On March 1, 1984, a short item entitled “Imprisoned Armenian Dies” appeared in the New York Times. “Gourgen Migirdic Yanikian, an Armenian author and engineer who killed two Turkish consular officials in California in 1973, died Monday in prison of natural causes. He was 88 years old. He was sentenced to life in prison in July 1973 for first-degree murder.”
Yanikian was born in 1895, in Karin (Erzerum). Following the Armenian massacres implemented by Sultan Abdülhamid II at the end of the nineteenth century, his family moved to Kars, which at that time was part of Russia. He studied in Moscow, lived and worked in Iran after getting married, and later moved to the United States.
At the age of 78, Yanikian, the author of several books, shot and killed Mehmet Baydar, the Turkish Consul-General in Los Angeles, and Bahadır Demir, his deputy, at the Baltimore Hotel in Santa Barbara, thus, in his words, putting a start to “the war of an Armenian individual against the Turk”. Without previously informing them that he was Armenian, Yanikian invited the Turkish officials to the hotel with the aim of giving them a painting belonging to Sultan Abdülhamid’s palace and a bank note with the signatures of prominent people, as a present to Turkey.
In a recording sent from prison, he explained why he took that step: “Our cause had been buried and they were preparing to cover it with the veil of forgetfulness. As an Armenian individual, I could not accept that. The spirit of justice inherited from my grandparents erupted like a volcano inside me and burned the faces of those carrying out the funeral. And I, by cleaning the dust of decades of oblivion off the Armenian cause, laid it in front of mankind.”
In the autumn of 1972, a couple of months before killing the Turkish officials, Yanikian visited Armenia for two weeks and donated tothe Martiros Saryan house-museum a painting by that artist – Oriental Interior – which had been considered lost.
Regarding his visit to Armenia, he later wrote in one of his books, “One morning I woke up early and, sitting by the window, was looking at Ararat. The newly-rising sun had illuminated the snow-covered peak of our shrine with its rays. Each minute the scene changed and it seemed as if the sun’s rays were caressing its snow-covered peak, which was returning its kisses to the sun, with reflections of thousands of different colours. There were small houses not far from the hotel. The residents were already in the yard and preparing to go to work. A woman who had covered her head with a scarf and was driving the cow out of the basement drew my attention. When the woman saw the shining peak of Ararat and the reflection of the sun’s rays, she forget about her cow, raised her head proudly and, looking at the mountain, made the sign of the cross and stared at the view, frozen for a couple of seconds. Isn’t this fact enough to order the entire world to return our mountain to us? After this sight I understood the meaning of our Ararat for each Armenian, even in Communist Armenia.”
In his book, The Aim and the Truth, Yanikian describes the killing of the two Turks in detail: “I had no feelings towards those who were coming to meet me voluntarily. For me they were a means to reach my objective. If they had been others, it would not have made any difference to me. I noticed that I was crying. Tears were falling from my eyes without my sobbing, but those were not tears of pity or hesitation, but anger, that events had taken such a turn that I was resorting to a step which I have always been against.”
After killing the Turkish consular officers in the hotel room, Yanikian handed himself over to the police. “How many times I shot and which one of the two, I do not remember, but when I shot for the last, ninth time, both of them were already lying on the floor. After putting the gun in my hand on the table, I took out the Browning and, approaching the corpses, fired two rounds into the head of each man. I went to the telephone, called the front desk, and asked them to connect me to Police Chief Carpenter, as there were two corpses in my room.”
The shots in Santa Barbara laid the foundation for the struggle of Armenian avengers: the new phase of Armenian demands. Yanikian is considered to be one of the spiritual founders of the Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia, ASALA.
On January 20, 1975, a bomb exploded in Beirut, near the office of the World Council of Churches. The bombers accused the World Council of Churches in collaborating with the American National Committee for Homeless Armenians. The “Gurgen Yanikian Military Group” claimed responsibility for the operation. This day is considered to be the establishment of ASALA. Over the following months and years, until December, 1990, ASALA carried out around 300 armed operations in different countries, including in Western Armenia, now part of Turkey, in Ankara, and in Istanbul.
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