Former Denier Donald Quataert now admits it was Genocide

[Joseph]

Former Genocide Denier Donald Quataert now admits it was indeed a genocide. He has since been forced to resign from the Chairmanship of the board of governors of the Institute of Turkish Studies (ITS). This is his review of the Donald Bloxham book.

Source: http://www.mesa.arizona.edu/


THE MASSACRES OF OTTOMAN ARMENIANS
Donald Quataert

The Massacres of Ottoman Armenians and the
Writing of Ottoman History

Donald Bloxham, The Great Game of Genocide: Imperialism, Nationalism,
and the Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians (New York, Oxford
University Press, 2005) 344 pp. $39.95

In the late 1960s (when I entered graduate studies), there was an
elephant in the room of Ottoman studies—the slaughter of the
Ottoman Armenians in 1915.1 This subject continued to be taboo
for a long time to come. To the best of my knowledge, no one
ever suggested that the so-called “Armenian question” not be
studied. Rather, a heavy aura of self-censorship hung over Ottoman
history writing. Other topics—as diverse as religious identities,
or the Kurds, or labor history—were also off limits. The Armenians
were not alone as subjects of scholarly neglect and
avoidance, nor as victims of state-sanctioned violence and discrimination
within the Ottoman Empire.

As Ottomanists remained largely silent, other writers were offering
Armenians’ points of view, using both the oral testimony of
Armenian survivors or the records of European and American
diplomats and missionaries who witnessed, at greater and lesser
distances, the atrocities of 1915. Journals, memoirs, and village reconstructions appeared in relatively substantial numbers and presented,
usually in anger or sorrow, the stories of the victims, and
sometimes their communities, before their disappearance. Much
of this work was initially by Armenians in the ªrst generation of
their diaspora and more recently by scholars who often, but not always,
were Armenian-Americans.


In the 1980s, another body of writing began to emerge, in
both Turkish and English, using Ottoman sources, with titles like
Documents on Ottoman Armenians.3 It quickly became evident that
the authors were not writing critical history but polemics that
moved along two fronts. Many of their works were directly sponsored
and published by the Turkish government and offered either
English or modern Turkish translations and sometimes reproductions
of Ottoman documents. Overall, these translations were intended
to demonstrate that after the Ottoman government ordered
the deportation of the Armenians from the eastern Anatolian war zones in the spring of 1915, the regime went to considerable trouble to protect the lives and properties of its departing subjects. More or less simultaneously, a second body of Ottomanist literature appeared. These studies added to the account that the years from 1911 to 1922 witnessed a terrible bloodletting
for all Ottoman subjects and that Muslims died in greater
numbers than did Christians during the conflaagrations.


After the long lapse of serious Ottomanist scholarship on the
Armenian question, it now appears that the Ottomanist wall of silence
is crumbling. In 1998, for example, the Armenian Forum published
articles by several Ottomanists, as well as Armenian specialists,
in which the scholars actually talked to, instead of past, one
another; they sought to engage in constructive dialogues on the
massacres and not simply to speak to their own constituencies. A
remarkable set of events, perhaps even a permanent break in the
wall, occurred in late 2005. A Turkish university managed to hold
a two-day conference exploring the events of 1915. The Turkish
government had blocked several earlier efforts. This time, however,
despite ofªcial intimidation and public harassment, Turkish
historians and other Turkish academics debated and discussed this
once-forbidden subject.

Such is the backdrop for a discussion of Bloxham’s The Great
Game of Genocide. Although the book has many faults and short-comings, it is intellectually honest and makes important contributions
to shattering the taboos that still prevail.

The author has strong biases, but readers will detect the presence of a scholar struggling with complex political, economic, and moral issues.
From this reviewer’s perspective—as expressed in The Ottoman
Empire (Cambridge, 2000)—Ottoman civil and military personnel
in 1915 committed mass murders of Armenian subjects,
persons whom they were sworn and bound to protect and defend.
As I wrote in the second edition to my book, however, debate
that centers around the term genocide may degenerate into semantics
and deºect scholars from the real task at hand, to understand
better the nature of the 1915 events.

