The Armenian Genocide stands out, perhaps, not so much for its scale or particular brutality—though these were certainly sizable—but for the Turkish republic’s long-standing denial of its occurrence, or scale, or the intentions of those behind it. This denial is all the more peculiar in that a large body of evidence has been available since at least 1919, when the failing Ottoman government attempted to alleviate its standing at the post-World War I peace conference by putting on trial the leading members of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP; Turkish: İttihat ve Terakki Cemiyeti) for committing mass murders against Armenians. The CUP leaders were tried mostly in absentia, but much of the proceedings were published in the official gazette, Takvim-i Vekayi. As Eugene Rogan has recently pointed out, “these records, published in Ottoman Turkish, have been in the public domain since 1919 and make a mockery of any attempt to deny the Young Turk government’s role in ordering and organizing the annihilation of the Ottoman Armenian community.”Footnote ¹ The books under review here all make important contributions to our understanding of the violence of this period, as well as helping us to understand the causes and consequences of the long-standing denial of extreme violence against a targeted group.

For many years, only Armenians (usually in the Western diaspora) wrote about the genocide, mostly without access to Ottoman archival sources, but recently some Turkish historians (also usually in the Western diaspora) have begun to focus on these tragic events. Taner Akçam was among the first Turks to publish books about the genocide, beginning with his 1992 publication, Türk Ulusal Kimliği ve Ermeni Sorunu (Turkish National Identity and the Armenian Problem).Footnote ² By my count, he has published at least fourteen books on the Armenian question and has been a consistent, outspoken critic of the Turkish state’s refusal to recognize the genocide, despite numerous threats on his life from various Turkish ultranationalist groups.Footnote ³ The book under review here, The Young Turks’ Crime Against Humanity: The Armenian Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing in the Ottoman Empire, builds on Akçam’s earlier work, A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility,Footnote ⁴ providing far more extensive evidence, particularly from Ottoman state archives, including extensive use of the Cipher Office (Şifre Kalemi)’s telegrams.

Akçam argues that the humiliating defeats in the two Balkan wars and the loss of much of the Ottoman Empire’s Balkan territory shifted the CUP leaders’ focus for state and national preservation and renewal to Anatolia, where they feared that the large concentrations of Christian subjects would subvert their efforts. In response, these leaders developed a policy of cleansing Anatolia of most of its non-Muslims, following a basic guideline of five to ten percent maximum non-Muslims in any given territory. This policy was applied to the Greeks of Thrace and the Aegean coast in the run-up to WWI, and it almost led to another war with Greece. Though this initial implementation was at times violent, the overall process was more like ethnic cleansing than genocide. By contrast, the same demographic policy’s application to Christians, particularly Armenians, in much of central and eastern Anatolia led to genocide. At this time, the CUP’s leadership became increasingly fearful of losing eastern Anatolia as a result of the February 1914 Russian-sponsored Armenian reform program. This fear was exacerbated by WWI conditions, especially the isolation of the Armenians from the Great Powers, who had defended their rights; by the Russian army’s advance into eastern Anatolia; by exaggerated reports of Armenian collusion with the Russians; and by a few isolated uprisings behind the front lines. As a result, the CUP leaders’ demographic policy turned increasingly genocidal, culminating in the 1915–1916 deportations and massacres. Concurrent with this policy of removal, the government resettled Muslim refugees from the Balkans and the Caucasus in the homes and villages of the deported and killed Christians. Importantly, concerning the CUP leaders’ decision to carry out the genocide, and basing himself solidly on Ottoman documents, Akçam sees a process much more than a single decision: “The annihilation of the Armenians seems not to have resulted from a single decision on a given date; rather, the genocide appears to have been the cumulative outcome of a series of increasingly radical decisions, each triggering the next in a cascading sequence of events.”Footnote ⁵

