A Shameful Act The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility

Under the cover of World War I, some one million Armenians were killed through starvation, forced marches, and mass acts of slaughter. Although history and world opinion have held the Ottoman powers responsible, modern Turkey has rejected any claim of genocide. Now, in a pioneering work of excavation, Turkish historian Taner Akcam has made unprecedented use of government records and other sources to produce a scrupulous charge sheet against the Ottoman authorities. The first scholar of any nationality to have mined this significant evidence, Akcam reconstructs the systematic orchestration of the killing by coordinated departments of the Ottoman state and examines Turkey's subsequent success at evading accountability. Book jacket.

Born in Ardahan province, Turkey, in 1953, Taner Akçam is the author of ten scholarly works of history and sociology, as well as numerous articles in Turkish, German, and English. He currently teaches at the University of Minnesota.