The Daily Telegraph (LONDON)
October 13, 2007 Saturday

‘The river flowed with blood’ Helen Brown applauds a scrupulously
researched history of human liquidation that makes a legal case for
genocide

by Helen Brown

BOOKS; Pg. 28

A Shameful Act: the Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish
Responsibility
by Taner Akçam
tr by Paul Bessemer
580pp, Constable & Robinson, pounds 9.99 (pbk)

T pounds 9.99 (plus 99p p&p) 0870 428 4112

In 2005, the Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk was charged with the
criminal offence of "insulting Turkishness” for stating that "a
million Armenians were killed in these [Turkish] lands and nobody
dares to talk about it”. Last October, he was awarded the Nobel
Prize for Literature, becoming the first Turkish Nobel prizewinner.
But in Turkey the use of the word "genocide” to describe the deaths
of hundreds of thousands of Armenians in the early 20th century is
still taboo, and carries a three-year prison sentence.

In his scrupulously researched book on the ethnic cleansing that
Theodore Roosevelt described as "the greatest crime” of the First
World War, the Turkish-born sociologist and historian Taner Akçam
calls on the people of Turkey "to consider the suffering inflicted in
their name”. In the measured tone used throughout his account of
these horrific human "liquidations”, Akçam tells the people of his
homeland that all communities are prone to dwell not on the wrongs
they have inflicted but on those they have endured. And that in
recording the decline of the Ottoman Empire, Turkey has too long
"memorialised” the massacre of Muslims by Armenians, Bulgarians,
Greeks and others "while making no mention of suffering inflicted by
Muslims on non-Muslim groups such as the massacre of Christians, let
alone the Armenian genocide… To prevent the recurrence of such
events,” he says, "people must first consider their own
responsibility, discuss it, debate it, and recognise it.”

To be fair to the men and women on the Turkish streets, there are
practical reasons why they might not know too much about their
country’s uncomfortable past. The Alphabet Reform of 1928 changed
Turkish script from Arabic to Latin letters and, "with a stroke of a
pen”, writes Akçam, "the Turkish people lost their connection to
written history”, becoming dependent on the version sanctioned by a
state that had "pruned” its archives of most incriminating documents
in 1918. To this day, the complete official court records from the
period are absent and those documents still extant are often
dismissed by Turkish scholars as "victors’ justice” imposed by the
Allies, eager to discredit the Ottomans and carve up the empire.

Akçam – who obtained political asylum in Germany in the 1970s after
receiving a 10-year prison sentence for involvement in a student
journal, and now teaches in America – has sought out documents from
around the world. He has hunted down the memoirs of foreign
missionaries and ambassadors and the telegrams sent by the
perpetrators to make a solid case for the genocide having been
planned and orchestrated by the Turkish Nationalist party. He
explains how, following their defeat in the Balkan War of 1912-13,
the Ottomans lost more than 60 per cent of their territory, and a
deep belief developed that it was impossible for the Turks to live
side by side with the empire’s remaining Christian population.
Although Armenian men were conscripted to fight for Turkey in the
Great War, they were suspected of forming a fifth column. And after
Turkey’s devastating defeat by the Russians at Sarikamish in 1914-5,
the Armenians in the army were led away from their units and killed.

It was also at this time that the "deportations” began. Although
Turkish war criminals argued that they just wanted the Armenians out,
Akçam points out that no transport was provided. He convincingly
argues that the implicit aim was elimination. Armenian homes and
possessions were confiscated or looted. If groups of Armenian women,
children and the elderly weren’t slaughtered, they died on death
marches or through starvation. Men such as Celal, the
governor-general of Aleppo, asked the ministry of war to provide
housing for the deportees and was refused. He recalls feeling "like a
man standing by a river without any means of rescue. But instead of
water, the river flowed with blood and thousands of innocent
children, blameless old men, helpless women and strong young people
all on their way to destruction. Those I could seize with my hands I
saved; the others I assume floated downstream, never to return.”
Such moments of emotion are rare in this book: Akçam is attempting to
make a watertight legal case for genocide, and has nearly 200 pages
of footnotes.

We in the West must face our own responsibility. We read how, after
1920, the British abandoned their demand for the war criminals to be
punished, and many of those responsible found their way straight back
into the "new” Turkish government. In a depressing final paragraph,
Akçam says that because the Great Powers used words such as "human
rights” and "democracy”

to legitimise the most obvious colonial moves, Turks began to view
both notions as ‘Western hypocrisy’. Beyond the specific historical
reasons, the fundamental problems that lay behind the failure to
bring the perpetrators of the Armenian genocide to justice persist to
this day. If it is not possible to draw a clear line of division
between humanitarian goals, on the one hand, and a state’s economic
and political interests, on the other, then how are we to come to a
consensus about ethical norms?

While acknowledging that this question remains unanswered, Akçam
seems optimistic. He has dedicated his book to a devout Muslim Turk
who risked death by hiding members of an Armenian family in his home,
whose "courageous act continues to point a way towards a different
relationship between Turks and Armenians.”