Akçam’s focus on demographic policy, an approach he shares with Uğur Ümit Üngör, is elaborately and fully supported by a wealth of documentation. This is, perhaps, the book’s greatest value. Akçam has delved deep into the Ottoman archives, especially the documents of the Ministry of the Interior’s Office of the General Directorate of Security (Emniyet Umum Müdürlüğü) and the Cipher Office. Quoting extensively from over 600 documents, he proves convincingly that the Ottoman archives corroborate the picture found in Armenian, British, German, and American documents, as well as memoirs and other materials. In effect, his study destroys the long-presumed wall between those non-Turkish (mostly Armenian) historians who argued that foreign documents were more reliable and that the Ottoman archives had been cleansed of incriminating materials, and the pro-state Turkish historians who dismissed all incriminating foreign documents as anti-Turkish propaganda. Akçam shows that, in fact, many of these documents, both Ottoman and non-Ottoman, tell essentially the same story and prove that the CUP eventually decided on a deliberate policy to annihilate the Armenians in particular, through arrest, torture, deportation, starvation, and massacre.

Because his focus is on displaying the convincing evidence available in the Ottoman archives, Akçam has organized the book more thematically than chronologically. After an opening chapter that serves as an essential and informative primer on the Ottoman sources, he then provides chapters on the development of the plan to homogenize Anatolia, beginning with the ethnic cleansing of Greeks from eastern Thrace and the Aegean littoral. Then follow chapters on the Armenians and other Christians of Anatolia, charting the entire process, from the removal of those deemed particularly subversive to the eventual decision to annihilate the Armenians as a people. The book also includes informative chapters on the conversion and forced marriage of Christian children and on confiscated Armenian properties, and finally a chapter specifically challenging the official denialist arguments of the Turkish state, again employing the wealth of materials he has found in the Ottoman archives.

Akçam’s book is not without flaws. While the book is meticulously researched, at times it is so focused on documents and documentation that the overall structure suffers. For example, Chapter 11, entitled “Some Official Denialist Arguments of the Turkish State and Documents from the Ottoman Interior Ministry,” lacks any clear thematic or chronological structure and is mostly a useful list of document-based arguments against those who deny the genocide. One could also say the book is strong in documentation but weak in analysis. Quite often a long quotation is followed by very little analysis. Overall, however, Taner Akçam has found and presented to an English-speaking audience an incredibly rich and diverse set of primary sources to prove the Young Turks’ culpability, and his book has thus made a crucial contribution to the study of the Armenian genocide.

Perhaps the most nuanced and thorough consideration of these four books, Ronald Suny’s “They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else”: A History of the Armenian Genocide is a masterful synthesis in the best sense of the word. While his argument relies considerably on the research of Raymond Kévorkian, Taner Akçam, and others,Footnote ⁶ Suny takes a longer-term perspective and presents a very readable narrative. He begins the first chapter, entitled “Empire,” with the Turkic tribes’ conversion to Islam in the tenth century CE and the second chapter, “Armenians,” much earlier, in the fifth century BCE, when “the Persian king Darius the Great had the first written mention of Armenia carved into the great rock at Behistun.”Footnote ⁷ He then tracks the long development of relations between Armenians and Ottoman Turks, as well as relations between Kurds and Armenians, over the five centuries of Ottoman rule, though most of the subsequent discussion is focused on the nineteenth century. Suny has studied nationalism throughout his career, and his ideas about the flexible nature of nation-building are ever present in this book. Despite the long-term view, Suny is careful not to present simplistic national narratives of “the Turks” and “the Armenians.” Instead, he pays close attention to the evolving nature of various identities and to the various social, economic, and political divisions within these groups.

