On 30 October 1918, the Ottoman government signed a truce that sanctioned unconditional surrender to the Entente powers. The next night, paralyzed by panic and defeatism, the inner circle of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) burned suitcases full of documents, disbanded the CUP as a political party, and fled to Odessa on a German submarine. The power vacuum was filled by a new cabinet led by the liberal Freedom and Coalition Party (Hürriyet ve İtilaf Fırkası), a hodgepodge of anti-CUP politicians. This party ruled the Ottoman Empire during the armistice (1918–23) wherever the Istanbul government wielded sufficient actual power from the imperial heartland. The day after their rise to power, the liberals began reversing CUP policies. More important, the government exposed, debated, and prosecuted CUP war crimes, particularly the persecution and mass murder of Armenians. On 16 December 1918, Grand Vizier Damad Ferit Pasha officially charged a military tribunal with investigating and prosecuting CUP crimes; one part of the tribunal was to deal with specific provinces, while another part focused on the entire CUP cabinet. The first series of legal sessions began on 5 February 1919, and the final session was held on 9 February 1920. For a whole year, soldiers, eyewitnesses, politicians, and Muslim clerics were interrogated about their knowledge of the Armenian genocide. The tribunal unearthed forty-two official wartime documents: confessions, testimonies, telegrams, memoranda, declarations, letters, and cross-examinations. The main indictment charged the CUP cabinet ministers, the military, and the CUP with organizing “deportation and murder” (tehcir ve taktil). The final judgment of 5 July 1919 concluded that the CUP government had attempted the systematic annihilation of the Ottoman Armenian civilian population: “The terror that was carried out in various places during the Armenian deportations . . . did not consist of sporadic events but was prepared, carried out, and coordinated by abovementioned persons by way of illegal verbal orders and decrees, under the auspices of a central authority; this has been ascertained based on the unearthed evidence and witness accounts . . . The mass murders were committed by order of Talaat, Cemal, and Enver” (Takvim-i Vekâyi, nr.3604, appendix of 22 July 1919). The entire CUP elite was sentenced to death in absentia. However, the perpetrators escaped punishment for three reasons: negligence by a venal Ottoman bureaucracy, obstruction by CUP loyalists, and the resurrection of Turkish nationalism under the auspices of Mustafa Kemal.

Judgment at Istanbul, an exhaustive and definitive treatment of these trials, is a translation of the 2008 original in Turkish (Tehcir ve Taktil Divan-ı Harb-i Örfi Zabıtları: İttihad ve Terakkiʾnin Yargılanması 1919–1922 [Istanbul: İstanbul Bilgi Üniversitesi Yayınları, 2008]). In this reference handbook, thirteen chapters are sandwiched between an introduction and two appendices that list documents and sources. Three of the chapters (including one that is four pages long) were written by Akçam and ten by Dadrian (some based on earlier publications). The book offers meticulous accounts of the Ottoman collapse in 1918, the question of postwar Ottoman punitive justice, and the preparations, initiation, proceedings, and conditions of the court-martial. It also examines the societal context in which the tribunal operated. The authors must be commended for their assiduous engagement with a range of sources. The most revelatory of these are articles from the Ottoman press during the armistice, which clearly demonstrate that condemnation of the Armenian genocide was ubiquitous in Ottoman society.

In Part I (Chaps. 1–4), Dadrian argues that the tribunal was established within a context of enormous external and internal liabilities. Based on transcriptions of parliamentary debates and the Ottoman press, he discusses how the military defeat generated a fear of punitive justice in late 1918 and a persecutory atmosphere. Chapter 5, on the impact of emergent Kemalism on the court-martial, offers a discussion of the growing inability of Damad Ferit's government to confront the Kemalists, who undermined the tribunal by offering impunity to the convicts. Furthermore, in Chapters 6 and 7 Dadrian examines in great detail how the legal process was organized, concluding that “the verdicts depended almost entirely on Muslim testimony supporting the bulk of the existing documentary evidence” (p. 109). Akçam's chapter (Chap. 10), “Formation and Operation of the Ottoman Military Tribunals [sic],” seems repetitive when read next to that of Dadrian (Chap. 8), “A Summary of the Conditions Surrounding the Trials,” because both discuss the political will behind the tribunal. The most revelatory chapter of the book is Chapter 13, which reproduces in English the full texts of the indictments and verdicts. In the final verdicts, the court convicted the CUP of having planned and pursued the systematic “annihilation” (imha) of the Armenians as a group. This, according to one verdict, was “entirely unacceptable to human and civilized sensibilities and in Islam's view considered among the greatest of offenses” (p. 291).

The book has flaws as well as merits. Much like the current trials in Cambodia involving five Khmer Rouge leaders, the Ottoman tribunal can be criticized for having been overly politicized and therefore generating an impure legal process. It is rather obvious that the Liberal Entente welcomed the tribunal to purge the Ottoman political spectrum of CUP opposition. This aspect of the tribunal escapes the critical attention of the authors, who, in an attempt to legitimize its conclusions, too often brush aside its irregularities. Yet, it is equally unmistakable that in the course of investigating the CUP's crimes, the prosecutors secured some exceptional documentary evidence that now proves invaluable for understanding the nature of the Armenian genocide. For example, the proceedings demonstrate the importance of secrecy in the planning and implementation of anti-Armenian measures. The documentation in Chapters 2 through 7 also corroborates recent research, such as that by Nader Sohrabi and Şükrü Hanioğlu, which suggests that the CUP operated as a ruthless state within a state, undermining the Ottoman government bureaucracy and state legitimacy, and never eschewing the commission of violence against its own citizens.

Judgment at Istanbul is detailed and exhaustive, though perhaps to the extent that it will not be accessible to a general readership. The legal-history buff would relish reading the expansive descriptive sections (Chaps. 3, 4, 7, and 12 in particular, which offer analyses of the legal proceedings), but the level of descriptiveness causes the lucidity of the argument to suffer somewhat. Further, parts of the book could have benefited from tighter editing, and there are occasional problems with organization. For example, Chapter 8 includes a six-page section, “A Final Comment,” which harks back to the 1914 Armenian reform plan and seems to be entirely out of place. The research base of the book is enormous, and it is clear there are few relevant sources the authors have not consulted, but empirical density cannot substitute for lucid argumentation. Digging for and locating relevant facts are important, but the materials must be sufficiently integrated into a coherent argument as a whole. The reader patiently muddles through the volume, but any expectation for an overarching conceptual frame or even a final interpretative conclusion is in vain. Instead, the book examines a range of issues but lacks focus and does not sufficiently situate the trials in the global history of genocide or even in the context of World War I. (Gary Bass’ succinct, though less rigorous, study, Stay the Hand of Vengeance: The Politics of War Crimes Tribunals [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001], offers such an overview.) Nevertheless, a useful reference book of this kind was long overdue, and Judgment at Istanbul will prove indispensable for any student of the Armenian genocide.