A Question of Genocide Armenians and Turks at the End of the Ottoman Empire

by Suny, Ronald Grigor; Göçek, Fatma Müge; Naimark, Norman M.

• ISBN13: 9780195393743
• ISBN10: 0195393740
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-02-23
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

One hundred years after the deportations and mass murder of Armenians, Assyrians, and other peoples in the final years of the Ottoman Empire, the history of the Armenian Genocide remains a victim of historical distortion, state-sponsored falsification, and the deep divisions between Armenians and Turks. Working together for the first time, Turkish, Armenian, and other scholars present here the most accurate reconstruction of what happened and why. This book is the product of a decade of scholarly encounters that launched intense investigations by historians and other social scientists dedicated to honest exploration of one of history's greatest tragedies. While the word "genocide" still divides communities, there is no longer any serious doubt that the Young Turk government ordered and carried out in 1915-1916 mass deportations and massacres targeted toward designated ethnoreligious groups. This volume includes reviews of the historical debates surrounding these events, portraits of the perpetrators, detailed accounts of the massacres themselves, and reflections on the broader implications of what happened then on what might happen now. Here history is not only the stories that we tell about the past but the foundation on which might be built new understandings of the present and possible futures.

Author Biography

Ronald Grigor Suny is the Charles Tilly Collegiate Professor of Social and Political History and Director of the Eisenberg Institute of Historical Studies at the University of Michigan. Fatma Müge Göçek is Associate Professor of Sociology and Women's Studies at the University of Michigan. Norman M. Naimark is the Robert and Florence McDonnell Professor of East European Studies and Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.

Table of Contents

Contributors	p. ix
Preface	p. xiii
Acknowledgments	p. xxi
Introduction: Leaving It to the Historians	p. 3
Historiographies of the Genocide
Writing Genocide: The Fate of the Ottoman Armenians	p. 15
Reading Genocide: Turkish Historiography on 1915	p. 42
On the Eve of Catastrophe
The Silence of the Land: Agrarian Relations, Ethnicity, and Power	p. 55
What Was Revolutionary about Armenian Revolutionary Parties in the Ottoman Empire?	p. 82
Non-Muslims in the Ottoman Army and the Ottoman Defeat in the Balkan War of 1912-1913	p. 113
From ôPatriotismö to Mass Murder: Dr. Mehmed Resid (1873-1919)	p. 126
Genocide in International Context
The Politics and Practice of the Russian Occupation of Armenia, 1915-February 1917	p. 151
Germany and the Young Turks: Revolutionaries into Statesmen	p. 175
Who Still Talked about the Extermination of the Armenians? German Talk and German Silences	p. 199
Genocide in Local Context
Zeytun and the Commencement of the Armenian Genocide	p. 221
The Ottoman Treatment of the Assyrians	p. 244
The First World War and the Development of the Armenian Genocide	p. 260
Pouring a People into the Desert: The ôDefinitive Solutionö of the Unionists to the Armenian Question	p. 276
Continuities
ôTurkey for the Turksö: Demographic Engineering in Eastern Anatolia, 1914-1945	p. 287
Renewal and Silence: Postwar Unionist and Kemalist Rhetoric on the Armenian Genocide	p. 306
Notes	p. 317
Index	p. 415
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