Book Review

Authors: Hikmet Özdemir, Kemal Çiçek, Ömer Turan, Ramazan Çal?k and Yusuf Halaço?lu

(Ankara: Turkish Historical Society, 2004), 211 pp. ISBN 975161708-1

Historians generally believe that without waiting 50 years after an incident, or in the case of opening archives, at least 30 years, history cannot be written properly. If written earlier than this, it will be full of mistakes and deficiencies. The reason behind such an argument concerns the ongoing formation of the events. That is, not all the consequences of the events can be clarified in such a short term, though they can be seen in the medium, and long term. 

We can say that for the work examined here that the course of history has been “completed in the historical perspective”. It has been almost 90 years since 1915. Although the fallout from these events continues, we can say that the subject is now ripe for the historians to study.

The Turkish Historical Society has responded to the Armenian genocide allegations with mathematical calculations based on western documents. The Turkish Historical Society presents the results of this research, which lasted approximately two years in the archives of the USA (missionary archives included), Britain, Germany and Ottoman Turkey, in the book called Armenians: Deportation and Migration.

The book consists of three parts: the first part includes data on the Armenian population in the Ottoman empire, comments on population research, Ottoman population and sources, diplomatic reports and statistics of the Armenian Patriarch, British Statistics (1919), American Statistics (1919). It also considers so-called ‘unusual factors’ in the population calculations, new research on Armenian population and final assessments on Armenian population.

The Second part mentions about the deportations and transportation of Armenians to Syria, the road to deportations and the reports on deportations, migration to Russia and other places, the losses and the rest.

The third part includes Armenians after the deportations, the Decree on the return and resettlement of Armenians, the collaboration of Armenians with the occupation forces in Anatolia and the Armenians who migrated abroad in the wake of the Turkish National Liberty War. In addition a conclusion, appendixes, bibliography and index parts are presented to the reader.

This book, which was prepared depending on the foreign documents, assesses the genocide claims of Armenians scientifically and puts forward clearly the situation of Armenians and the Armenian population from 1914 to 1918.

The original language of the book is Turkish and it is printed on quality paper. On the cover of the book, there is a picture of Armenians subjected to deportation, which is taken from the German Archives.