Suny argues that long-term historical processes played important roles in creating the “affective dispositions” that eventually led to genocide. The chapter entitled “Nation” reveals the ways in which the spread of nationalism from Europe affected the relations between the various religious and ethnic groups of the Ottoman Empire. The chapter entitled “Great Powers” then proceeds to show the pernicious role these powers played in worsening relations between Muslims and Christians within the empire, creating amongst Muslims, and especially amongst the Young Turks, a close association between outside Christian powers and the Armenians as an internal fifth column. The most important result was the Young Turks’ growing suspicion of the Armenians as suspect and potentially treasonous. However, Suny does not think their plans for the Armenians were certain before the war’s outbreak. While discussing in detail the earlier outbreaks of violence against the Armenians, especially the Hamidian massacres of 1894–1896 and the 1909 Adana riot, he sees these actions as periodic outbreaks of violence against a suspected and sometimes hated minority, but violence that lacked a genocidal aspect: “The Genocide should be distinguished from the earlier episodes of conservative restoration of order by repression or urban ethnic violence.”Footnote ⁸ He contends that “the Genocide was neither religiously motivated nor a struggle between two contending nationalisms, one of which destroyed the other, but rather the pathological response of desperate leaders who sought security against a people they had both constructed as enemies and driven into radical opposition to the regime under which they had lived for centuries.”Footnote ⁹ Like Akçam, Suny sees the Balkan wars as crucial in catalyzing the CUP leaders’ affective disposition, though even here he stresses the possible contingencies: “Yet even after the coup of 1913 the three Paşas, Enver, Talat, and Cemal, never completely agreed on a clear ideological orientation and wavered among Ottomanism, the pan-Turanian form of Turkish nationalism, and pan-Islam.”Footnote ¹⁰ Hence, Suny gives WWI the decisive role in the decision for genocide: “Had there been no World War there would have been no genocide, not only because there would have been no ‘fog of war’ to cover up the events but because the radical sense of endangerment among Turks would not have been as acute.”Footnote ¹¹

There is much more to be learned from Suny’s book, but I want to discuss one problem as well. In the conclusion, he explains why he thinks that the Armenian deportation and massacres qualify as genocide, while many other historical cases do not. Bemoaning the misuse and overuse of the term “genocide,” he notes, “Sadly it seems that nowadays in order to be a full-fledged nation-state one not only needs a flag, a national anthem, and an opera house, but also a genocide.”Footnote ¹² While not belittling other mass murders—such as the 1930s Soviet purges, collectivization, or famines—Suny argues that there is “utility” in restricting the term “to what might more accurately be referred to as ‘ethnocide,’ that is, the deliberate attempt to eliminate a designated group defined by the cultural characteristics—language, imagined biological origins (race), religion—that have historically bound them together as a community and appear to distinguish that people from others.”Footnote ¹³ While this definition follows the United Nation’s definition of genocide quite closely, the term “ethnocide” makes considerable sense in that genocide has been overly politicized and applied to various cases of mass murder that do not fit the UN definition. Regardless, for Suny, the intention of the perpetrators is key, and his book proves the CUP leaders’ intent convincingly. He strives to distinguish this definition from ethnic cleansing, which almost always includes some killing, “but more immediately involves displacement and deportation, the physical moving of a distinct population.”Footnote ¹⁴ In this discussion, I think that Suny is splitting some pretty thin definitional hairs, intending to show that the Armenian case is closest to the archetype: the Jewish Holocaust. I also do not really see the “utility” in keeping the term’s definition so narrow: to be honest, I am not sure the term has much utility at all in its official capacity, as Suny’s suggested use of “ethnocide” seems to imply. If “ethnocide” is a more accurate term, then perhaps we should simply use it.

One of the questions that most often struck me when I first began to read about the Turkish denial of the genocide was this: why would the new Republic of Turkey that emerged from the world war, occupation, imperial collapse, and war for independence so closely adhere to and identify with the ancien régime’s deeds and glory? Why not reject the whole imperial project as the new Turkish republican nation-state, along the way denouncing its crimes and forging a new path? Having studied Tsarist Russia and the Soviet Union closely, I thought it largely unnecessary for modern Turks to defend the old regime and its actions: Russians, qua Soviet citizens (at least until 1991), completely rejected the Tsarist past with no apparent ill effects to their state. The answer to this question reveals a great deal about the denial phenomenon in Turkey. As these books make clear, the Republic of Turkey emerged from and was to a large extent a product of the violence and the violators of the dying Ottoman Empire. Indeed, many of the members of the first National Assemblies were members of the CUP, and Mustafa Kemal and his supporters came from this very milieu.

