Turkey’s Killing Fields
By GARY J. BASS

New York Times Book Review
December 17, 2006

A SHAMEFUL ACT
The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility.
By Taner Akcam. Translated by Paul Bessemer.
483 pp. Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt & Company. $30.

In July 1915, the American ambassador to the Ottoman Empire sent Washington
a harrowing report about the Turks’ `systematic attempt to uproot peaceful
Armenian populations.’ He described `terrible tortures, wholesale expulsions
and deportations from one end of the Empire to the other accompanied by
frequent instances of rape, pillage and murder, turning into massacre.’ A
month later, the ambassador, Henry Morgenthau – the grandfather of the
Manhattan district attorney, Robert M. Morgenthau – warned of an `attempt to
exterminate a race.’

The Young Turk nationalist campaign against the empire’s Armenian subjects
was far too enormous to be ignored at the time. But decades of
government-backed denial have created what amounts to a taboo in Turkey
today. Instead of admitting genocide, Turkish officials contend the
Armenians were a dangerous fifth column that colluded with Russia in World
War I; many Armenians may have died, they say, but there was no organized
slaughter. Turkish writers who challenge this line, like the novelists Orhan
Pamuk and Elif Shafak, have risked prosecution for insulting Turkish
identity. And on the diplomatic front, when Turkey should be polishing its
credentials for eventual European Union membership, it is mired in
historical fights; this May, for instance, it pulled out of a NATO military
exercise to protest the Canadian prime minister’s acknowledgment of the
genocide.

`A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish
Responsibility,’ by Taner Akcam, is a Turkish blast against this national
denial. A historian and former leftist activist now teaching at the Center
for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Minnesota, Akcam is
often described as the first Turkish scholar to call the massacres genocide,
and his impressive achievement here is to shine fresh light on exactly why
and how the Ottoman Empire deported and slaughtered the Armenians. He
directly challenges the doubters back home, basing his powerful book on
Turkish sources in the old Ottoman script – including the failed Ottoman war
crimes tribunals held after World War I. Although he bolsters his case with
material from the American, British and German archives, he writes that the
remaining Ottoman records are enough to show that the ruling party’s central
committee `did deliberately attempt to destroy the Armenian population.’

Akcam closely links the 1915 genocide with World War I. The Unionists, as
the nationalist leaders were known, dreaded the partition of their empire by
the European great powers. Not only did they suspect the Armenians of
dangerous disloyalty, Akcam writes, but massacres of Muslims in Christian
regions of the faltering empire before World War I had fostered a desire for
vengeance.

While never excusing the atrocities, Akcam does argue that the Turkish
leaders chose genocide in a mood of stark desperation. Staggered by a series
of early military defeats, and by the Allied onslaught at Gallipoli, they
fully expected their empire – driven out of so much of its vast territories
over the past two centuries – to collapse. The Turkish heartland of Anatolia
was threatened – as was Constantinople.

The fiercest Ottoman enemy was Russia, which had nearly seized
Constantinople in a bloody 1877-78 war and had a storied history of trying
to foment uprisings against Ottoman rule. The Turkish nationalist line puts
great weight on the internal menace of pro-Russian Armenians. But Akcam
argues that there was little real danger from the Armenian uprisings, which
were limited and directed mostly against the deportations. (British
officials considered the Armenians militarily useless and thus refused to
encourage the uprisings.) Akcam allows that the evacuation of Armenians may
have been justified by military necessity in areas where the Armenian
revolutionaries were strong – but not throughout the empire.

The killings were a colossal undertaking. Paramilitaries and Interior
Ministry gendarmes slaughtered Armenians en masse, while the Interior
Ministry under Talat Pasha, who coordinated the campaign, arranged for the
deportation of untold thousands more to the blazing Syrian deserts. Many of
the deportees were massacred along the way, and those who survived were left
without food, shelter or medicine, in what Akcam calls `deliberate
extermination.’ Akcam cites Ottoman Interior Ministry papers that chillingly
call for keeping Armenians to less than 5 or 10 percent of the population. A
postwar Turkish investigation found that some 800,000 Armenians perished.

After the war, Britain pressured the defeated Ottoman government into
setting up its own war crimes tribunals. Mustafa Kemal Ataturk himself, the
founder of the present Turkish republic, once said that the Unionist leaders
`should have been brought to account for the lives of millions of our
Christian subjects ruthlessly driven en masse from their homes and
massacred.’ Today, those who deny the genocide have to dismiss these trial
records as mere victor’s justice. Akcam uses the records as important
evidence, though he frowns on Britain’s imperialist ambitions and cultural
biases.

This dense, measured and footnote-heavy book poses a stern challenge to
modern Turkish polemicists, and if there is any response to be made, it can
be done only with additional primary research in the archival records. In
1919, a British general hoped the Ottoman war crimes trials would `dispel
the fog of illusions prevailing throughout the country.’ Eighty-seven years
later, the murk still lingers.

Gary J. Bass, the author of `Stay the Hand of Vengeance: The Politics of War
Crimes Tribunals,’ is writing a book on humanitarian intervention.

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company