Armenian Genocide.

• Author: Evans, John M.
• Position: 'The Young Turks' Crime Against Humanity: The Armenian Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing in the Ottoman Empire' & ' Judgment at Istanbul: The Armenian Genocide Trials' - Book review

The Young Turks' Crime Against Humanity:The Armenian Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing in the Ottoman Empire By Taner Akcam, ISBN-13-978-0691153339,Princeton University Press, 2012, 483 pp. $39.50, Kindle edition: ASIN:B007BP3BIU, $21.73.

Judgment at Istanbul: The Armenian Genocide Trials By Vahakn N. Dadrian and Taner Akcam, ISBN-13-978-0857452511, Zoryan Institute (Berghahn Books), 2011, 363 pp., $110.00

These two books are the latest, and perhaps most conclusive, of the many I have read about the 1915 Armenian Genocide. Dr. Taner Akcam's The Young Turks' Crime Against Humanity: The Armenian Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing in the Ottoman Empire (Princeton University Press, 2012) constitutes a major breakthrough in our understanding of the social engineering that led to the near destruction of the Armenians of Anatolia, and of the dual-track mechanism for organizing it that the Young Turks employed. Judgment at Istanbul: The Armenian Genocide Trials (Zoryan Institute; 2011) co-authored by Akcam and veteran Armenian historian Vahakn Dadrian, gives the English-speaking world, for the first time, the full story of the courts- martial constituted by the Ottoman Government in 1919 to hold to account the perpetrators of the deportations and massacres (seven of the most important of whom had already escaped to safety on a German warship).

Both volumes are a must for serious scholars of the Armenian Genocide, but The Young Turks' Crime Against Humanity is the better value for most readers (Judgment at Istanbul, published first in Turkish in 2008, and now in English from Berghahn Books, lists at $110), although university libraries will want to have both.

Dr. Akcam, a Turkish historian now at Clark, was the first scholar of Turkish origin to recognize the Armenian Genocide; he has made huge contributions to understanding it in his 2004 From Empire to Republic: Turkish Nationalism & the Armenian Genocide and A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility (2006) and in innumerable articles and lectures.

A close friend of the Turkish Armenian journalist Hrant Dink, who was assassinated on an Istanbul street in January, 2007, Akcam has himself been the target of death threats, yet he has continued to mine the Ottoman archives, which he is able to read in the pre-reform script, with jaw-dropping results.

One of his recurring themes is that the Ottoman archives, far from painting a picture at odds with that which is already...