A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility » (Reprint)

Born in Ardahan province, Turkey, in 1953, Taner Akçam is the author of ten scholarly works of history and sociology, as well as numerous articles in Turkish, German, and English. He currently teaches at the University of Minnesota.

"The definitive account of the organized destruction of the Ottoman Armenians . . . No future discussion of the history will be able to ignore this brilliant book."—Orhan Pamuk

Beginning in 1915, under the cover of a world war, some one million Armenians were killed through starvation, forced marches, and mass acts of slaughter. Although Armenians and the judgment of history have long held the Ottoman powers responsible for genocide, modern Turkey has rejected any such claim.

Now, in a pioneering work of excavation, Turkish historian Taner Akçam has made unprecedented use of Ottoman and other sources—military and court records, parliamentary minutes, letters, and eyewitness reports—to produce a scrupulous account of Ottoman culpability. Tracing the causes of the mass destruction, Akçam reconstructs its planning and implementation by the departments of state, the military, and the ruling political parties, and he probes the multiple failures to bring the perpetrators to justice.

As the topic of the Armenian genocide provokes ever-greater passion and controversy around the world, Akçam's work has only become more important and relevant. Beyond its timeliness, however, A Shameful Act is sure to take its lasting place as a classic and necessary work on the subject.

The New York Times - Gary J. Bass

A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility, by Taner Akcam, is a Turkish blast against this national denial. A historian and former leftist activist now teaching at the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Minnesota, Akcam is often described as the first Turkish scholar to call the massacres genocide, and his impressive achievement here is to shine fresh light on exactly why and how the Ottoman Empire deported and slaughtered the Armenians. He directly challenges the doubters back home, basing his powerful book on Turkish sources in the old Ottoman script—including the failed Ottoman war crimes tribunals held after World War I. Although he bolsters his case with material from the American, British and German archives, he writes that the remaining Ottoman records are enough to show that the ruling party's central committee "did deliberately attempt to destroy the Armenian population."

Map     xii
Preface     1
Author's Note     15
The Armenian Question Prior to the Decision for Genocide     17
The Ottoman State and Its Non-Muslim Populations     19
The Union and Progress Era     47
Turkish Nationalism     82
The Decision for Genocide and Subsequent Developments     109
What Led to the Decision for Genocide?     111
The Decision and Its Aftermath     149
The investigations and Prosecution of the War Crimes and Genocide     205
The Question of Punishing the "Turks"     207
Ottoman Government Initiatives     243
The Turkish National Movement's Position on the Genocide     303
The Final Phase of the Trials     349
Why the Postwar Trials Failed     368
Notes     377
Acknowledgments     465
Index     467