My concern about the term genocide is partly a reflection of
the current state of debate among Ottomanists and the reluctance
of both these professional historians and the Turkish government
to consider the fate of the Armenians. These politics mean that use
of genocide creates more heat than light and does not seem to promote
dispassionate inquiry. Moreover, genocide evokes implicit
comparisons with the Nazi past, which precludes a full understanding
of the parameters of the Ottoman events. Nonetheless, I
use the term in the context of this review. Although it may provoke
anger among some of my Ottomanist colleagues, to do otherwise
in this essay runs the risk of suggesting denial of the massive
and systematic atrocities that the Ottoman state and some of its
military and general populace committed against the Armenians.
Indeed, as I state in the second edition, accumulating evidence is
indicating that the killings were centrally planned by Ottoman
government officials and systematically carried out by their underlings.[/B]

Bloxham sometimes offers inadequate evidence to buttress
his arguments concerning the central planning of the massacres.
For example, he documents a spring 1915 decision to deport “all
of the Armenians” from an area in western Anatolia by citing a
Berlin newspaper, Berliner Tageblatt, of 4 May 1916 (78, n. 88).
Citing a secondary source dated a year after an event is not presenting
sufficient historical evidence and does not make a convincing
case.

Nonetheless, what happened to the Armenians readily satisfies the U.N. definition of genocide. Furthermore, Bloxham is correct to say, “The 1915–16 genocide was a one-sided destruction of a largely defenceless community by the agents of a sovereign
state” Leaving aside any reservations about using the
term genocide, which did not become part of the international lexicon
until after World War II, to describe events during World
War I, the question remains: How do we frame discussions of the
systematic widespread slaughters that have occurred in the past?


The Armenians had coexisted in relative peace for most of the
period during which they were under Ottoman administration.
The Armenian massacres of the mid-1890s, 1909, and World
War I were not the inevitable outcome of preexisting primordial
divides but were historically contingent events. What caused
them?
Bloxham’s book is divided into two parts. In the ªrst, he surveys
late Ottoman history and the genocide (he has no qualms
about using this term coined in the late 1930s). He then devotes
slightly more than half of his work to exploring the complicity of
the Great Powers in the perpetration of the Ottoman atrocities of
1915 and in supporting the denials of the Turkish Republic following
the elimination of the Ottoman Empire. Bloxham offers a
study of imperialism in the Near and Middle East and its consequences
for the peoples of the region. Toward the end of the
book, he summarizes his own contribution as “the sorry history of
the manipulated aspirations of supplicant peoples by the Great
Powers” (225). Bloxham describes his goal as “an analysis of the
way that the Armenian question continued periodically and tragically
to intersect with the greater imperial and military policies of
the powers” (133). The book is much stronger in Parts II and III,
in which he discusses the involvement of the Great Powers and
presents considerable original research. The earlier chapters in
Part I are weaker, at least partly because Bloxham did not utilize
much of the new scholarship on Ottoman history that would have
provided him with richer insights into the structure of Ottoman
society and the state.

[Joseph]

2.

Bloxham does not consult Ottoman archival sources. In fact,
he uses few Turkish secondary ones. Thus, his is not an
Ottomanist tract according to the deªnition given above—that is,
a study that uses Ottoman-language sources in signiªcant measure.
His is always the externalist view, events as seen from the outside
by Europeans and Americans. He does not offer much insight
about developments in the nineteenth century from an Ottoman
point of view, whether domestic or international politics or the
massacres themselves. In this sense, his book resembles Fromkin’s
A Peace to End All Peace, which, despite the praise of many historians,
is deeply troubling for its nearly complete dependence on
non-Ottoman sources for its analysis of the end of the Ottoman
Empire.8 But, in Bloxham’s defense, his goal is not to examine the
events of 1915 for their own sake, but to trace the complicity of
the Great Powers in them and in their subsequent cover-up. But
his willingness to use the Turkish government’s compilations of
Ottoman documents is fraught with peril, since it seems to validate
the academic legitimacy of material that is no less problematical
than the German White, French Yellow, British Blue, and the
other colored “books” that the various Great Powers assembled to
demonstrate their innocence regarding the outbreak of World
War I.9
Bloxham relies heavily on a host of German, Austro-
Hungarian, French, British, and U.S. primary and secondary
sources. However, he does not give a sufªcient narrative of the
unfolding of the 1915 genocide. Since many people, among them
Ottomanists, deny its reality, and many others do not know the
details but often only the polemics, Bloxham might have offered a
summary of the events themselves.
Bloxham’s exoneration of Imperial Germany from any particular
wrongdoing in the slaughter and its aftermath is persuasive.
He is right not to transfer onto the Wilhelmine Reich the sins of
the Third. By dividing responsibility equally among the Germans,
Austro-Hungarians, British, French, and Americans, he drives
home the point that if the Great Powers, as a group, had acted differently,
the horrors of 1915 might have been averted. He shows
how the particular alignments in 1914—Britain, France, Russia

