Six years ago, Taner Akçam reminds us in his book on The Young Turks’ Crime Against Humanity, a Turkish court sentenced two journalists to a year to jail for using the term, “genocide,” to describe “events of 1915.”  It passed a suspended sentence on Sarkis Seropyan and Arat Dink, son of the 2007 slain journalist Hrant Dink (to whom this book is also dedicated). The court found that talk of genocide adversely affects national security, that this claim supports some plans aiming to change Turkey’s geographic and political boundaries and is part of a campaign to destroy its physical and legal structure. Accepting the term, “genocide,” the judge opined, may lead to questioning of the sovereign rights of the Republic which is under siege by genocide resolutions. The assertion that genocide happened is not protected speech. According to Turkish law, such freedoms can be limited in order to protect the security of the nation.

It is alarming that by this logic Taner Akçam’s name appeared on a 2009 “hit list” with “traitors to national security” (p. xii). This list also included Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk whom a court likewise fined in 2011. However, in 2008, paragraph 301 of the Turkish penal code was softened. Insult to “Turkishness” was redefined as insult to the “Turkish nation.” But even this must to be nullified; all the more because Ankara wants to join the European Union. On March 9, 2011, the European Parliament marked this paragraph as detrimental to freedom of speech. Yet, the Turkish courts prosecute persons who have exercised this right. Others like Akçam, who live in America, received death threats, while Turkish officials maintained a black out on this past. So what happened in 1915 that justifies a formal state denial and threats against independent thinkers?

Akçam offers answers. I shall explore them and give an overview of their strengths and weaknesses, the missing parts of the mosaic, and describe an ideological gap. In his previous book, A Shameful Act[1], this chair of Armenian Studies at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, identified the perpetrators of the genocide against Armenians. Now he focuses on 1913 to 1918. He opined that this history reveals two sides of a coin: the same events, but different views. Akçam unified them in one account (p. xiii), but there are multiple narratives, including a German one (350). Based on six hundred Ottoman documents which had not been previously available, Akçam claims that his book as a “first” on the genocide of the Armenians.

Parts of this book appeared in Istanbul. This English version (p. xxxii) differs from the Turkish text as it has revised and new chapters. The reader might miss definitions of Turks, Ottomans, Young Turks and Ottomanism.[2] Akçam uses the term, “Young Turks,” for those who rebelled in 1908. In 1913 they set up a triumvirate of “Three Pashas,” Cemal, Enver and Talat. But the members of the Committee of Unity and Progress, CUP, or Unionists, were as multi-ethnic as the Empire. Turks, the majority, held key positions, although Arabs, Jews, Kurds and Druses made their contribution.  There were a pro-German grand vezir, Halim Said, Tekin Alp, an ideologue, Emmanuel Carasso a Unionist, and Kurds in killer gangs. So, “Young Turks” needed to be defined better by showing how the multi-ethnic mixture changed with men from the Balkans and the Caucasus. What joint ideology drove them ahead? Taner Akçam did not answer this key question.

In the first three chapters Akçam exposed the purge of Ottoman sources from the very start and immediately after the genocide, the plan to cleanse Anatolia, and the drive against the Greeks of Thrace and the Aegean 1913 to 1914. In the next three chapters he dealt with the turn of Ottoman policies against the Greeks, an initial phase of the anti-Armenian policy and its final steps in decision-making. Chapters seven to ten offer documentary archival proof of the intent to annihilate, the related “demographic policy” against the Armenians, and assimilation by forced conversion to Islam and marriage. The last three chapters contain information with regard to Armenian property, the official denial and Ottoman counter-sources, and his conclusions.

The reader gets an overview of Ottoman sources (pp. 453-457). Incriminating records have been destroyed “right after reading.” After the war, the same took place in Istanbul Court-Martials about War Crimes 1918 to 1922. Also, papers were removed by such leading men as the Unionist Nazim Bey and Hans von Seeckt, acting chief of staff of the Ottoman High Command. At the same time, the author also cited Ahmed Esat (later known as Esat Uras) who disclosed that an order to kill deportees was sent via courier to governors. After reading it, the message was to be returned to the couriers, who were often secretaries of the CUP party. This was corroborated in the trial of March 5, 1919. Akçam reprinted Talat’s cable of June 22, 1915 to governors concerning forced conversion to Islam with the note to remove it from the telegraph office and destroy it (pp. 13-15). From the start, the perpetrators worked with a notion of guilt and endeavored to hide their crimes.

