Turks in Viena came together on Thursday to commemorate Erdoğan Özen, a Turkish diplomat killed by an Armenian terror group in 1984.
A ceremony was held outside the Turkish Embassy to honor the deputy counselor for labor as 40 years passed after he was assassinated by the Armenian terrorist organization ARA on June 20 in Vienna.
Speaking at the ceremony, Türkiye's Ambassador to Austria, Ozan Ceyhun, reminded that Turkish diplomats were targeted by Armenian terror groups during the 1970s and 1980s.
They were targeted just because they were Turks and represented Türkiye, Ceyhun said.
Reminding that an Austrian police officer was also killed during the attack, the Turkish ambassador recalled that a total of 77 people – 58 of them Turkish nationals, including 31 diplomats and members of their families – lost their lives in attacks carried out by these terrorist groups from 1973 to 1986.
Levent Eler, Türkiye's permanent representative to the U.N.'s office in Vienna, Hatun Demirer, Türkiye's permanent representative at the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) and the slain diplomat's wife Monika Özer attended the ceremony.
The terror campaign started in 1973 when Türkiye's Consul General in Los Angeles, Mehmet Baydar and diplomat Bahadir Demir were assassinated by a terrorist named Gourgen Yanikian.
The vast majority of the attacks on Turkish diplomats and citizens in the 1970s and 1980s were conducted by the Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia (ASALA) and the Justice Commandos of the Armenian Genocide (JCAG), both designated as terrorist groups in the U.S. and Türkiye.
Founded in 1975 in Beirut, Lebanon, during the Lebanese Civil War, ASALA is responsible for hundreds of bloody terrorist acts.
ASALA was the first Armenian terror group to launch a campaign against Türkiye. It targeted not only Türkiye but also other countries and became infamous for a 1975 bomb attack on the Beirut office of the World Council of Churches.
The nationalistic JCAG has only targeted Türkiye because it believed that attacking other countries would damage the so-called "Armenian struggle."
Armenian terrorist attacks intensified from 1980 to 1983 when 580 of the 699 attacks – over 80% – occurred. The attack at Esenboğa airport in the Turkish capital of Ankara on Aug. 7, 1982, was one of the most notorious attacks by ASALA, as the group targeted civilians for the first time.
Nine people died and over 80 were injured when two terrorists opened fire in a crowded passenger waiting area at the airport.
The 1981 and 1983 Paris attacks are among the group's other notable acts. ASALA terrorists held 56 people hostage for 15 hours during the Turkish Consulate attack in 1981, while a suitcase bomb killed eight people – most of them non-Turks – in 1983 at a Turkish Airlines check-in desk at Paris' Orly Airport.
According to some Turkish officials, after the Orly attack, the group lost much of its support and financial backing from the Armenian diaspora and had to dissolve, but terrorist attacks continued to take place until the mid-1990s, with the last one targeting diplomat Çağlar Yücel in Baghdad, Iraq, in December 1993.