Taner Akçam - The Young Turks' Crime against Humanity http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xf5igXFiRDAThe Book:The Young Turks' Crime Against Humanity The Armenian Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing in the Ottoman Empire
TANER AKÇAM
Series: Human Rights and Crimes against Humanity
Publication Date: April 2012, Pages: 528
Published by: Princeton University Press
eISBN: 978-1-4008-4184-4
Stable URL:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt7rt86Book DescriptionIntroducing new evidence from more than 600 secret Ottoman documents, this book demonstrates in unprecedented detail that the Armenian Genocide and the expulsion of Greeks from the late Ottoman Empire resulted from an official effort to rid the empire of its Christian subjects. Presenting these previously inaccessible documents along with expert context and analysis, Taner Akçam's most authoritative work to date goes deep inside the bureaucratic machinery of Ottoman Turkey to show how a dying empire embraced genocide and ethnic cleansing.
Although the deportation and killing of Armenians was internationally condemned in 1915 as a "crime against humanity and civilization," the Ottoman government initiated a policy of denial that is still maintained by the Turkish Republic. The case for Turkey's "official history" rests on documents from the Ottoman imperial archives, to which access has been heavily restricted until recently. It is this very source that Akçam now uses to overturn the official narrative.
The documents presented here attest to a late-Ottoman policy of Turkification, the goal of which was no less than the radical demographic transformation of Anatolia. To that end, about one-third of Anatolia's 15 million people were displaced, deported, expelled, or massacred, destroying the ethno-religious diversity of an ancient cultural crossroads of East and West, and paving the way for the Turkish Republic.
By uncovering the central roles played by demographic engineering and assimilation in the Armenian Genocide, this book will fundamentally change how this crime is understood and show that physical destruction is not the only aspect of the genocidal process.
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Chapters:3.
NEOTTOMAN SOURCES AND THE QUESTION OF THEIR BEING PURGEDPages: 1-28
One of the issues at the center of the debates about 1915 concerns which documents are available and to what degree they can be trusted. Among these sources, the official papers belonging to the Ottoman government of that time, which are found in the Ottoman Archive of the General Directorate of the Prime Ministerial State Archive of the Turkish Republic (T.C. Başbakanlık Devlet Arşivleri Genel Müdürlüğü Osmanlı Arşivi; hereafter Prime Ministerial Ottoman Archive), hold a special place, and various views have been proposed on their value. Powerful evidence that the documents in this archive have been “cleansed” in a deliberate...
4.
THE PLAN FOR THE HOMOGENIZATION OF ANATOLIAPages: 29-62
Although the Ottoman Empire possessed a lengthy history of devising and implementing population and resettlement policies, by the second half of the nineteenth century it was forced to contend with a totally new problem.¹ Large numbers of Muslims—migrants from recently lost Ottoman territories as well as expellees from other countries—began to flood into the shrinking Ottoman state, many continuing well into the imperial hinterlands. The 1912–13 Balkan Wars represented the peak of this migration and an important turning point.
Up to this time, the Ottoman authorities had always solved the problem of immigration and resettlement on a...
5.
THE AFTERMATH OF THE BALKAN WARS AND THE “EMPTYING” OF EASTERN THRACE AND THE AEGEAN LITTORAL IN 1913–14Pages: 63-96
Throughout the years of 1913 and 1914 until its entry into the war, the Ottoman government carried out a basic ethnic-cleansing operation, particularly against the Greeks in Thrace and the Aegean littoral. They used a dual-track mechanism extensively. On one hand, they signed separate “population exchange” agreements with the governments of the Balkan states; on the other hand, they terrorized Ottoman Greek subjects, including with massacres, to force them to move to Greece. The number of Greeks who had to flee or had been forcefully expelled was roughly three hundred thousand. This wide-scale suppressive policy brought the Ottomans to the...
6.
THE TRANSFORMATION OF OTTOMAN POLICIES TOWARD THE OTTOMAN GREEKS DURING THE FIRST WORLD WARPages: 97-124
In studying the available documents from the Interior Ministry’s Cipher Office, one can observe that the policy followed against the Ottoman Greeks underwent an important change in November 1914, when the use of widespread violence against the Greeks and their forcible expulsion to Greece were halted. Policies concerning the Greeks during the war years were restricted henceforth to sending some of those living in coastal areas to interior provinces for military reasons. This procedure, connected with Russian military victories at the end of 1916 and throughout 1917, was carried out in a systematic manner, particularly in the Black Sea region....
7.
