Volume 54, Number 8 · May 10, 2007
The Mass Murder They Still Deny
By Michael Oren
A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility
by Taner Akçam, translated from the Turkish by Paul Bessemer
Metropolitan, 483 pp., $30.00
The first reports of massacres reached the US embassy in Istanbul in December 1914. Hundreds of Armenians, a Christian people with ancient roots in Anatolia, had been murdered by rioters in the Bitlis region of eastern Turkey and hanged in the streets of Erzurum. Countless others had died from exposure and exhaustion while laboring as human mule-trains for the Turkish army. By the spring of 1915, much of the country's Armenian population had—so it was claimed by Armenian spokesmen and American missionaries and diplomats—been subjected to mass deportations, wholesale pillage, and rape.
Review, 4149 words
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