"The Young Turks' Crime Against Humanity: The Armenian Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing in the Ottoman Empire By Taner Akcam, and Judgment at Istanbul: The Armenian Genocide Trials By Vahakn N. Dadrian and Taner Akcam. These two books are the latest, and perhaps most conclusive, of the many I have read about the 1915 Armenian Genocide. Dr. Taner Akcam's The Young Turks' Crime Against Humanity: The Armenian Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing in the Ottoman Empire constitutes a major breakthrough in our understanding of the social engineering that led to the near destruction of the Armenians of Anatolia, and of the dual-track mechanism for organizing it that the Young Turks employed. Judgment at Istanbul: The Armenian Genocide Trials co-authored by Akcam and veteran Armenian historian Vahakn Dadrian, gives the English-speaking world, for the first time, the full story of the courts-martial constituted by the Ottoman Government in 1919 to hold to account the perpetrators of the deportations and massacres (seven of the most important of whom had already escaped to safety on a German warship)," John Evans, former US Ambassador to Armenia writes. Evans writes both volumes are a must for serious scholars of the Armenian Genocide. Writing about Ak?am Evans says, "A close friend of the Turkish Armenian journalist Hrant Dink, who was assassinated on an Istanbul street in January, 2007, Akcam has himself been the target of death threats, yet he has continued to mine the Ottoman archives, which he is able to read in the pre-reform script, with jaw-dropping results". The former ambassador writes, "In a way, Akcam's account is oddly reassuring, as it gets to a basic and banal, if also horrifying, truth: the Turks did not so much loathe the Armenians as view them as competitors in the impending challenge of building a new state, inspired by extreme Turkish nationalism, on the ruins of the defunct Ottoman Empire. This is not to understate the crimes committed, which included rape, forced assimilation and murder, as well as wholesale expropriations of land and property: genocide, in short." "With less than two years to go until the centenary, much will yet be written, but I doubt as much light will be shed as by these two valuable volumes," Evans concludes. John Evans' review was published by American Diplomacy, noting that John M. Evans, a career Foreign Service Officer who served as the U.S. Ambassador to Armenia from 2004 to 2006, stirred controversy in February 2005 by publicly dissenting from the policy of the Bush Administration on the 90-year-old issue of the Armenian Genocide.

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