THE INITIAL PHASE OF ANTI-ARMENIAN POLICYPages: 125-156
Extant Ottoman documents reveal that the Unionist government made clear distinctions in its wartime policies between the Armenians and the empire’s other Christian communities. The Greeks, as has been seen, were deported and expelled with brutality, but the Armenians were targeted for outright annihilation. In the decision to exterminate them, the Unionists’ overarching objective of homogenizing the population of Anatolia undoubtedly played an important role; however, it would be incorrect to infer a direct line of causation between the two. The available evidence does not indicate that the restructuring of the general population resulted automatically in the annihilation of a...
8.
FINAL STEPS IN THE DECISION-MAKING PROCESSPages: 157-202
The battle of Sarikamiş (January 1915) was a complete disaster for the Ottoman Army, which lost, by its own count, more than sixty thousand soldiers, most of whom froze to death in the snows of the Caucasus Mountains. Along with this great loss, many soldiers deserted from the army and, in order to survive, turned to brigandage.¹ Another setback, though perhaps not of the same magnitude, was experienced in Egypt, when Cemal Pasha’s Fourth Army was seriously defeated by the English in February 1915 in what became known as the First Canal Expedition. Meanwhile, the plan to get the Muslims...
9.
INTERIOR MINISTRY DOCUMENTS AND THE INTENT TO ANNIHILATEPages: 203-226
Despite all attempts to sanitize the archival record, as discussed at the beginning of this study, the surviving documents in the Interior Ministry section of the Prime Ministerial Ottoman Archive are sufficient to show the distinctive character of Ottoman wartime measures against the Armenians: having been uprooted and deported from Anatolia, they were to be denied even rudimentary living conditions. As shown in chapter 6, the orders to annihilate the Armenian population did not reach the regional and district officials through the usual governmental channels but instead were hand-delivered by selected Unionist operatives. Although, for this reason, the original orders...
10.
DEMOGRAPHIC POLICY AND THE ANNIHILATION OF THE ARMENIANSPages: 227-286
If the annihilation of the Armenians was the outcome of a sequence of decisions, each one triggering the next, questions arise as to the possible relationship between demographic policy and genocidal practice. Were they distinct responses to different needs? Or was genocide the ultimate fulfillment of a demographic vision? I will argue that there was such a causal relationship. Demographic anxieties shaped the Armenian deportations: the population ratios where Armenians were deported and where they remained were decisive, and the deportations were carried accordingly.
The course of the war and accompanying security fears powerfully shaped decisions about the annihilation of...
11.
ASSIMILATION: THE CONVERSION AND FORCED MARRIAGE OF CHRISTIAN CHILDRENPages: 287-340
In his autobiography, Totally Unofficial Man, Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term “genocide,” recalled his struggle to persuade the United Nations to recognize “cultural genocide.” This concept, wrote Lemkin, “meant the destruction of the cultural pattern of a group, such as the language, the traditions, the monuments, archives, libraries, churches. In brief: the shrines of the soul of a nation.”¹
The original third article of what would become the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948) defined cultural genocide as any of the following: (a) the forcible transfer of children to another human group;...
12.
THE QUESTION OF CONFISCATED ARMENIAN PROPERTYPages: 341-372
The deportations left an enormous amount of abandoned Armenian property and possessions in their wake. This posed the question of what policy the government and local officials should take in regard to its preservation or liquidation. The ultimate answer of the Unionist government is highly instructive regarding the ultimate aims of their Armenian policy. On the basis of existing Interior Ministry Papers from the period, it can confidently be asserted that the goal of the CUP was not the resettlement of Anatolia’s Armenian population and their just compensation for the property and possessions that they were forced to leave behind....
13.
SOME OFFICIAL DENIALIST ARGUMENTS OF THE TURKISH STATE AND DOCUMENTS FROM THE OTTOMAN INTERIOR MINISTRYPages: 373-448
There are certain theses in the discussions about the Armenian Genocide that people have not gotten sick of repeating to such a degree that they practically become memorized. These include the now-classic arguments that Armenian Catholics and Protestants, and the Armenians of Istanbul and İzmir, were not deported. Families of soldiers were not touched, and despite it being wartime, the government opened investigations against state officials who acted badly toward the Armenians during the deportations. It tried 1,397 people, issued long prison sentences, and even had some people executed. All possible aid was given to the Armenians on the roads...
14.
TOWARD A CONCLUSIONPages: 449-452
The Armenian Genocide—the first large-scale mass murder of the twentieth century—must be placed in a new context and understood within that context: the commencement of the partitioning of the Ottoman Empire into nation-states. Far from an isolated campaign against a single ethnoreligious group, the annihilation of the Armenians was part of an extremely comprehensive operation that was accomplished in order to save the empire. For this reason, it is not correct to interpret the Armenian Genocide along the lines of a clash between the empire’s Muslim groups (ethnic Turks, Kurds, Circassians, and others), more generally expressed by the...
