Taner Akçam’s The Young Turks’ Crime Against Humanity: The Armenian Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing in the Ottoman Empire examines the genocidal character of the deportations and massacres of Ottoman Armenians on the basis of Ottoman archival records. Akçam cites approximately six hundred Ottoman documents to demonstrate that state policies towards the empire’s Armenians were intended to bring about their annihilation and were, therefore, genocidal in nature.¹ Akçam’s somewhat unorthodox reliance on a single archival source to support his argument fills an important gap in the literature related to the Armenian Genocide. The book demonstrates, for the first time, that Ottoman archival records surrounding the events of 1915-1916 confirm that the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) deliberately implemented a policy of ethnoreligious homogenization in Anatolia that aimed to destroy the Ottoman Armenian population.² By illustrating the consistency of these records with the information found in German and American documents, Akçam establishes that Ottoman and Western sources contain complementary rather than contradictory information on Ottoman policies towards the Armenians during World War I.³  Akçam, thus, offers a new perspective to assess the validity of Ottoman and Western archives regarding the genocide, breaking a taboo among scholars who often discredit one set of archival sources or the other as unreliable.⁴

Akçam first examines the ethnic cleansing of Anatolia’s Christian population and the assimilation of Anatolia’s non-Turkish Muslim communities to highlight how the Armenian Genocide was part of a larger systematic state policy intended to achieve ethnoreligious homogeneity in Anatolia. This policy had two main goals: to establish a collective Muslim Turkish identity in Anatolia and to prevent the European powers, primarily Russia, from intervening in the empire’s internal affairs on behalf of Anatolia’s Christian population. The CUP’s nationalist logic contradicted that of empire; it undermined the supranational identity of Ottomanism which superseded religious or ethnic affiliations to bind the empire together.⁵ The policy to homogenize Anatolia began implementation after the losses of the 1912-1913 Balkan Wars, when large numbers of Muslim refugees from the Balkans, as well as Muslim expellees from other regions such as the Caucasus, began to migrate to Anatolia.⁶ Population exchange agreements with Bulgaria, Greece, and Serbia in the aftermath of the wars (many of which were not put into action due to the outbreak of WWI) recognized the right of anyone to emigrate from the Ottoman Empire and settle in the country of their “own” community.⁷ These agreements territorialized ethnoreligious identities, implying that Christians were foreign to the Ottoman Empire and Muslims to Balkan states. Decisions regarding where to settle these refugees were made with the intention to reshape Anatolia’s demographic character on the basis of its Muslim Turkish population.⁸

Akçam analyzes Ottoman statistical reports to demonstrate that the government’s settlement policies were undertaken according to a comprehensive plan that sought to engage in the demographic engineering of Anatolia’s population.⁹ The main consideration of the government’s refugee settlement policy was to ensure that the number of people belonging to any non-Turkish group, regardless of religion, were being resettled in an area where they would not exceed five to ten percent of the total population.¹⁰ This principle, which Akçam refers to as the “five to ten percent rule”, was intended to ensure that non-Turkish groups abandoned their own languages and cultures to assimilate into their new communities and fully integrate into the Turkish majority.¹¹ Groups that were deemed “unassimilable”, such as Greek Orthodox in certain regions, Syriac Christians in eastern Anatolia, and almost all Armenians, were considered a threat to this population regime and expelled from their homes.¹³ The systematic resettlement of Muslims from the Balkans and the Caucasus into their villages attests to arrangements for such actions having been made in advance. Preparations for the forced population transfers of Christians were likely made in the context of the 1913-1914 Armenian reform discussions, as the provinces to which the reforms were to be applied were the ones where the ratio of the Armenian population to the general population was taken as determinative.¹⁴ This reform agreement reinforced the Ottoman government’s conviction that non-Muslims in general, and Armenians in particular, were permanent pretexts for European states, especially Russia, to intervene in the empire’s internal affairs.¹⁵ While the CUP annulled this agreement in November 1914, the danger of its revival in the wake of advancing Russian armies in 1915 prompted the Interior Ministry to “[eliminate the Armenian problem] in a manner that [was] comprehensive and absolute.”¹⁶