[Joseph]

3.

versus Germany and Austria-Hungary—created a favorable
atmosphere for bigots within the Ottoman government to gain
inºuence over key parts of the state apparatus (66). Imperialism
had speciªc effects on Ottoman political decision making.
Bloxham also makes clear that the United States—the imperialist
power of our own age—follows, for raison d’etat, the same
strategy of conveniently looking the other way that its imperial
predecessors established in the Middle East. Indeed, for much of
the history of the Turkish Republic, U.S. businessmen, diplomats,
and politicians have remained silent about the events of 1915, favoring
the new nation-state for its stabilizing role. “American diplomats
also swiftly learned that there was no political capital to be
made in the Armenian cause” (24). Later, the Cold War and Turkey’s
role as a crucial U.S. ally perpetuated the pattern. Even the
American Protestant missionaries who had worked among the Ottoman
Armenians were caught up in the new politics. The Near
East Mission, in an April 1948 report, wrote of its own role in the
Cold War as “a bulwark against Communism.”10 Indeed, Bloxham
is sharply critical of America’s distancing itself from the
Armenian cause. He entitles a chapter of his book “The USA:
From Non-intervention to Non-recognition,” and he rebukes
Congress for its annual refusal to commemorate the Armenian
Genocide.
In common with many Ottomanists and non-specialists alike,
Bloxham consistently betrays a careless use of the terms Turk and
Turkish when referring to the Ottoman state or some of its Muslim
subjects. In this regard, he has plenty of company. For example, in
a richly detailed and important recent book on his years of reporting
about the Middle East, Fisk includes a powerful and disturbing
chapter about the Armenian massacres that often parallels Bloxham’s
arguments. Although its title—“The First Holocaust”—is
neither illuminating nor helpful, since it focuses attention on comparisons
with the Nazis rather than analyses of the speciªcities of
1915, the chapter itself offers substantial, and effective, eyewitness
testimony, much of it from interviews that Fisk gathered from
aged Armenian survivors during the early 1990s. Unfortunately,
however, Fisk proceeds as if the Ottoman Empire scarcely existed;

he almost always—anachronistically—substitutes Turk or Turkish
for the historically accurate term Ottoman.11
Bloxham, by contrast, clearly knows better, but he too very
often writes Turkish when he means Ottoman. Within the space of
a single paragraph, he refers to “Turkish suspicion” and “Ottoman
troops,” and, even worse, in two consecutive sentences, he wavers
from “the Ottoman army” to “the Turkish armies” (84, 100). That
he is aware of the difference between Ottomans and Turks is clear
from the various points at which he speciªcally distinguishes them
(say, 62, 106). But too often, frequently on the same page, he slips
back and forth.
Thus do Bloxham, Fisk, and many others create confusion
around a key issue. Who committed the deportations and slaughters?
On a moral plane, does the elision of Turk and Ottoman mean
that modern-day Turks are liable for the sins of the Ottomans? On
the historical plane, were the killers Ottoman ofªcials bent on saving
the state in a wartime crisis, or were they Turkish chauvinists
or racists bent on purging the land of its non-Turkish populations?
Bloxham seems to believe the latter to be the case (94, 135). In one
of his milder formulations, he argues that the military commanders
of the early Turkish Republic were as “equally nationalistic” as
ofªcers of the late Empire. But this characterization of the Ottoman
ofªcers as Turkish nationalists is too simplistic and unfair.
Many of these ofªcers remained loyal Ottomanists until the elimination
of the Empire.
Thus, even though, at many junctures, Bloxham labors to establish
historical contingency, his narrative has an air of inevitability
about it. He rushes to judgment too hastily about the ideological
bent of the late Ottoman civil and military leadership, fully
ignoring and thus summarily dismissing the opposing position
(58–59). Considerable scholarship, based on Ottoman archival
sources and other materials, suggests that most of the Ottoman
leadership during the ªnal decade of the Empire’s existence remained
committed to an ideology and system in which Ottoman
subjects would, or should, be loyal to the state.12 These works explicitly
reject the notion of a pervasive Turkish nationalism

[Joseph]

4.

