(PDF) (DOC) (JPG)March 29, 2007

Some of the 270 attendees at the lecture by
Professor Tan Akcam

On March 29, before an audience of over 260 students, faculty, and community members, the noted historian Taner Akcam linked the Armenian Genocide of 1915-1917 to Ottoman Turkey’s population policy implemented on the eve of World War I to maintain Turkish hegemony over a diminished and endangered empire. The event was sponsored by Ramapo College’s Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies and the Armenian National Committee of New Jersey. Introducing Professor Akcam was Dr. Antranig Kasbarian, Nagorno-Karabagh Program Director of the New York-based Tufenkian Foundation.

One of the first Turkish academics to acknowledge and discuss openly the Armenian Genocide, Akcam based his talk on his book A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility, published by Metropolitan Books last November (ISBN 0805079327).

Making extensive use of Ottoman and other sources previously unused by historians of any nationality, Akcam placed the genocide within the context of Turkish nationalism. He showed an empire in a state of collapse plagued by dissension and contradiction. In its dying breath, as Akcam’s presents, Ottoman Turkey lashed out against and attempted to constrain its ethnic and religious minorities.

Professor Taner Akcam

According to Akcam, the Turkish government adopted a policy of “ethnic cleansing.” Greeks and Albanians were deported from southwestern Turkey, while Moslem Kurds, Central Asians and Arabs were moved from their domiciles in eastern Turkey and subject to “Turkification.” The culmination of this process was the first of the 20th Century’s genocides, in which over a million Armenian men, women and children lost their lives and livelihoods through organized killing, rape and deportation.

Professor Akcam made this tragedy come alive by citing from telegrams and other documents penned by the Ottoman Turkish leadership. They poignantly depicted a situation in which the government pursued its policy of maintaining minority representation in most areas to five to ten percent of the total population against the Armenians with particular vehemence. Among the Turkish claims that Ackam puts to rest was that the government drafted a policy and set aside funds to compensate Armenians for confiscations and loss of income incurred during the expulsions. Documents unearthed by Ackam reveal that the authorities erected a deliberate smokescreen to hide widespread persecution and expropriation.

Taner Akcam was born in the province of Ardahan, Turkey, in 1953. He became interested in Turkish politics at an early age. As the editor-in-chief of a student political journal, he was arrested in 1976 and sentenced to ten years imprisonment. Amnesty International adopted him as one of their first prisoners of conscience, and a year later he escaped by digging a tunnel with a stove leg and fled to Germany, where he received political asylum.

In 1988, Akcam began work as a research scientist at the Hamburg Institute for Social Research. While researching the late Ottoman Empire and early Republic, especially the history of political violence and torture in Turkey, he became interested in the Armenian genocide. In 1996 he received his doctorate from the University of Hanover. His dissertation thesis was titled “The Turkish National Movement and the Armenian Genocide Against the Background of the Military Tribunals in Istanbul Between 1919 and 1922.” Since 2002 he has been a visiting associate professor of history at the University of Minnesota.

Akcam is the author of ten books and numerous articles in Turkish, German, English and other languages.

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