The book that most directly addresses the question of denial is Fatma Müge Göçek’s Denial of Violence: Ottoman Past, Turkish Present, and Collective Violence against the Armenians, 1789–2009. Göçek was one of the founding members (along with Ronald Suny) of the Workshop on Armenian/Turkish Scholarship (WATS), and has contributed a great deal to the improvement of Armenian-Turkish relations and to research on the genocide. Göçek argues, first, that the denial of violence against Armenians in the Ottoman Empire was more long-standing, lasting from 1789 to the present. Second, she contends, “the historical construction of denial varies in relation to the particular interaction of structural and affective elements, constituting, in this particular empirical case, four distinct periods of collective denial.”Footnote ¹⁵ Third, she argues that this denial has persisted over a long period “because it involves the interaction of state and society, becomes multi-layered across time, and keeps on selectively and successfully drawing on events for legitimation.”Footnote ¹⁶ Göçek divides her book into chapters that follow these four periods: the imperial period (1789–1907), the Young Turks (1908–1918), the early republican period (1919–1973), and the late republican period (1974–2009).

Although the book is based on an incredible amount of research and takes on an important and poorly understood subject, Göçek employs an odd set of sources to prove her arguments: over 300 memoirs and autobiographies published after the reform of the Turkish script in 1928. Her logic is worth interrogating:

The idea to focus on those texts most accessible in republican Turkey certainly makes an important rhetorical point: even the evidence publicly available to the Turkish state and society has been ignored in the drive to deny. I find it strange, however, that Göçek limits her own research and source base to these post-1928 memoirs. Surely, if she is trying to chart a much longer persistent pattern of denial of violence from 1789 to 2009, it makes more sense to include memoirs, private papers, correspondence, party documents, and perhaps even government documents produced and published across the entire period, which would help her to answer the main question more solidly. This source exclusivity is particularly problematic because Göçek very often makes assertions about the pre-1928 period, but without consulting documents or other kinds of sources published (or unpublished) before 1928.

Second, this source base is not representative. The overwhelming majority of the memoir writers were, of course, members of the elite: male, Turkish, educated, Europeanized, and relatively well off. In all these ways, these writers did not reflect the majority of the peoples inhabiting either the Ottoman Empire or the Republic of Turkey. It is, therefore, deeply problematic to rely solely on such memoirs to tell the history of Ottoman and Turkish denial, but even more so when Göçek uses these sources to make claims about all of Ottoman or even Turkish society. At many points in the book, Göçek employs this very limited and unrepresentative source base to make broad generalizations about “Ottoman society,” “people,” Turks, Muslims, etc.Footnote ¹⁸ Equally worrisome is her almost cavalier use of the memoirs to prove historical points. For example, while discussing the CUP’s economic policy during WWI, she cites only the memoirs of four persons: no government documents or even the work of historians who have specialized on this topic.Footnote ¹⁹ At another point, Göçek asserts that “in the aftermath of the counterrevolution [of April 1909], many memoirs noted that the CUP became even more violent and repressive.”Footnote ²⁰ One would think the footnote to this assertion would include a list of these “many memoirs,” or at least several examples, but instead, the footnote cites only one memoir.Footnote ²¹

Göçek’s presentation of the memoirs is also problematic. She refers to them on every page, but rarely critiques, discusses, or even mentions the actual memoirist. It is as though she thinks the individual who wrote the memoir is unimportant to what she or he wrote. For example, she provides a lengthy quotation from the memoir of Sarkis Çerkezyan,Footnote ²² an Armenian born in the Syrian desert during the exile, in discussing the republican-period tendency of Turks to forget their earlier close connections to Christians; in this case, Armenian Patriarch Sinork Kalustyan and Lütfi Doğan, the head of the Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet İşleri Başkanlığı) from 1968 to 1972, were half-brothers, sharing a common mother. In the text discussion, one looks in vain for any mention of the actual memoirist; instead, we only read “one memoir narrates […]” and “the memoir explains […].”Footnote ²³ I do not understand why Göçek thinks it valuable to make truth statements about the past without mentioning the names of her memoirists. Perhaps she thinks the anonymity implies greater objectivity when making claims about the Ottoman and Turkish past; however, historians (and many historical sociologists) usually indicate and discuss their sources carefully and deliberately (à la Akçam), striving to remind the reader that there is no valid assertion about the past emanating from some source outside of the past.

