Killing Orders by Taner Akcam

Reviewed by: Vahe H. Apelian

I have been reading KILLING ORDERS by TANER AKCAM. It will be a slow reading partly because of the small font, crowded line spacing  on below quality sheets. Also, reading history is not like reading a novel. It requires concentration and hence time.

Taner Akcam’s book “Killing Orders” is about Talat Pasha’s telegrams. Many of us have seen these telegrams in Armenian books. They are in Ottoman Turkish.

How was it that the Armenians got hold of these telegrams? How can the Armenians claim that these telegrams are authentic? And, who was Naim Bey to have become privy of such important corded documents? Authenticating such questions constitute the crux of the reading of the book.

I had long been aware that Mazlumian brothers, the owners of the historic Baron Hotel in Aleppo played a key role in obtaining the telegrams. It turns out that an Armenian journalist by the name of Aram Andonian, who was arrested on April 24, 1915 but somehow escaped, was the person who purchased these telegrams from Naim Bey in Baron Hotel Mazlumiam brothers owned in Aleppo. There does not seem to a mention in the book if the Mazlumian brothers financially assisted in the purchase.  Naim Bey brought these documents in batches on the 6^th, 10^th, and 14^th November 1918. “On the basis of Naim’s recollection and the documents he sold, Andonian wrote a book in Armenian in 1919, which was published only after the English and French editions”, notes Taner. As to Naim Bey, money seems to have been his only motif to sell these historic documents.

Naim Bey was “the office secretary in the Department Office of the Aleppo Branch of the Interior Ministry’s Directorate for Tribal and Immigrant Settlement”. Furthermore, Taner Akcam notes that “the text that is referred to here as “memoirs” is not a book of collection in the classic sense; it is a collection of handwritten copies of some 52 Ottoman documents, along with supplementary notes explaining them, all written by Naim himself. Most of the documents within this collection are attributed to the Unionist Triumvir and Interior Minister Talat Pasha, and some contain his orders regarding the liquidation of the Armenian population”.

Obviously  Turkish historians have questioned the authenticity of these telegrams from Talat Pasha ordering the killing of the Armenians and have questioned if an Ottoman bureaucrat named Naim Bey in fact existed and have claimed that the telegrams and the person are figments of Armenian historians’ imagination.  Hence the Turkish denialists have long claimed that these documents and the memoirs themselves are forgeries produced by the Armenians. Akcam painstakingly disputes such allegations by the Turkish denialists with historical evidence backing their authenticity. His knowledge of Ottoman Turkish and the codes the Turkish officials used during the era help him greatly to make his case.

On an important side note, I would like to quote Taner Ackam’s claim that serendipitous turn of events lead him to lay his hands on a bunch of documents kept in the NAASR (National Association for Armenian Studies and Research) institute  that turned out to be Naim Bey’s memoirs and hence became the impetus for him to embark on his research authenticating that Naim Bey actually existed and these documents are real and not forgeries. Quoting from the book, Taner Akcam’s book “presents new evidence and arguments that prove the killing orders of the Armenian Genocide issued by Talat Pasha are authentic. For decades it has been claimed that these incriminating documents and the memoirs of the Ottoman bureaucrat Naim Effendi, in which they are preserved, were forgeries”.

I believe Tim Arango, a Los Angeles correspondent for NY Times,  best sums up both the author and the book in an article in NY Times on April 22, 2017,  claiming that Taner Ackam is the “Sherlock Holmes of Armenian Genocide” who uncovered lost evidence. 

Taner Akcam has deciduated the book to his “Dear friend Hrant Dink, who dreamt of bringing the Armenians  and people of Turkey together on the basis of ‘Truth and Justice’. His assassination in 2007 did not kill this dream, but instead inspired hundreds of thousands of individuals to follow in his footsteps. And to my daughter Helin, who gives me hope in the newer generation’s ability to carry on Hrant’s dream for a better future.”

Taner Akcam and Emanuel Macron

According to Wikipedia “Altuğ Taner Akcam is a Turkish-German historian and sociologist. He is one of the first Turkish academics to acknowledge and openly discuss the Armenian Genocide and is recognized as a ‘leading international authority’ on the subject.” He is the chairman of Robert Aram, Marianne Kaloustian and Stephen and Marian Mugar Armenian Genocide studies in the Department of History of the Clark University, in Worcester, MA.  Quoting from the back cover of the book, Taner Ackam’s  publications include “The Young Turks’ Crime Against Humanity: The Armenian Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing in the Ottoman Empire (2012), which was co-winner of the Middle East Studies Association’s Albert Hourani Book Award  and of Foreign Affairs.com’s Best Books on the Middle East”.

Last year the ANCA-Western Region recognized his contributions to Armenian Genocide study and recently President Emmanuel Macron of France praised him during a dinner hosted by the Coordinating Council of Armenian Organizations in France (CCAF) for standing up against denialists of the Armenian Genocide.

The book is 261 pages long with a rich bibliography and is indexed and contains pictures of the telegrams and other documents. The book retails on Amazon.com from where I purchased the copy I am reading.