or Pan-Turkic movement, arguing instead for the persistence of
Ottomanism well after the events of 1915. Indeed, some of them
maintain that Ottoman Muslim nationalism caught up in the crisis
of saving the state during wartime precipitated the slaughter.13
Bloxham certainly has the right to disagree with these contentions,
but he needs to acknowledge and debate them, lest he fall into the
same trap as those who deny the genocide altogether, content to
ignore evidence against their own cherished positions. The connection
between Ottoman and Republican Turkish policies toward
Armenians richly deserves further study, but Bloxham’s elisions
of Ottoman and Turkish by no means serve to promote such a
project.
Also problematical is Bloxham’s oversimpliªed assessment of
the policies that Sultan Abdulhamid (1876–1909) directed toward
Ottoman Muslims (46–48, 55). Bloxham is determined to portray
this ruler as a proto-Islamist, whereas much of the recent Ottomanist
literature presents him primarily as a monarchist intent on
propping up his legitimacy. Abdulhamid’s instruments of legitimation
included charitable donations, rebuilding the tombs of earlier
Ottoman sultans, and appeals to fellow Muslims.14 Bloxham ignores
the ªrst two and stresses the third, thereby gravitating to
those aspects of the Sultan’s rule that reinforce pre-existing notions
of Ottoman brutality toward the Armenians instead of exploring
late Ottoman methods of statecraft. Abdulhamid hardly
deserves to be cleared from any guilt in the massacres that took
place on his watch; in fact, research links him with the Armenian
massacres of 1895 in Istanbul.15 But the effect of Bloxham’s onedimensional
portrait of him is to shortchange our understanding of
a complex ruler. It is no less a blight on Bloxham’s otherwise compelling
analyses and insights as is his careless conºation of Ottomans
and Turks. Such a gap in the Ottoman context is the equivalent
of studying Rwanda-Burundi during the 1990s only from the perspective of the U.N. and the U.S., but not of the actual participants
in the tragedy.
Given its focus on the foreign policy of the Great Powers, the
book is sufªciently documented. One confusing note, however,
occurs at a key point in Bloxham’s discussion of a meeting in an
eastern Anatolian town at which prominent government leaders
“agitated for an immediate massacre” of certain Ottoman Armenians.
Bloxham reports the meeting as taking place on April 18,
1915, but the footnote cites an April 15, 1915, source for it. Elsewhere
in the same footnote, Bloxham cites an April 22, 1915,
source for a different matter, the passage of irregular troops (83 n.
142). Either one of the dates relating to the meeting is a typographical
error, or the April 22 source is the one that actually documents
the meeting. Such an error should not have crept into the
ªnal manuscript; it will only give credence to those who wish to
deny and invalidate the author’s arguments—more the pity, given
the moral integrity in Bloxham’s treatment of a subject over which
actual blood and not merely scholars’ ink has been spilt.16
Bloxham’s contributions are many. He calls for a “normalization
[his stress] of the study of state-sponsored mass murder . . . that
. . . emerges . . . often piecemeal, informed by ideology but according
to shifts in circumstances” (69). He criticizes the Eurocentric
bias among many critics of these Ottoman events who neglect
imperial Germany’s slaughter of the Herero and Nama peoples in
Southwest Africa. Similarly, the silence surrounding the 1880s
Czarist massacres of Muslim Circassians (who would later themselves
slaughter Armenians) and the killings of Ottoman Muslims
either by Ottoman Christian subjects of the sultan or by the newly
independent states in the former Ottoman Balkans is untenable. A
double racism appears to be at work. Observers are willing to condemn
atrocities by the Ottomans against Armenians, but, as
Bloxham says, they seem to worry less when the victims are those
not like us, in this case the Herero peoples or Muslims during the
final Ottoman decades.
To his credit, Bloxham also places the denials of the republican
Turkish state in the eighty years since its formation in historical
context. He notes that Turkey’s leaders feared that “the atten-
16 I refer also to the assassination of many Turkish diplomats by Armenians during the
1980s.
tion of the outside world on matters Armenian” simply would be
a pretext for interfering in internal Turkish affairs or making
claims on Turkish territory (111). These republican Turkish concerns
are not dissimilar to those of certain Ottoman leaders that
Armenian nationalist claims, coupled with Russian imperial ambitions,
would lead to the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire.
Bloxham’s assessment of the positions that the Great Power
individually espoused is particularly strong. Austria-Hungary,
another empire struggling with its late nineteenth-century multiethnicity,
behaved cautiously toward the Armenians. Britain,
however, opportunistically “adopted publicity of the massacres” as
a means of wooing U.S. “public opinion against the Central
Powers” at a point when the American entry into the war was uncertain
(128). Bloxham also offers a thoughtful, multifaceted explanation
of why the post–WorldWar I trials “to punish Ottoman
leaders for crimes against humanity” fell apart (163). The Great
Powers’ postwar politics and the lack of legal mechanisms available
“for the prosecution of a state’s mass murder of its own civilians”
combined to limit the possibility of a full examination of the wartime
massacres (163).
Near the end of the study, Bloxham is able to draw only a
gloomy conclusion from his research: “If there is a concrete policy
implication from this book, it is not for Ankara but for the Armenian
diaspora, whose lobbyists should stop putting hope in the
agenda of the USA and the major European states” (225).
The recent works by Bloxham and Fisk, among others, illustrate
a long-standing pattern in the scholarship concerning 1915
and its aftermath. Ottomanists (like me) have long surrendered academic
study of this vital topic to those unable or unwilling to use
the Ottoman archives and other Ottoman-language sources, failing
to take their rightful responsibility to perform the proper research.
Oddly, Ottomanists fall into a camp of either silence or denial
—both of which are forms of complicity. Those who have the
linguistic and paleographic tools to unlock the truth must not
leave the matter for others to debate and resolve. How can we expect
Bloxham and Fisk to write accurately about the role of
Ottomans (not Turks) in the deaths of so many Armenians
when Ottomanists provide no guidance, no leadership, and no
scholarship?
Bloxham’s book is a worthy addition to a mounting literature
that seeks, through critical scholarship, to discuss the horrors of the
past and their legacies for the living. The best hope is that it will
stimulate Ottomanists to engage the issues that he has raised and
encourage the dialogue that has begun to emerge between heretofore
sharply divided legatees and their supporters.

