Turkey commemorates ambassador killed by Armenians at the Chancery building

The diplomat was killed on 9 June 1977 and the Justice Commandos of the Armenian Genocide (JCAG) claimed responsibility for the attack. This was the first time the embassy organised an official commemoration ceremony of this kind.

The current Turkish ambassador, Mehmet Pacaci, opened the ceremony in the hall of honour, delivering a brief speech in English. After remembering the “martyrdom” of his predecessor who met his fate at the hands of a group of “Armenian terrorists”, he recalled the words, which Paul VI pronounced at the Angelus on 12 June that same year. The then Pope referred to the attack as a deplorable, cowardly and fierce incident carried out against a diplomat accredited to the Holy See, which he did not in any way provoke. He expressed the hope that the honest conscience of peoples would protect modern society from a methodical and violent degeneration of controversies that may afflict it. During the course of the ceremony held yesterday evening, Ankara’s representative to the Holy See made no mention of the Pope’s upcoming visit to Armenia.

Ambassador Taha Carım was mentioned in a statement issued by the Holy See on 3 February this year. “The memory of the suffering and pain of both the recent past, as in the case of the assassination of Taha Carım, Ambassador of Turkey to the Holy See, in June 1977, at the hands of a terrorist group, urges us to acknowledge the suffering of the present and to condemn all acts of violence and terrorism, which continue to cause victims today,” the statement said. The Vatican issued the statement after Pope Francis was presented with a copy of a book on the Battle of Dardanelles, titled “La Squadra Pontificia ai Dardanelli 1657 / Ilk Canakkale Zaferi 1657”, an Italian and Turkish transliteration of a manuscript from the Chigi collection of the Vatican Apostolic Library. The Vatican statement expressed its appreciation for “the renewed commitment of Turkey to open up its archives to historians and researchers” looking at the “pain” and “suffering” experienced “by all parties involved in wars or conflicts, including the events of 1915, “regardless of religious or ethnic identity”. Armenians refer to the events of 1915 as Medz Yeghern, the great crime and other countries such as Germany recognise as a “genocide”, a term that is contested by Turkey. After this statement was published, Ankara decided on that very same day, to send its ambassador, Mehmet Paçacı, back to the Vatican to resume his duties, after it had recalled him the previous April because the Pope openly spoke of the Armenian “genocide” during a ceremony commemorating the centenary of the Armenian massacre. During his upcoming trip to Armenia, Francis will visit the Tsitsernakaberd Armenian Genocide Memorial Complex in Yerevan.