One of the more frustrating aspects of this book is that Göçek does not directly answer her main question of why there was such a vehement denial. Instead, one has to almost read between the lines in order to find it out. Her first chapter concludes with the implied idea that it had something to do with the way the Ottoman sultans viewed their rule and role in state and society:

Despite the ambiguity of meaning, this statement seems to imply that the key reason for the advent of denial was the sultan’s inability or refusal to admit that he had not been able to protect his non-Muslim subjects and therefore his state, instead blaming foreign powers. This appears to be a rather flimsy basis for two centuries of denial or for setting a pattern of denial. Moreover, Göçek seems here to have missed the larger point that the Ottoman Empire was at this time not at all alone in denying internal violence (even state-sponsored) against minorities. She even acknowledges this at one point, noting that Sultan Abdülhamid “made valid points regarding Western European duplicity.”Footnote ²⁵ The point is not that many wrongs make a right, but rather that it is not sufficient to place the origins of Ottoman denial in such a narrow and particularly Ottoman state context.

Despite these problems, Göçek’s study certainly provides a much more plausible, though partial, answer to the question of denial in the republican period in her analysis of the deputies of the first Turkish National Assembly. She found that 69 of the 392 deputies (18 percent) “had explicit connections with the CUP,” and she implicates the deputies as a whole: “The list of the posts the deputies held during this period [1915-1917] suggested that all had ample knowledge about the Armenian deportations and massacres, and some also profited from the movable and immovable goods that the Armenians had left behind.”Footnote ²⁶ In addition, sixteen of the deputies were “actively involved in fighting the Armenians in the east.”Footnote ²⁷ Moreover, as Göçek notes and her appendix shows, many of the deputies who had formerly been members of the CUP or its Special Organization (Teşkilat-ı Mahsusa) were elected to the assembly multiple times.Footnote ²⁸ These numbers are significant, and they considerably help to explain the denial’s persistence into the republican period.

Unfortunately, in addition to problems in argumentation and sourcing, Göçek’s book also contains a number of citation problems and factual mistakes, which could have been easily excised by an attentive editor. For example, in a seemingly crucial section of the book entitled “Escalating Patriotism during the Allied Occupation,” Göçek refers to a number of memoirists, even quoting from them at length, but she fails to provide even a single footnote to the specific sources of these quotations.Footnote ²⁹ In the first sentence of Chapter 2, Göçek asserts that the Ottoman Empire entered World War I “on the side of the Axis powers”—that is, the German-led alliance in World War II, of which the then Republic of Turkey was not a part.Footnote ³⁰ She also claims that the Ottoman Empire “had joined the war [WWI]” by early August 1914.Footnote ³¹ There are other mistakes, but this is perhaps the most glaring: on page 390, Göçek writes that “a beautiful August day in 2007” was the “last time I saw Hrant [Dink] alive.” The attentive reader will find this particularly startling, because only five pages earlier Göçek had solemnly (and correctly) stated that Hrant Dink was assassinated on January 19, 2007!Footnote ³²

Finally, the book’s conclusion is a singular disappointment. It seems to me that at the end of such a sprawling, complex, and uneven book, a conclusion is absolutely essential: a summing up of the major points, stressing those that are most important and tying them all together. Otherwise, the reader is left unsure of what to conclude. Göçek’s point that there can be no conclusion because the denial continues may be an important political statement, but it does not help the reader to understand her book’s overall argument.

While the historiography on the genocide is certainly improving as it becomes more open, multivalent, and solidly based in the documents, there are still very few local studies. Uğur Ümit Üngör’s sweeping, circumspect, and nuanced study, The Making of Modern Turkey: Nation and State in Eastern Anatolia, 1913–1950, focuses on Diyarbekir province and shows how much local studies can enrich our understanding of these events. Placing his study in the broader geographical and chronological context of the rise of nationalism in Europe and its effects on the multiethnic empires of eastern Europe, especially the Russian and Ottoman Empires, Üngör argues that over the period from 1913 to 1950 “the Young Turk regime subjected East Anatolia, an ethnically heterogeneous space, to various forms of nationalist population policies aimed at ethnically homogenizing the region.”Footnote ³³ Building on the “Young Turk Era” periodization of Erik-Jan Zürcher,Footnote ³⁴ Üngör argues that the 1890s massacres, the deportation and massacres of Christians (especially Armenians and Syriacs), the Armenian genocide, the subsequent massacres and deportations of Kurds, as well as the sweeping and intensive efforts to assimilate the latter and efface their culture in the interwar period were all crucial components of the making of modern Turkey: violence and the removal or assimilation of non-Turkish elements, he suggests, lay at the very foundation of the republic.

