Author Argues That Armenian Genocide Happened

Taner Akçam, a Turkish professor at the University of Minnesota, said yesterday in a speech at Harvard what many Turks have refused to say: “There was an Armenian genocide.”

Akçam’s evening lecture—which was co-sponsored by the Harvard Armenian Society, the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian studies, and other groups—drew an audience of over three hundred to the Center for Government and International Studies last night.

Akçam, who was sentenced by a Turkish Court in the 1970s to nearly nine years in prison for his writing but escaped after one year to political asylum in Germany, used last night’s opportunity to present recent research that he claims shows that the Armenian genocide was a real and deliberate act by Turkish leaders during World War I.

Akçam, whose book’s title—“A Shameful Act”—comes from a description of the alleged genocide by Turkey’s founder Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, cited a number of documents, many from the official Ottoman Archives, that he said explicitly described a systematic plan on the part of Turkey’s ruling party. One document stated, “What we are talking about is the elimination of the Armenians.”

Turkey did not acknowledge the genocide in the years immediately following World War I because it was concerned that such acknowledgement would imperil its territorial claims, Akçam said. But he added that this should no longer be a concern for the Turkish government.

“The question of territory should be considered closed and resolved, and the question of responsibility and human rights abuses should be considered unresolved,” Akçam said.

The government of Turkey to this day acknowledges no wrongdoing.

Timur Söylemez, a counselor at the Turkish Embassy in Washington, wrote in an e-mailed statement before Akçam’s speech that the allegations of genocide “have never been historically or legally substantiated beyond reasonable doubt.”

“As the facts stand today, the events of 1915 fail to meet the definition of genocide as established by international law,” he wrote.

Söylemez declined to be interviewed by phone.

But Akçam said that the term “genocide” is “a distraction.”

“The fundamental issue is not the definition of a term,” he said. “What needs to be reemphasized is the need for moral condemnation of an act.”

James R. Russell, the Mashtots Professor of Armenian Studies at Harvard, noted in a phone interview yesterday that most scholars agree that the Turkish government’s claims of innocence are “demonstrably untrue.”

“The extermination of the Armenians was pre-arranged,” Russell said yesterday morning. “It took place not only in the war zone; it took place all across Anatolia, and the people who were systematically murdered were virtually in all cases not connected to the war.”

Harvard Armenian Society co-president Nina K. Kouyoumdjian ’08 said before last night’s event that she hoped events like Akçam’s lecture would raise awareness and prevent history from repeating itself.

“It’s not as if Armenians want the land back or anything,” she said. “We want to prevent events like this from happening to another group of people.”