Akçam effectively argues that the five to ten percent rule was not implemented solely as demographic engineering, but also as an instrument of destruction. He uses Ottoman Interior Ministry documents regarding the five to ten percent rule to develop his thesis that Ottoman policies towards the Armenians during WWI had clear genocidal intent. According to the Ottoman census, the prewar Armenian population of Anatolia was 1.3 million.¹⁷ The Ottoman administration’s goal was to deport the Armenians to Ottoman provinces in what are now parts of Syria and Iraq without exceeding ten percent of the local population. The general population of the regions in which Armenians were to be settled totalled 1.85 to 2.18 million (depending on whether or not Mosul was included as a place of Armenian settlement).¹⁸ The Ottoman government’s five to ten percent rule evidently did not allow for the Ottoman Armenian population to exceed 218,000.¹⁹ Therefore, according to official Ottoman documents, the Ottoman Armenian population was to be reduced from 1.3 million to approximately 200,000.²⁰ Daily official requests by Interior Minister Talat Pasha for population statistics from the provinces further illustrate that the central government consistently monitored the mathematical reduction of Armenians during the deportations by systematic massacre, hunger, or disease.²¹

One of the most compelling ways in which Akçam highlights the Ottoman government’s direct involvement in the massacres that occurred during the deportations is by discussing the dismissal of Ottoman state officials from office who refused to kill Armenians. These dismissals were often made upon the urging of the CUP’s so-called “responsible secretaries”, who conveyed killing orders to the provinces.²² During the Unionists’ trials after the war, Ankara governor Mazhar Bey described his own dismissal under this policy. He explained the process of his removal thus: “I acted as if I did not understand the orders concerning the deportation of Armenians that I received from the interior minister in Istanbul…[when] Atıf Bey arrived…and orally relayed to me the order regarding the killing…of the Armenians…I told him ‘No Atıf Bey, I am the governor, I am not a bandit. I cannot do it.’”²³ Other governors were also dismissed from their posts for refusing to deport or massacre Armenians, including Kastamonu governor Reşid, the district governor of Mardin, and Der Zor district governor Suad Bey.²⁴ Similarly, Çerkes Hasan Bey was “accused of being a traitor” and forced to resign from his position for organizing the deportations in a “just and humane” manner.²⁵ Other state officials, such as Basra governor Ferit, Müntefak district governor Bedi Nuri, and Sabit, the acting head official of Beşiri County, forfeited their lives for refusing to execute orders to massacre the Armenians residing in their respective jurisdictions.²⁶ The Ottoman government’s treatment of those who opposed state annihilation policies strengthens Akçam’s argument that the CUP’s intent was the destruction, and not merely the deportation, of Ottoman Armenians. Furthermore, his examination of resistance from Muslim officials towards anti-Armenian state policies complicates traditional narratives of the Armenian Genocide, which sometimes overlook the tragic fates of Muslims who risked their lives to save non-Muslims during the genocide.

Akçam’s usage of “secret” and “top secret” telegrams sent from Istanbul to the provinces during WWI brings new insights into the CUP’s reconstruction of Ottomanism to allocate a dominant role to the empire’s Turks.²⁷ He uses these documents to expand upon Ottoman historian M. Şükrü Hanioğlu’s statement that the CUP’s “new Ottomanism” served a Turkist agenda and ended up as the ideological foundation for a society dominated by Turks. Akçam illustrates this point by quoting from coded telegrams that discuss the Turkification of Anatolia’s non-Turkish Muslim communities, as well as the assimilation of non-Muslim women and children into a dominant Turkish culture. One telegram to Kayseri discusses prohibiting sending Kurdish groups into Arab or Kurdish majority areas because their assimilation into Turkish society would be nearly impossible in such a milieu.²⁸ CUP officials frequently utilized the terms temsil and temessül, meaning to “come to resemble” or “assimilate”, in the context of Turkifying non-Turkish Muslim refugees and non-Muslim women and children who converted to Islam, usually to save their lives.²⁹ These documents make it clear that their goal was not only to create a society dominated by Turks, as Hanioğlu argues, but a monolithic one consisting primarily of people identifying as “Turkish”. 