Genocidal Attempts Against all “Infidels”

Until 1913, the Balkan Wars led to a Muslim migration into the Ottoman realm. In the fall of that year and in 1914 the Ottomans exchanged populations by agreements with Bulgaria, Serbia and Greece. For a short period, they provided for the bilateral exchange of minorities to each of their respective ethno-religious majority lands. According to Akçam, there was a Unionist plan of further ethno-religious homogenization in Anatolia with two parts: cleansing of Anatolia’s non-Muslim population and the assimilation or Turkification of Anatolia’s non-Turkish people (p. xiv). As it turned out, all “infidels” were included.

Akçam discovered cables dealing with the expulsion of 500 Russian Jews from Jaffa on February 6, 1915. He came to the conclusion that deportations of which the government was unaware took place in a great number within the area controlled by Cemal Pasha’s Fourth Army. Here Akçam argued that Cemal ordered a number of expulsions that he considered necessary on the basis of political and/or military necessity. On August, 23, an “irritated Talat” (p. 61) asked Cemal about the identity of “1,700 Jews to be expelled” and “the reasons of their expulsion.”

Was Talat really “unaware” or “irritated” about expulsions for “political and/or military necessities?” Was it one or the other? In many cases a dual track-system was at work, which Akçam uncovered for Armenians (p. 380). The Ottomans had sent “protective cables” in favor of a “fair treatment” of the deportees (also to pacify their German partners). But the Unionists sent contradictory “genocidal cables.” The latter were often dispatched on the same official or private telegraph lines or via courier (p. 13). With regard to Jewish affairs in Palestine there were no “war necessities” for the deportations, as may be seen in Jewish and German records.[3]

Was there an ideology that favored the liquidation of non-Muslim minorities? The talk that Russian Jews belonged to an enemy state does not apply, for the persecutions began in 1913. Cemal tried twice, in 1915 and 1917, to drive all Jews from Palestine regardless of their citizenship. This also affected the German Jews there. There are eyewitness reports that lead to one conclusion: as the Armenian genocide progressed, the Unionists also tried to carry out the same policy against Palestinian Jews. They were unable to achieve this goal because of the Kaiser’s pro-Zionist line, Zionist counter steps and diplomatic protests. One tenth of Palestinian Jews perished in this attempted genocide. Akçam cannot explain this ideology, which is a weak point in a great study.

Greek villagers of western Anatolia were forced out and replaced by Muslim immigrants (pp. 69-70). Special Organization Units, teshkilat-i makhsusa, did the intimidation, terror and killings. They cleared out villages, pushed males into conscription for labor brigades and redistributed Greek-owned businesses to Muslims. In 1914 Celal Bayar was involved as a civilian. Later, he became President of the Republic. In late 1916, Bahaeddin Şakir fully turned against the Greeks of the Samsun area (p. 100, 112).  Akçam viewed this development as a trial run of the deportation of Armenians (p. 94). He also pointed to the ties between Berlin and Istanbul. There was a key figure, the German marine attaché Hans Humann. A boyhood friend of war minister Enver, he tried to slow down the force against “coastal Greeks.” Nonetheless, the Ottomans expelled them. Akçam stressed that the “evacuations” 1916 to 1918 were enforced with brutality, but for what purpose?

Akçam focused on Armenians though he neglected cables which contained the incitement to jihad and Islamism. He wrote that “about 150 families have been converted to Islamism” (p. 292, 301). But they converted to Islam, the religion, not to the ideology of Islamism. This is true for the sultan’s jihad appeal of November 14, 1914. Also the “Ottoman population or settlement policy” (p. 271) took place in a multiethnic empire and was not an isolated initiative against the Armenians. What about non-Armenian Christians who were murdered, such as Assyrians and other “infidels?” It is hard not to stumble over so many cables where Ottoman soldiers explained that their killings followed the sultan’s jihad or “German wishes” to do it à la franca,” that means “the European or German way.”[4]

Since a coherent perspective is missing here, the author cannot sufficiently explain the ideological nexus which motivated the previous Armenian massacres, which had taken place since 1894, the parallel attempts against the Jews since 1915, the fading war threat in Gallipoli – after March 1915 – and the full jihadization of Islam by the German-Ottoman axis. Akçam missed or ignored this literature.[5] So Akçam cannot explain the fact that Armenians and other minorities were subjected to a genocide which was rooted in a strain of Islamism. In fact, on February 1, 1916, minister of war Enver Pasha told the German politician Gustav Stresemann that the Ottomans had killed up to a million and a half Armenians.[6]

