Last April, on the eve of the anniversary of the government deportations in 1915 that began the systemic massacres, then prime minister and now president Erdoğan, in a hedged but nonetheless unprecedented statement, offered his condolences for the mass murder, speaking of the “shared pain” of “millions of people of all religions and ethnicities [who] lost their lives in the first world war”. Yet the messaging is mixed. This year Turkey has chosen to mark the centenary of the allied landings in Gallipoli — a battle Mustafa Kemal was instrumental in winning — on the same date, April 24, as the remembrance of the Armenian genocide.
One can now find books in Turkey analysing these terrible events as a genocide but no official recognition that this was what it was. Erdoğan’s offer to open Ottoman archives to a panel of international scholars to determine the truth of what happened is superfluous in light of scholarship there for all to see.
The three newly published, and very different, books discussed here — and many previous works besides — can leave no one with a scintilla of doubt that what was done to the Ottoman Armenians (and the Assyrian Christians of eastern Anatolia) was genocide. They were annihilated, and the merciless drive against the Armenians was centrally directed by the Ottoman government under the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) or Young Turks.
more here.