The book has a clear and easily comprehensible structure. Üngör lays out his main arguments and the chapters’ main points in the preface. In addition, each chapter concludes with a discussion section in which he summarizes the chapter and makes larger theoretical points. In Chapter 1, Üngör provides the background on Diyarbekir province, explaining its ethnically heterogeneous social relations, which he neither romanticizes as some interethnic utopia nor reifies as essentially conflictual. Chapter 2, entitled “Genocide of Christians, 1915–1916,” describes the deportations and massacres of Armenians, Syriacs, and other Christians. Under the rule of the governor (vali) Mehmed Reşid, Diyarbekir became a crucial killing ground and deportation hub. Chapter 3 charts the repeated deportations of Kurds from the region in 1916, 1925, and 1934. In Chapter 4, Üngör describes how the Kemalist state used its control of education and culture to strive to Turkify the Kurds, and in Chapter 5 he shows how the state went to great lengths to control citizens’ memory of its violent past. Üngör couches all these discussions in terms of two key techniques that the Young Turks employed: population politics and social engineering.

Üngör is a scholar who understands the complexities of the past (and the present): “Essentialistic ideas of homogeneous and hermetically bounded national units in collective action and conflict (the Kurds versus the Syriacs or the Turks against the Armenians) are quite ahistorical and need to be deconstructed.”Footnote ³⁵ This complexity is clearly reflected in his portrayal of the genocide in Diyarbekir province. Üngör emphasizes the importance of the Ottomans’ humiliating defeat in the Balkan wars and the concomitant persecution and massacres of Muslims there by Christian armies (Bulgarian and Greek) as the crucial events in creating a genocidal mindset amongst both the CUP leadership and many of the Muslim refugees, some of whom played active roles in the deportation and massacres of Christians in 1915–1916. Mehmed Reşid, the brutal and ruthless governor of Diyarbekir province, was not a refugee from the Balkan wars, but was from a Circassian family in the Caucasus who had fled Tsarist persecution to the Ottoman Empire in 1874. Hence, he could both identify with the Young Turks’ feelings about the loss of homeland and suspect the Armenians as local collaborators with the invading Russian army. Üngör not only discusses central (Talat and Enver Pashas) and local (Reşid) roles in the deportations and massacres, but also describes the participation of local Kurdish tribes and Circassian soldiers. Indeed, he stresses the importance of local elites in the genocide:

While this is certainly a sophisticated portrayal of the genocide, Üngör’s book takes the story much further than most studies. Indeed, his main idea is really to see the genocide and massacres of the war as part of a larger set of population policies designed to socially engineer the peoples of Anatolia into a homogenous, Turkified nation. He makes an explicit link between the CUP, the genocide, other violent actions of WWI, the war for independence, and the new Republic of Turkey:

The Making of Modern Turkey not only traces the continuity of population politics across the 1923 divide, but also describes the consistency presented by the Kurds, both among the families and tribes that resisted their own deportation and among those who collaborated in the Christians’ deportation: “Kurdish collaborators and their families profited from the deportations, became even richer, and are still highly influential in the eastern provinces.”Footnote ³⁸ And ironically, in the longer story, the Turkish settlers brought in to replace the deported Kurds failed to Turkify Diyarbekir: “Many Turks simply left the area after 1950. Decades after the deportations, it seems most of the Turkish settlers who continued to live in Diyarbekir province themselves became ‘Kurdified’ rather than ‘Turkifying’ their Kurdish neighbours.”Footnote ³⁹ Üngör also notes the consequences of the Young Turks’ violent efforts to “Turkify” eastern Anatolia: “The Young Turks saw an east where a Turkish majority needed to be established by force. But by treating the territory as if it was on the verge of secession (as Greece, Bulgaria, Montenegro, Macedonia, or Albania had been), the Young Turks significantly contributed to the production of a nationalist politicization of the Kurdish-inhabited territories.”Footnote ⁴⁰

