Lilit Sedrakyan
“Radiolur”
Los Angeles
Turkish historian Taner Akcam delivered a lecture on “New Testimonies from Ottoman Archives” for the Armenian community of US West Coast. He said he has new evidences, which present the Armenian Genocide from a different perspective.
“My main argument based on the new evidences is that the Armenian Genocide was part of a clear-cut demographic policy perpetrated with mathematical accuracy. These arguments come to prove that the leaders of the Committee of Union and Progress had dispassionately planned and calculated everything. The deportation, physical extermination and assimilation of Armenians were components of that program,” Mr. Akcam said.
According to him, these and other components incorporated in Ottoman documents help us get a better notion of the Armenian Genocide. Besides, the new evidences are particularly precious for the fact that they were found in Ottoman archives.
“Until recently Turkey had been denying the authenticity of American, German, French and Armenian archives and insisting that Ottoman archives were the only reliable source for them. Now, the documents from Ottoman archives come to prove that that it was genocide, deliberately planned and perpetrated with great accuracy,” Taner Akcam said.
The historian said the documents had been neglected up until now because of several reasons, one of which was the ignorance of the Ottomans.
According to him, another reason is that in order to get the complete picture, it was necessary to read and combine the documents correctly. Taner Akcam has combined the documents to recover the correct chain of events. “These are valuable documents, and it would be good if young scholars studied them,” he said.
Akcam has published the new evidenced in his new book titled “The Crime of Young Turks against Humanity: The Armenian Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing in the Ottoman Empire.”