[bell-the-cat]

He has since been forced to resign from the Chairmanship of the board of governors of the Institute of Turkish Studies (ITS).

What is the source for this bit of information?

Though who would want to sit on a board of governors composed of the likes of Heath Lowry and Justin McCarthy!

[Joseph]

or Pan-Turkic movement, arguing instead for the persistence of
Ottomanism well after the events of 1915. Indeed, some of them
maintain that Ottoman Muslim nationalism caught up in the crisis
of saving the state during wartime precipitated the slaughter.13
Bloxham certainly has the right to disagree with these contentions,
but he needs to acknowledge and debate them, lest he fall into the
same trap as those who deny the genocide altogether, content to
ignore evidence against their own cherished positions. The connection
between Ottoman and Republican Turkish policies toward
Armenians richly deserves further study, but Bloxham’s elisions
of Ottoman and Turkish by no means serve to promote such a
project.
Also problematical is Bloxham’s oversimpliªed assessment of
the policies that Sultan Abdulhamid (1876–1909) directed toward
Ottoman Muslims (46–48, 55). Bloxham is determined to portray
this ruler as a proto-Islamist, whereas much of the recent Ottomanist
literature presents him primarily as a monarchist intent on
propping up his legitimacy. Abdulhamid’s instruments of legitimation
included charitable donations, rebuilding the tombs of earlier
Ottoman sultans, and appeals to fellow Muslims.14 Bloxham ignores
the ªrst two and stresses the third, thereby gravitating to
those aspects of the Sultan’s rule that reinforce pre-existing notions
of Ottoman brutality toward the Armenians instead of exploring
late Ottoman methods of statecraft. Abdulhamid hardly
deserves to be cleared from any guilt in the massacres that took
place on his watch; in fact, research links him with the Armenian
massacres of 1895 in Istanbul.15 But the effect of Bloxham’s onedimensional
portrait of him is to shortchange our understanding of
a complex ruler. It is no less a blight on Bloxham’s otherwise compelling
analyses and insights as is his careless conºation of Ottomans
and Turks. Such a gap in the Ottoman context is the equivalent
of studying Rwanda-Burundi during the 1990s only from the perspective of the U.N. and the U.S., but not of the actual participants
in the tragedy.
Given its focus on the foreign policy of the Great Powers, the
book is sufªciently documented. One confusing note, however,
occurs at a key point in Bloxham’s discussion of a meeting in an
eastern Anatolian town at which prominent government leaders
“agitated for an immediate massacre” of certain Ottoman Armenians.
Bloxham reports the meeting as taking place on April 18,
1915, but the footnote cites an April 15, 1915, source for it. Elsewhere
in the same footnote, Bloxham cites an April 22, 1915,
source for a different matter, the passage of irregular troops (83 n.
142). Either one of the dates relating to the meeting is a typographical
error, or the April 22 source is the one that actually documents
the meeting. Such an error should not have crept into the
ªnal manuscript; it will only give credence to those who wish to
deny and invalidate the author’s arguments—more the pity, given
the moral integrity in Bloxham’s treatment of a subject over which
actual blood and not merely scholars’ ink has been spilt.16
Bloxham’s contributions are many. He calls for a “normalization
[his stress] of the study of state-sponsored mass murder . . . that
. . . emerges . . . often piecemeal, informed by ideology but according
to shifts in circumstances” (69). He criticizes the Eurocentric
bias among many critics of these Ottoman events who neglect
imperial Germany’s slaughter of the Herero and Nama peoples in
