A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility (review)

Taner Akçam, a Turkish historian, sociologist, and human-rights activist, has written a landmark book—ably translated by Paul Bessemer—on the Armenian Genocide and its continuing denial by the Turkish state and its supporters. His book sheds new light on the motives that led the perpetrators to decide to destroy the Armenian community during World War I. However, his primary contribution is to clarify Turkey’s continuing, perplexing denial. The work is organized into three major parts: The Armenian Question Prior to the Decision for Genocide; The Decision for Genocide and Subsequent Developments; and The Investigation and Prosecution of the War Crimes and Genocide. It is in the third and last part that Akçam addresses the issue of denial.

Throughout the nineteenth century the Ottoman Empire tried to stave off military defeat and dissolution as it was beleaguered by the Great Powers and harried by its minorities. In dealing with the European empires, the various sultans tried to strengthen the state, modernize the military, and balance one power off against the other in the “great game” of international politics. In dealing with minorities, the sultans vacillated between reform and repression. Nor did the Ottomans shrink from widespread massacre as a method of intimidating or even eliminating minorities who demanded self-determination.

In 1894–96, under the rule of Sultan Abdul-Hamid II, tens of thousands of Armenians were massacred, following a period of agitation by some Armenian parties for independence, including calls on the Great Powers for assistance. In 1908 the Young Turks staged a political revolution, led by the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), whose original purpose was to reform the empire in order to preserve it. But the Balkan Wars radicalized the Young Turks and the CUP, who abandoned earlier pluralist notions for a harder-edged integral nationalism. Whereas under Abdul-Hamid Armenians and other minorities had played a legitimate, albeit inferior, role in the Empire, under the nationalists no Christian minority enjoyed a secure place. The Armenians in particular aroused CUP suspicions: they could claim to be the original settlers of Anatolia—the heartland of Turkey—and their population centers were located on the border with Turkey’s traditional enemy Russia.

Even before World War I the Armenians were viewed as an internal threat linked to an external enemy. Once the war started, a danger once theoretical became real in CUP eyes. It is in this context that Armenians in the army were assigned to labor battalions and subsequently massacred. At the same time Armenian communal leaders were forced to surrender weapons, even if they had none: some communities actually purchased weapons in order to comply! With the war turning against the Turks in 1915, the CUP undertook the deportation of the Armenians to preempt any collusion with a Russian invasion.

It soon became apparent that the deportations were not a means for removing an “unreliable” population, but rather for destroying the Armenian community. More than a million Armenians perished as the deportee caravans were set upon by organized killers of the “Special Organization” and others. What outright murder left undone, starvation and disease finished. Some scholars estimate that about ninety percent of the deportees perished en route to the Syrian desert.

The Ottoman Empire signed the Armistice of Mondros on October 30, 1918. On November 1–2, 1918, Talât, Enver, Cemal, and several other leaders of the CUP escaped from Istanbul aboard a German vessel. In January 1919, the Preliminary Peace Conference in Paris established a “Commission on Responsibilities and Sanctions” charged with examining war crimes and crimes against humanity by the Central Powers and their allies, including the Ottoman Empire. Following the Commission’s efforts, the Treaty of Sèvres (signed August 20, 1920) called for the trial of those who had been implicated. Unfortunately a series of circumstances, including the rise of a new nationalism led by Mustafa Kemal in Ankara and intrigues among the...