(PDF) (DOC) (JPG)April 25, 2007

One of the first Turkish scholars to systematically study slaughter of one million Armenians by the Ottoman Turks during World War I, Taner Akçam lays to rest claims by apologists and deniers who minimize the deaths and claim that they were incidental to the war effort, or the fault of the Armenians themselves because they were disloyal.

Basing his account on newly available archival sources, Akçam makes it clear that the persecution of the Armenians was part of an overall Ottoman population policy that aimed at Turkification and the limitation of its non-Turkish population. The policy began in the years before the First World War with the “ethnic cleansing” Greeks and Albanians from southwestern Turkey and spread to encompass Moslem Kurds, Central Asians and Arabs in the eastern part of the country. As Akçam points out, it was an outgrowth of the empire’s decline and was fueled by the nationalism of a younger generation of intellectuals and military leaders schooled in Central Europe.

Akçam end his study with an examination of the role of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey, in failing not only to take responsibility for the genocide, but also for continuing the pre-war policy of removing or limiting the non-Turkish peoples living on the new republic’s territory. Ironically, the title for Akcam’s book, “A Shameful Act,” comes from a speech by Ataturk himself. Unfortunately, however, instead of coming to terms with the crimes that the wartime regime perpetrated, Ataturk set a course of denial from which the government of Turkey has not veered to this day.

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