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

• Author: Gencturk, Ahmet
• Position: Book review

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

Edited by Ronald Grigor Suny, Fatma Muge Gocek and Norman M. Naimark

Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011, 434 pages + xxii, $33.20, ISBN 9780195393743.

The book under review is the product of the research findings and discussions of the Workshop for Armenian and Turkish Scholarship (WATS) initiated by a group of faculty, including Professors Fatma Muge Gocek, Gerard Libaridian. and Ronad Sunny. In addition, they are also contributors to the book and graduate students at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. They participated in a series of meetings of the Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminar on Mass Killing organized by Norman Naimark, which was held for over six years at Stanford University.

The book brings fifteen articles together in five parts: Histographies of Genocide, On the Eve of the Catastrophe, Genocide in the International Context, Genocide in the Local Context and Continuities. Among the authors are four Turkish scholars, some of which refuse to label the events of 1915 as genocide and prefer the terms of extermination, mass killings, demographic engineering, or massacres. However, the absence of prominent scholars, who are close the Turkish position, such as Hakan Yavuz, Justin McCarthy, Guenter Lewy, Mehmet Perincek, Heath Lowry, Erman Sahin, and Jeremy Salt prevent readers from learning about the other side of the controversy. They could have greatly contributed to this work through their profound knowledge and analyses.

In his preface to the book under review, Norman Naimark, makes a number of incorrect assertions that are surprising coming from a history professor teaching at the prestigious University of Stamford. First, Naimark falsely accuses Turkey of complicating archival access and intimidating scholars from engaging research on events of 1915 (p. xiii). As a matter of fact, Ottoman Archival Sources, particularly the Irade Collection, Mesail-I Muhimme (Important Issues), and the Bab-i Asafi records that includes Kilise Defterleri (Church Registers) for the years 1869-1921 and Gayri Muslim Cemaatlere Ait Defterler (Registers on Non-Muslim Communities) for the years 1830-1918 are accessible to any scholar, including the most pro-Armenian ones. For instance, Taner Akcam, one of the well-known pro-Armenian Turkish scholar, used sources from the Turkish State Archives for some of his works.

Second, Naimark mentions "Islamic religious prejudice...