Southwest Africa. Similarly, the silence surrounding the 1880s
Czarist massacres of Muslim Circassians (who would later themselves
slaughter Armenians) and the killings of Ottoman Muslims
either by Ottoman Christian subjects of the sultan or by the newly
independent states in the former Ottoman Balkans is untenable. A
double racism appears to be at work. Observers are willing to condemn
atrocities by the Ottomans against Armenians, but, as
Bloxham says, they seem to worry less when the victims are those
not like us, in this case the Herero peoples or Muslims during the
final Ottoman decades.
To his credit, Bloxham also places the denials of the republican
Turkish state in the eighty years since its formation in historical
context. He notes that Turkey’s leaders feared that “the atten-
16 I refer also to the assassination of many Turkish diplomats by Armenians during the
1980s.
tion of the outside world on matters Armenian” simply would be
a pretext for interfering in internal Turkish affairs or making
claims on Turkish territory (111). These republican Turkish concerns
are not dissimilar to those of certain Ottoman leaders that
Armenian nationalist claims, coupled with Russian imperial ambitions,
would lead to the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire.
Bloxham’s assessment of the positions that the Great Power
individually espoused is particularly strong. Austria-Hungary,
another empire struggling with its late nineteenth-century multiethnicity,
behaved cautiously toward the Armenians. Britain,
however, opportunistically “adopted publicity of the massacres” as
a means of wooing U.S. “public opinion against the Central
Powers” at a point when the American entry into the war was uncertain
(128). Bloxham also offers a thoughtful, multifaceted explanation
of why the post–WorldWar I trials “to punish Ottoman
leaders for crimes against humanity” fell apart (163). The Great
Powers’ postwar politics and the lack of legal mechanisms available
“for the prosecution of a state’s mass murder of its own civilians”
combined to limit the possibility of a full examination of the wartime
massacres (163).
Near the end of the study, Bloxham is able to draw only a
gloomy conclusion from his research: “If there is a concrete policy
implication from this book, it is not for Ankara but for the Armenian
diaspora, whose lobbyists should stop putting hope in the
agenda of the USA and the major European states” (225).
The recent works by Bloxham and Fisk, among others, illustrate
a long-standing pattern in the scholarship concerning 1915
and its aftermath. Ottomanists (like me) have long surrendered academic
study of this vital topic to those unable or unwilling to use
the Ottoman archives and other Ottoman-language sources, failing
to take their rightful responsibility to perform the proper research.
Oddly, Ottomanists fall into a camp of either silence or denial
—both of which are forms of complicity. Those who have the
linguistic and paleographic tools to unlock the truth must not
leave the matter for others to debate and resolve. How can we expect
Bloxham and Fisk to write accurately about the role of
Ottomans (not Turks) in the deaths of so many Armenians
when Ottomanists provide no guidance, no leadership, and no
scholarship?
Bloxham’s book is a worthy addition to a mounting literature
that seeks, through critical scholarship, to discuss the horrors of the
past and their legacies for the living. The best hope is that it will
stimulate Ottomanists to engage the issues that he has raised and
encourage the dialogue that has begun to emerge between heretofore
sharply divided legatees and their supporters.

http://www.armeniangenocide.com/showthread.php?p=29230#post29230

[Joseph]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/harut-sassounian/turkish-ambassador-dismis_b_104996.html