The Ottoman Documents and the Genocidal Policies of the Committee for Union and Progress
(İttihat ve Terakki) toward the Armenians in 1915
Taner Akçam
Abstract.
The author analyzes the Ottoman Archives as a source of information on the Armenian Genocide of 1915.
He discusses the contradictory positions of two broad groups of scholars on the reliability of these archives, concluding that the Ottoman Archives agree with the information found in the
archives of the United States, Britain, Germany, and Austria. He discusses the various categories of Ottoman documents, which mostly came out during the trials related to the Armenian Genocide,
which took place from 1919 to 1921, and makes clear that there was a wide-ranging cleansing operation of the archives after the armistice in 1918. The author explores the reliability of this evidence and, based on the existing documents that remain, tries to reconstruct the structure and implementation of the genocide. He concludes that the Ottoman documents clearly show the genocidal intent of the Ottoman authorities and puts the Armenian genocide within the broader context of an overarching plan to homogenize the ethnic population of Anatolia.
Genocide Studies and Prevention: An
International Journal-The Ottoman Documents and the Genocidal Policies-
