Beginning with the negotiations that concluded with the unanimous
adoption of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and
Punishment of the Crime of Genocide on December 9, 1948, and
...extending to the present day, the United States, Soviet
Union/Russia, China, United Kingdom, and France have put forth
great effort to ensure that they will not be implicated in the
crime of genocide. If this were to fail, they have also ensured
that holding any of them accountable for genocide will be
practically impossible. By situating genocide prevention in a
system of territorial jurisdiction; by excluding protection for
political groups and acts constituting cultural genocide from the
Genocide Convention; by controlling when genocide is meaningfully
named at the Security Council; and by pointing the responsibility
to protect in directions away from any of the P-5, they have
achieved what can only be described as practical impunity for
genocide. The Politics of Genocide is the first book to
explicitly demonstrate how the permanent member nations have
exploited the Genocide Convention to isolate themselves from the
reach of the law, marking them as "outlaw states."
Introducing new evidence from more than 600 secret Ottoman documents, this book demonstrates in unprecedented detail that the Armenian Genocide and the expulsion of Greeks from the late Ottoman ...Empire resulted from an official effort to rid the empire of its Christian subjects. Presenting these previously inaccessible documents along with expert context and analysis, Taner Akçam's most authoritative work to date goes deep inside the bureaucratic machinery of Ottoman Turkey to show how a dying empire embraced genocide and ethnic cleansing.
Although the deportation and killing of Armenians was internationally condemned in 1915 as a "crime against humanity and civilization," the Ottoman government initiated a policy of denial that is still maintained by the Turkish Republic. The case for Turkey's "official history" rests on documents from the Ottoman imperial archives, to which access has been heavily restricted until recently. It is this very source that Akçam now uses to overturn the official narrative.
The documents presented here attest to a late-Ottoman policy of Turkification, the goal of which was no less than the radical demographic transformation of Anatolia. To that end, about one-third of Anatolia's 15 million people were displaced, deported, expelled, or massacred, destroying the ethno-religious diversity of an ancient cultural crossroads of East and West, and paving the way for the Turkish Republic.
By uncovering the central roles played by demographic engineering and assimilation in the Armenian Genocide, this book will fundamentally change how this crime is understood and show that physical destruction is not the only aspect of the genocidal process.
The Killing Trap, first published in 2005, offers a comparative analysis of the genocides, politicides and ethnic cleansings of the twentieth century, which are estimated to have cost upwards of ...forty million lives. The book seeks to understand both the occurrence and magnitude of genocide, based on the conviction that such comparative analysis may contribute towards prevention of genocide in the future. Manus Midlarsky compares socio-economic circumstances and international contexts and includes in his analysis the Jews of Europe, Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, Tutsi in Rwanda, black Africans in Darfur, Cambodians, Bosnians, and the victims of conflict in Ireland. The occurrence of genocide is explained by means of a framework that gives equal emphasis to the non-occurrence of genocide, a critical element not found in other comparisons, and victims are given a prominence equal to that of perpetrators in understanding the magnitude of genocide.
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