Key Contradictions

On the one hand the author claimed that the context of such mass murder was the division of the empire into nation-states (449). In fact, the Armenian genocide was a part of a comprehensive operation intended to save the empire, — or rather a Turkish nation state. Akçam states that it is incorrect to interpret the Armenian genocide along the lines of a clash between the Muslim groups as Turks, Kurds or Circassians versus its Christian groups like Armenians, Greeks and Assyrians. Rather this genocide must be seen as an issue between the Ottoman state and its subjects and part of specific policies of the regime. The rulers viewed not only one group, due its religious and ethnic makeup as a threat. Thus they intended to expel those groups from Anatolia, and failing that, to kill them. If this was the case, how can he explain the same policy against the other groups, including the Jews of Palestine?

On the other hand, Akçam by citing many records proved that the major fault line of genocide was the one he called “incorrect” for interpretation (p. 449). This was between the Turkish Muslim majority and the non-Muslim minorities. That basic difference was in the mind of the people involved as the Empire’s fundamental classification due to religion in every Ottoman census: Muslims and non-Muslims (p. 32). Only this deeper distinction permits a correct understanding for other eras from the Ottoman-Russian War of 1878 up to the Armenian massacres 1894-1896, 1914 to 1918 and, briefly after the war, in the decline of the Ottoman Empire and the emergence of the Republic of Turkey. The author did not clarify what was the major ideology, the driving force in the minds of the Ottomans that was additionally instigated by the German-Ottoman jihad.  Also missing from the index are the terms, jihad and Islamism.

Akçam did not discuss at all the appeal to jihad by the Ottoman sultan-caliph (and counter declarations by Agha Khan III) for example. But there are many cables with reports by Turkish and Kurdish witnesses who explained that they perpetrated massacres in the name of jihad. Sometimes common soldiers and officers explained that the Sultan declared jihad or even that these were German orders by the Kaiser. The author acknowledges that the policy of “Ottoman Islamist supremacy against infidels” played a role, and the Unionists saw the Christians as second class citizens (335). Only one minority was protected by a sovereign state, the Greeks. Therefore, the Ottomans took special care not to draw Athens into the war. Two groups were unprotected by a state, the Armenians and the Jews. Islamism was the main ideology behind the Armenian genocide and the attempted genocide against the Jews of Palestine. It received impetus as a result of an organized incitement campaign of German–Ottoman jihadization of Islam which openly took place since 1914 and is the missing part of the story.[7]

To sum up, Akçam has unearthed new skeletons in the form of documents from Turkish archives but he overlooked the “genocidal brain and soul.” We know better now what steered the limbs but less about the ideology in their minds. The author mentioned Muslim fanaticism (p. 289, 307), but this is not enough. It is only part of the story. We can compare his results with other records. His use of the term, “population policy,” is weak. It works for official Ottoman views. If two thirds of a populace were destroyed, can we accept it as policy? (p. 450) “Population policy” was a code and cover, as was the term, “relocation to designated areas.” The soldiers and bands in the killing fields were not driven by such a “policy” but rather by jihad and Islamism. Some twenty-five years later, Hitler and his accomplices such as the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, al-Hajj Amin al-Husaini, and Iraq’s ex-prime minister, Rashid Ali al-Kailani, again used this very genocidal strain of that ideology.

After the Second World War, the fate of the Ottoman’s Armenian population was high on the list of crimes against humanity. One film included a clip from a 1949 CBS interview with Raphael Lemkin, the law professor who in 1943 coined the term “genocide” which corresponds with the German word, “Völkermord,” (which contains a plural, the murder of peoples). “I became interested in genocide,” he said, “because it happened so many times,” Lemkin tells commentator Quincy Howe: “First to the Armenians, then after the Armenians, Hitler took action.”[8] Hitler and al-Husaini, who was the chief Islamist of the time, were allied observers of the Armenian genocide and the attempted genocide against Jews in World War One. They used their understanding of these earlier events as a precedent and blue print for genocides against Jews, Slavs and others during World War Two.

Taner Akçam’s study represents a giant step forward. He produced a most important book, all the more so because the ideology of Islamism has endured,[9] and most recently some of its outstanding proponents have seized power in the Middle East.

DR. WOLFGANG G. SCHWANITZ is a historian of the Middle East and German Middle East policy. He is the author of five volumes and the editor of ten books, including Germany and the Middle East, 1871-1945 (Wiener, 2004). His upcoming book is German Middle Eastern Studies After 9/11 (Weist, Berlin 2013).

This book review has been made available to the Faculty Forum courtesy of the Jewish Political Studies Review.