ARMENIAN GENOCIDE SCHOLARS’ JOINT BOOK PUBLISHED
PanARMENIAN.Net
November 22, 2011 – 11:17 AMT
PanARMENIAN.Net – A book entitled Judgment at Istanbul: The Armenian
Genocide Trials was published by Berghahn Books of New York and Oxford.
In the aftermath of its disastrous defeat in WWI, Ottoman Turkey
had to face the wartime crime of the destruction of its Armenian
population. An inquiry commissioned by the Ottoman government in 1919
presented enough preliminary evidence to organize a series of trials
involving the perpetrators of these crimes. It is the record of these
trials and the unparalleled details they provide on the planning and
implementation of these heinous crimes that has brought together the
two most renowned scholars of the Armenian Genocide, Professors Vahakn
Dadrian and Taner Akcam, in their first joint publication.
After years of research and analysis, the authors have compiled for
the first time in English the complete documentation of the trial
proceedings and have set these findings in their historical and legal
context, Zoryan Institute announced.
In describing the book, Prof. Dadrian commented, “This is a most
important work, for two reasons. First, it is based on authentic
Turkish documentation, which the Ottoman government was forced to
release during the trials. Second, unlike most books on the Armenian
Genocide, which are historical interpretations, this study, for the
first time is based also on the testimony of high-ranking Ottoman
officials, given under oath, on the magnitude of the crimes against
the Armenians, and in this sense, serves as a legal case study of
the Armenian Genocide.”
During his more than fifty years of research on the subject, Dadrian
discovered that the Takvim-i Vekâyi, the official Ottoman government’s
gazette, was not the only major source of information on these military
tribunals. In fact, Renaissance, a French language Armenian newspaper
in Constantinople at the time, reported summaries of many of the
trial proceedings taken from the reports of the Ottoman language
newspapers of the day, which were otherwise not accounted for in
official government records.
Prof. Akcam, the book’s co-author, noted that “While the official
government record lists only twelve trials, newspapers provide us
details on sixty-three. For the first time, information from the
Ottoman newspapers of the era has been utilized to reconstruct the
trials. A great deal of effort was required to track down all issues
possible of fourteen different Ottoman newspapers, which meant
visiting many libraries in different cities. Often, the articles
we were looking for had been cut out of the paper in one location,
but we were able to find a copy in another location.”
The Zoryan Institute sponsored the collection of these newspapers,
their translation and transliteration, as part of the long-term
project known as “Creating a Common Body of Knowledge,” and retains
copies in its archives.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
