Dadrian-Akcam Book on Turkish Courts-Martial Now in Third Edition

Despite being based on a taboo topic that is subject to legal restriction in Turkey, the Dadrian-Akcam book on the Turkish courts-martial, titled Tehcir ve Taktil: Divan-i Harb-i Orfî Zabitlari. Ittihad ve Terakki’nin Yargilanmasi, 1919-1922, is now in its third edition, indicating remarkable interest in the topic of the Armenian Genocide there.

First published some 16months ago by Bilgi University Press in Istanbul, this 732-page volume is a detailed reconstruction, with a historical and legal analysis, of the post-World War I Turkish military tribunals prosecuting the perpetrators of “crimes against the Armenians” during the war, and is based on original Ottoman sources. Jointly compiled and edited by Professors Vahakn N. Dadrian, the director of genocide research at the Zoryan Institute, and Taner Akcam, the Kaloosdian/Mugar Chair in Armenian Genocide Studies at Clark University, this compendium is ushered in by a 125-page introduction by Dadrian.

It explores the criminal prosecution in the 1919-21 post-war period of the perpetrators of the war-time Armenian Genocide. Supported by a succession of post-war but pre-Kemalist Turkish governments, Turkish military tribunals spent months gathering incriminating evidence as part of their pre-trial interrogations. As a result, the Mazhar Inquiry Commission was able to amass, classify, and catalogue a wealth of evidence attesting to the deliberate and planned nature of the wholesale liquidation of the targeted Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire. Witness testimonies included disclosures by high-ranking military officers, governors of several ranks, and Young Turk Ittihad party leaders, including the extensive affidavit supplied by wartime Third Army commander General Mehmet Vehip.

Several aspects of these trials, unprecedented in Ottoman-Turkish history, render the resulting documentation of the centrally organized mass murder invaluable. Foremost among these is the nature of the evidence-in-chief, involving secret and top-secret official ciphers issuing from Talat Pasha, the interior minister, party chief, and prime architect of the Armenian Genocide. Equally important, all these ciphers were authenticated by competent officials from both the Justice and Interior Ministries before being introduced as prima facie evidence. Moreover, the defendants were confronted with these documents asking them to verify the authenticity of their signatures at the end of the documents.

An English-language edition of this important book is set to be published by a major American university press before the end of the year.