Meet Taner Akcam, Anti-Denialist

by Dexter Van Zile (August 2012)

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Erdogan has a problem.

His name is Taner Akcam.

The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, a book by Franz Werfel about a group of Armenians that successfully defended themselves in a mountain stronghold against Turkish forces intent on annihilating them before they were rescued by the French in 1915. (This story was documented by Edward Minasian’s book Musa Dagh.)

The efforts of the Turkish government to hide the truth continues today. Efforts to speak honestly about what happened to the Armenian people in Turkey invites trouble. In 2011, one leading Turkish intellectual was fined for insulting the Turkish state.

This helps explain why Akcam lives in the U.S. and not Turkey. The New Yorker describes his odyssey as follows:

A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility published by Metropolitan Books in 2006, Akcam lays out his case in authoritative and general terms, introducing readers to the overwhelming historical evidence of the crime committed against the Armenians by the founders of the modern state of Turkey.

In other words, Armenian aspirations for equal status, which manifested themselves in the late 1800s, helped incite hostility on the part of their Muslim neighbors in the Anatolian Peninsula, which helped paved the way for their destruction in the 1900s. This helps shed light on current events in the modern Middle East, where Christians and other religious and ethnic minorities in the Middle East are under siege. Non-Muslims who insist on their human rights are upending the social structure throughout the region, with potentially disastrous consequences.

The Young Turks’ Crime Against Humanity: The Armenian Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing in the Ottoman Empire published by Princeton University Press earlier this year, Akcam delves into the historical record in a much more technical manner than he did in A Shameful Act. He analyzes the telegrams and other documents produced by Ottoman officials to prove the existence of a coordinated and centralized campaign to extirpate the Armenian people from the Anatolian Peninsula, particularly from those provinces where hopes for their political emancipation were the strongest.

Under this demographic policy, Armenians were only allowed to remain as a small segment of the population of a province (between five and 10 percent) making it impossible for them to mount a challenge to Turkish control in any part of peninsula.

To achieve this quota, Armenians were forcibly relocated inside the Anatolian Peninsula and when their numbers exceeded the quota set for them, they were driven to locations in other parts of the Ottoman Empire, outside the peninsula where their population was not to exceed 10 percent of the local population.

As it became evident that it was impossible to adhere to these quotas, the Young Turks decided it was necessary for the Armenians to be annihilated. The result was the death of huge numbers of Armenians, with most estimates between 1.3 and 1.5 million Armenians being killed between 1915 and 1918. Many were massacred. Others starved in transit. Many drowned in the Black Sea after being thrown from boats.

Some Armenians escaped death through forcible conversion to Islam and many Armenian females were forcibly married to Muslim men.

The decision to exterminate the Armenian population in Anatolia was not taken all at once, but a consequence of increasingly radical decisions needed to achieve the demographic quotas described above, Akcam reports.

In the aftermath of the genocide, Turkish officials attempted to destroy many of the records to hide the enormity of their crime. Nevertheless Akcam was able to document how Talat Pasha, Interior Minister for the Ottoman Empire, directed, monitored and oversaw the destruction of the Armenian people in the future state of Turkey. He did this through the use of ciphered (or encrypted) telegrams that instructed local officials how to get rid of the Armenians and confiscate their property in their provinces.

Akcam documents how Ottoman officials who refused to participate in the killing were themselves killed and how government officials who appropriated for themselves Armenian property (intended for use by the state) were punished and how some of those responsible for the killings themselves were protected from punishment by Talat Pasha.

The cumulative impact of the evidence Akcam has compiled and elucidated in the course of his career tells an undeniable story of one people devouring the life and property of another.

Dexter Van Zile is Christian Media Analyst for the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA).

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