Akçam’s book also addresses a significant debate in late Ottoman history: whether the wartime deportations emerged out of responses to immediate political concerns or as part of a carefully considered and comprehensive plan to remake Anatolia. Some historians, such as Michael Reynolds, argue that the Unionists’ decision to engage in the ethnoreligious homogenization of Anatolia was driven by wartime security concerns.³⁰ Akçam disagrees with this argument, highlighting evidence that the CUP was already in the process of reshaping Anatolia’s demographic makeup prior to WWI. He demonstrates that the ethnoreligious homogenization of Anatolia was put into practice during and after the 1912-1913 Balkan Wars, when thousands of Muslim refugees from the Balkans fled to Anatolia. Expulsion and forced emigration were also implemented bilaterally with Greece, Serbia, and Bulgaria within the framework of official “population exchange” agreements after the end of the Balkan Wars.³¹ These agreements served to legitimize processes of ethnic cleansing that had already taken place during the wars. For example, thousands of Greeks in Thrace and the Aegean coast had already been expelled to Greece through force, threats, and massacres as part of the CUP’s plan before WWI to “free [themselves] of non-Turkish elements” in the Aegean region.³² At the same time, the CUP was strictly monitoring the resettlement of Muslim refugees under the five to ten percent rule.³³ This indicates that the CUP was engaging in a carefully considered plan to remake the population of Anatolia prior to WWI. 

Taner Akçam’s The Young Turks’ Crime Against Humanity: The Armenian Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing in the Ottoman Empire extensively analyzes over six hundred secret Ottoman documents to vividly portray the rationale behind the CUP’s violent project to radically alter the demographic makeup of Anatolia. The author transforms the standard interpretation of Ottoman archival sources by revealing how these records clearly illustrate that the Armenian Genocide and the expulsion of Greeks and Assyrians from the late Ottoman Empire were part of a greater official policy to homogenize Anatolia. In contrast to other works on the late Ottoman Empire, this book also highlights the central role of assimilation in the demographic engineering of Anatolia to show that physical annihilation was only one component of the CUP’s homogenization policy. Akçam’s research on this topic raises questions about the role of local social processes in ethnic cleansing and, thus, contributes to the study of mass violence and genocide more broadly.∇

Lara Hovagimian is a fourth-year student studying History, Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations, and Political Science. She is interested in the political and social histories of the late Ottoman Empire and its successor states, as well as the study of collective violence more broadly.

1. Taner Akçam, The Young Turks’ Crime Against Humanity: The Armenian Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing in the Ottoman Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), xxi.
2. Akçam, The Young Turks’ Crime Against Humanity, xxiii.
3. Akçam, The Young Turks’ Crime Against Humanity, xxiii.
4. Akçam, The Young Turks’ Crime Against Humanity, xxii-xxiii.
5. M. Şükrü Hanioğlu, A Brief History of the Late Ottoman Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 188.
6. Akçam, The Young Turks’ Crime Against Humanity, 29-30.
7. Akçam, The Young Turks’ Crime Against Humanity, 65.
8. Akçam, The Young Turks’ Crime Against Humanity, 29.
9. Akçam, The Young Turks’ Crime Against Humanity, 53.
10. Akçam, The Young Turks’ Crime Against Humanity, 48.
11. Akçam, The Young Turks’ Crime Against Humanity, 40-41.
12. Akçam, The Young Turks’ Crime Against Humanity, 55-58.
13. Akçam, The Young Turks’ Crime Against Humanity, 55-58.
14. Akçam, The Young Turks’ Crime Against Humanity, 48-49.
15. Akçam, The Young Turks’ Crime Against Humanity, 93.
16. Akçam, The Young Turks’ Crime Against Humanity, 132.
17. Akçam, The Young Turks’ Crime Against Humanity, 255.
18. Akçam, The Young Turks’ Crime Against Humanity, 258.
19. Akçam, The Young Turks’ Crime Against Humanity, 258.
20. Akçam, The Young Turks’ Crime Against Humanity, 258.
21. Akçam, The Young Turks’ Crime Against Humanity, 280-283.
22. Akçam, The Young Turks’ Crime Against Humanity, 194-195.
23. Akçam, The Young Turks’ Crime Against Humanity, 195.
24. Akçam, The Young Turks’ Crime Against Humanity, 195-196, 211, 284.
25. Akçam, The Young Turks’ Crime Against Humanity, 426.
26. Akçam, The Young Turks’ Crime Against Humanity, 196.
27. Hanioğlu, A Brief History of the Late Ottoman Empire, 188.
28. Akçam, The Young Turks’ Crime Against Humanity, 44.
29. Akçam, The Young Turks’ Crime Against Humanity, 41, 290, 320-323.
30. Michael A. Reynolds, Shattering Empires: the Clash and Collapse of the Ottoman and Russian Empires, 1908-1918 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 154.
31. Akçam, The Young Turks’ Crime Against Humanity, 30, 65.
32. Akçam, The Young Turks’ Crime Against Humanity, 29.
33. Akçam, The Young Turks’ Crime Against Humanity, 48.