The Young Turks' Crime against Humanity

One of ForeignAffairs.com’s Best Books on the Middle East for 2012 “Akcam has long courted controversy in Turkey, where he was jailed as a student activist in the 1970s before claiming asylum in Germany, but his intellectual courage is beyond question. Moreover, while Turkey’s official account of what happened in 1915 is unchanged, Turkish public and intellectual opinion is now much more open to debate. This dispassionate, scholarly study is a valuable contribution to help that debate move on.”–Delphine Strauss, Financial Times “[T]he fact that a Turkish historian with access to the Ottoman archives has written this book is of immeasurable significance.”–Foreign Affairs “Akcam has long been the most vocal Turkish scholars regarding the Ottoman participation in genocidal acts against Armenians. Here, using Ottoman archival sources, the author makes his case that the Young Turk government had planned prior to WWI to remove the empire’s Christian and no-Turkish Muslim population… The author’s discussion of the removal and execution of the Armenians is extremely detailed and well documented, and his usage of Ottoman sources, although questioned by Turkish nationalist scholars, is a very important addition to the study of this issue.”–Choice “[A] major breakthrough in the 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… [A] must for serious scholars of the Armenian Genocide.”–John M. Evans, former U.S. Ambassador to Armenia (2004-2006), American Diplomacy “Taner Ak?am’s study represents a giant step forward. He produced a most important book, all the more so because the ideology of Islamism has endured, and most recently some of its outstanding proponents have seized power in the Middle East.”–Dr. Wolfgang G. Schwanitz, Scholars for Peace in the Middle East “Taner Ak?am’s study represents a giant step forward. He produced a most important book, all the more so because the ideology of Islamism has endured, and most recently some of its outstanding proponents have seized power in the Middle East.”–Wolfgang G. Schwanitz, Jewish Political Studies Review

Taner Akçam, the first scholar of Turkish origin to publicly acknowledge the Armenian Genocide, holds the Kaloosdian and Mugar Chair in Armenian Genocide Studies at Clark University. His many books include A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility (Metropolitan Books).

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