After charting the many and varied efforts made by the Turkish state to Turkify the Kurds and to manipulate and in some cases wipe clean the memories of the deportations and massacres, Üngör then proposes three reasons why so many Turks share the state’s view of these events. First, he claims that the state’s efforts to imprint on its subjects a particular nationalist memory have been relatively successful for many. The state’s “closed circuit of knowledge” through control of what can be published about its past, as well as through textbooks and school curricula, have left most Turks with a very narrow view of the past. Second, he thinks that the state has done much to discourage people from educating themselves outside of school about the past. Third, he notes that most Turks do not meet or know Armenians, so they do not think much about them other than what the state tells them.Footnote ⁴¹ While each of these reasons has some validity, they each also fail to attribute any agency to the populace at large. As Göçek’s book makes clear, for those Turks willing to hunt through the memoir literature on the genocide, it is quite possible to learn a great deal about this crucial period of Turkish and Ottoman history, even without knowledge of Ottoman Turkish.

Having worked as a historian at one İstanbul university for the last six years, I would like to offer one other cause of the problem: the relatively low value and importance placed on history as a subject in the Turkish education system. One can see this in what students are required to learn for the university entrance exam, and in the very meager required history courses at the universities. It is also apparent in my interactions with university administrators, faculty members in other colleges, and students that history is viewed mostly as a hobby, not as a serious academic discipline. These attitudes are likely a result of the Turkish state’s insistence on a particular, narrow, nationalist narrative of the past, one that is usually only memorized for examinations rather than itself being examined by the students. I am not at all surprised that such a use of history (as in the Soviet case) has led most students to think very little of history as a serious academic subject.

Hence, the causes of persistent denial appear to be several. Göçek’s book chronicles the Ottoman state’s long-term persistent pattern of denial of violence and of blaming violence on the Great Powers’ meddling in Ottoman internal affairs. Göçek and Üngör’s books reveal the great continuity in personnel and practices between the Ottoman Empire and Republic of Turkey. This was not, of course, the whole story. Much was indeed new and revolutionary in the republic—but not the attitude toward or violent treatment of non-Muslims and non-Turks. Moreover, as Üngör makes clear, the new republic—like many other nationalizing, homogenizing states—employed the tools of education, cultural control, censorship, military training, and international political pressure to efface and keep buried its violent past. At the level of everyday life in Turkey, those Turkish citizens now living in formerly Armenian homes and villages likely feel that they have a great deal to lose in a genuine recognition of the region’s and the republic’s violent past. In economic and legal terms, this is mostly an unjustified fear: the international legal consensus is that the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide cannot be applied retroactively, as the International Center for Transitional Justice concluded in February 2003.Footnote ⁴² In fact, despite Üngor’s efforts, we still know very little about how the deportation massacres were implemented and resisted at the local level; this is an area in need of much more research.

While this long history of denial may make change appear impossible, there are clear signs that Turkey is now moving toward some sort of official recognition of the Armenians’ suffering. Göçek sees this as a result of the ruling Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP)’s efforts to move closer to the European Union, but there are also important internal developments. As she notes, a crucial moment was April 24, 2004, when the Kurdish newspaper Ülkede Özgür Gündem apologized for siding with the Turks against the Armenians in 1915–1917 through a headline reading, “We apologize.”Footnote ⁴³ Largely as a result of the efforts of brave scholars—especially those associated with WATS—historical debate and discussion about the genocide have become more open and multi-sided in the Turkish public sphere. Moreover, an increasing number of young historians, like Üngör, are researching this question in the Ottoman archives, and the Turkish state is clearly tolerating more open discussion.Footnote ⁴⁴ Most recently, the Peoples’ Democratic Party (Halkların Demokratik Partisi, HDP) won thirteen percent of the national election vote while clearly advocating recognition of the Armenian deportation and massacres as a genocide.Footnote ⁴⁵ These are signs that Turkish citizens are generally becoming more open to some sort of recognition, but there is still much work to be done. As all the books under review make clear, honest research into and recognition of the violent acts of the Ottoman and Turkish past are both possible and necessary.