of Armenian nationalists. In a typewritten note distributed to local press agencies, a little-known group calling itself the Revolutionary Armenian Army claimed responsibility for the assault. "We have decided to blow up this building and remain under the collapse," declared the note. "This is not suicide, but rather a sacrifice on the altar of freedom."

The assault was conducted by only one of a number of well-organized teams of radical Armenian terrorists. According to Western intelligence agents, some of the groups are pro-Western, some are Communist. But all are pledged to similar objectives. Among them: to force Turkish acknowledgment of and to avenge the alleged 1915 massacre of more than 1 million Armenians; and to gain political autonomy over their lost homeland, a 57,000-sq.-mi. region located along Turkey's border with the Soviet Union. Turkey has long maintained that the Armenian claims are baseless.

The Armenian attacks have been unrelenting. Three weeks ago, Armenian terrorists gunned down a Turkish embassy attache in Brussels; on the following day, they planted a bomb near the Turkish Airlines counter at Paris' Orly Airport, leaving 55 wounded and seven dead. During the past decade, 36 Turkish envoys have been assassinated abroad, including four in the U.S. In Turkey the Armenians were murdering several Turks each day until the 1980 imposition of martial law. The guerrilla groups tend to be highly professional: the best-known of them, the Marxist Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia (ASALA), created in 1975, was trained in the Beirut camps of the Palestine Liberation Organization. The P.L.O.'s pullout from Lebanon last summer may have forced ASALA to move its base to Western Europe.

The Armenians are so set on haunting and harassing the Turks that they will menace anyone who tries to stop them. In April 1982, France was reviled by the Turkish government for allegedly sanctioning the Armenian cause and for tolerating more than 40 attacks against Turks in the space of eight years. Now the French are not safe from Armenian rancor either. After Parisian authorities arrested Armenians suspected of being responsible for the Orly bombing, ASALA threatened to "spill more blood" unless the captives were released. Given the terrorists' record, there was every reason to believe that past grievances would continue to generate future casualties. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.