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Financial Times, UK
June 23 2012
History confronted
Review by Delphine Strauss
A fresh perspective on the Armenian tragedy
?The Young Turks' Crime Against Humanity: The Armenian Genocide and
Ethnic Cleansing in the Ottoman Empire, by Taner Akçam, Princeton
University Press, RRP £27.95/$39.50, 528 pages
`The dead who remain on the roads are to be removed and their corpses
are to be thrown into the valleys, lakes or rivers, and the
possessions that they have abandoned on the roads are to be taken and
burned.'
So wrote Talat Pasha, Ottoman minister of the interior, in a telegram
sent on July 21 1915 to provincial governors carrying out the
deportation of Anatolia's Armenian population. It is bureaucratic
asides such as this that shock in a newly translated book by Taner
Akçam, known as one of the first Turkish academics to challenge
Turkey's official denial that the resulting mass killings represented
genocide.
Bitter divisions over this bloody episode, which Armenians claim led
to the deaths of up to 1.5m people, have long poisoned Turkey's
overseas relations. Here, Akçam attempts to break the deadlock in the
historical debate. He underlines the futility of the frequent focus on
a `hunt for one Holocaust-style final decision', arguing that the
Armenians' annihilation was rather `the cumulative outcome of a series
of increasingly radical decisions'.
Instead of seeking evidence of a single, central order to exterminate
the Armenians in Ottoman archives ` from which incriminating evidence
may well have been removed ` Akçam argues that there is no real
discrepancy between the Ottoman documents that do survive and the
accounts of Armenian and foreign observers.
The cables and court records he cites, many unpublished until now,
show consistently that the central authorities ` whether or not they
ordered the massacres ` were aware of the scale of the killings
carried out by armed gangs, as well as of the deaths from hunger and
exposure among Armenians forced on to the roads under inhuman
conditions.
Yet their concern was with clearing the corpses, or preventing local
officials embezzling Armenian property, not with stopping it. They
also sent continual requests for statistics on the number of Armenians
remaining in each area, which they wanted to reduce to no more than 5
or 10 per cent of the local population ` a policy, Akçam argues, that
could only have been achieved by killing.
Yet perhaps as important as such indications of official intent is
Akçam's lucid account of the pressures driving Ottoman policy in the
run-up to 1915. As the Ottoman empire ceded one western province after
another to emerging nations in the Balkan wars of 1912-13, Muslim
refugees flooded eastward into Anatolia. There were population
exchanges with Bulgaria and Greece, and attacks on Greek villages
intended to persuade the Christian population to emigrate.
The Armenians, however, came to be seen as an existential threat to
the survival of the Ottoman state. The fear was that, with Russian
support, they could unite to form an autonomous government in eastern
Anatolia ` and this fear became acute in 1915 as Russian troops
crossed the Ottoman border.
Akçam stresses that this in no way justifies the official Turkish
version of events, which implies that when an ethnic group is seen as
a threat to the state, its wholesale deportation and the deaths that
inevitably result are acceptable. `The current framing of this debate,
especially in Turkey, shows that the fundamental moral issue has yet
to be addressed,' he writes, criticising the endless tug-of-war over
whether the word `genocide' should apply. `Regardless of the term
used, it is necessary to fully confront the immense human tragedy
whose repetition must absolutely be prevented.'
Akçam has long courted controversy in Turkey, where he was jailed as a
student activist in the 1970s before claiming asylum in Germany, but
his intellectual courage is beyond question. Moreover, while Turkey's
official account of what happened in 1915 is unchanged, Turkish public
and intellectual opinion is now much more open to debate. This
dispassionate, scholarly study is a valuable contribution to help that
debate move on.
Delphine Strauss is the FT's deputy comment editor and a former Ankara
correspondent
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/38ede876-bb0e-11e1-81e0-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1yeI01AUk
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
June 23 2012
History confronted
Review by Delphine Strauss
A fresh perspective on the Armenian tragedy
?The Young Turks' Crime Against Humanity: The Armenian Genocide and
Ethnic Cleansing in the Ottoman Empire, by Taner Akçam, Princeton
University Press, RRP £27.95/$39.50, 528 pages
`The dead who remain on the roads are to be removed and their corpses
are to be thrown into the valleys, lakes or rivers, and the
possessions that they have abandoned on the roads are to be taken and
burned.'
So wrote Talat Pasha, Ottoman minister of the interior, in a telegram
sent on July 21 1915 to provincial governors carrying out the
deportation of Anatolia's Armenian population. It is bureaucratic
asides such as this that shock in a newly translated book by Taner
Akçam, known as one of the first Turkish academics to challenge
Turkey's official denial that the resulting mass killings represented
genocide.
Bitter divisions over this bloody episode, which Armenians claim led
to the deaths of up to 1.5m people, have long poisoned Turkey's
overseas relations. Here, Akçam attempts to break the deadlock in the
historical debate. He underlines the futility of the frequent focus on
a `hunt for one Holocaust-style final decision', arguing that the
Armenians' annihilation was rather `the cumulative outcome of a series
of increasingly radical decisions'.
Instead of seeking evidence of a single, central order to exterminate
the Armenians in Ottoman archives ` from which incriminating evidence
may well have been removed ` Akçam argues that there is no real
discrepancy between the Ottoman documents that do survive and the
accounts of Armenian and foreign observers.
The cables and court records he cites, many unpublished until now,
show consistently that the central authorities ` whether or not they
ordered the massacres ` were aware of the scale of the killings
carried out by armed gangs, as well as of the deaths from hunger and
exposure among Armenians forced on to the roads under inhuman
conditions.
Yet their concern was with clearing the corpses, or preventing local
officials embezzling Armenian property, not with stopping it. They
also sent continual requests for statistics on the number of Armenians
remaining in each area, which they wanted to reduce to no more than 5
or 10 per cent of the local population ` a policy, Akçam argues, that
could only have been achieved by killing.
Yet perhaps as important as such indications of official intent is
Akçam's lucid account of the pressures driving Ottoman policy in the
run-up to 1915. As the Ottoman empire ceded one western province after
another to emerging nations in the Balkan wars of 1912-13, Muslim
refugees flooded eastward into Anatolia. There were population
exchanges with Bulgaria and Greece, and attacks on Greek villages
intended to persuade the Christian population to emigrate.
The Armenians, however, came to be seen as an existential threat to
the survival of the Ottoman state. The fear was that, with Russian
support, they could unite to form an autonomous government in eastern
Anatolia ` and this fear became acute in 1915 as Russian troops
crossed the Ottoman border.
Akçam stresses that this in no way justifies the official Turkish
version of events, which implies that when an ethnic group is seen as
a threat to the state, its wholesale deportation and the deaths that
inevitably result are acceptable. `The current framing of this debate,
especially in Turkey, shows that the fundamental moral issue has yet
to be addressed,' he writes, criticising the endless tug-of-war over
whether the word `genocide' should apply. `Regardless of the term
used, it is necessary to fully confront the immense human tragedy
whose repetition must absolutely be prevented.'
Akçam has long courted controversy in Turkey, where he was jailed as a
student activist in the 1970s before claiming asylum in Germany, but
his intellectual courage is beyond question. Moreover, while Turkey's
official account of what happened in 1915 is unchanged, Turkish public
and intellectual opinion is now much more open to debate. This
dispassionate, scholarly study is a valuable contribution to help that
debate move on.
Delphine Strauss is the FT's deputy comment editor and a former Ankara
correspondent
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/38ede876-bb0e-11e1-81e0-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1yeI01AUk
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress