Bøger af Vahakn N. Dadrian

Turkey's bid to join the European Union has lent new urgency to the issue of the Armenian Genocide as differing interpretations of the genocide are proving to be a major reason for the delay of the its accession. This book provides vital background information and is a prime source of legal evidence and authentic Turkish eyewitness testimony of the intent and the crime of genocide against the Armenians. After a long and painstaking effort, the authors, one an Armenian, the other a Turk, generally recognized as the foremost experts on the Armenian Genocide, have prepared a new, authoritative translation and detailed analysis of the Takvim-i Vekyi, the official Ottoman Government record of the Turkish Military Tribunals concerning the crimes committed against the Armenians during World War I. The authors have compiled the documentation of the trial proceedings for the first time in English and situated them within their historical and legal context. These documents show that Wartime Cabinet ministers, Young Turk party leaders, and a number of others inculpated in these crimes were court-martialed by the Turkish Military Tribunals in the years immediately following World War I. Most were found guilty and received sentences ranging from prison with hard labor to death. In remarkable contrast to Nuremberg, the Turkish Military Tribunals were conducted solely on the basis of existing Ottoman domestic penal codes. This substitution of a national for an international criminal court stands in history as a unique initiative of national self-condemnation. This compilation is significantly enhanced by an extensive analysis of the historical background, political nature and legal implications of the criminal prosecution of the twentieth century's first state-sponsored crime of genocide.

"... totally innovative ... Dadrian exhibits exemplary objectivity and provides us with the fruits of a life of scholarship and research. An inestimable contribution to our knowledge of history." · Journal of the Society of Armenian Studies"... marshals considerable evidence to show how the development of the Turkish-Armenian conflict escalated to the point of genocide ... Dadrian makes [an] important contribution to our understanding of the dynamics of the Ottoman decision to destroy its Armenian subjects." · MESA Bulletin"[The History of the Armenian Genocide] is without doubt the most important work ever done on this subject. [Dadrian's] painstaking archival work, and [his] wide reading in the relevant sources in Turkish, Armenian, German, French and English has no parallel. The book will stand as a monument parallel to Hilberg's master work, The Destruction of the European Jews ... [He has] forced me to rethink the entire issue of comparisons and differences between the Armenian experience in World War I and the Jewish experience in World War II." · Steven T. Katz, Cornell University"... an outstanding piece of scholarship ... based on years of meticulous study of primary sources ..." · Leo Kuper, University of California"... the author has pioneered the sociological study of the Armenian Genocide ..." · Roger Smith, College of William and Mary, VirginiaThe Armenian Genocide, though not given such prominent treatment as the Jewish Holocaust which it precedes, still haunts the Western world and has assumed a new significance in the light of "ethnic cleansing" in Bosnia and, more recently, Darfur. This study by the most distinguished scholar of the Armenian tragedy offers an authoritative analysis by presenting it as a case study of genocide and by seeing it as an historical process in which a domestic conflict escalated and was finally consumed by global war.