Warrant For Genocide (Ppr)

Warrant for Genocide provides a unique, interdisciplinary approach to understanding the underlying causes of the World War I Armenian genocide. It traces genocide to the origin and history of the long-standing Turko-Armenian discord with the massacres treated as a means to resolve the conflict between a powerful, dominant group and a weak, vulnerable minority.

The World War I destruction of the Armenian people in the Ottoman Empire was neither an accident nor an aberration. The seeds of the large-scale deportations and massacres of Armenians can be found in the 1919-1920 Turkish Courts Martial documents of leaders of the Young Turk Ittihadist regime. These were replete with xenophobic nationalism, calls for the use of arms to achieve that end, and references to Islam to incite the masses against Armenians. The utmost secrecy, camouflage, and deflection with respect to their plans were evident in what was not said. This was a drastic departure by the regime from its publicly proclaimed posture of egalitarianism, heralding the dawn of a new era of multiethnic harmony and accord in the decaying empire.

Dadrian carefully details these calculated deliberations and the concomitant shift from Ottomanism to Turkism in the radical wing of the regime. He illustrates how this rekindled enmities between dominant Turks and subject minorities. The desire to neutralize or eliminate the opposition helped pave the way to a new and radical nationality policy. To Dadrian, the act of genocide was a draconian method of resolving a lingering conflict.

No analysis of the Armenian genocide can be adequate without understanding the origin, elements, evolution, and escalation of the Turko-Armenian conflict. Dadrian details this admirably, showing that in the final analysis, the Armenian genocide was a cataclysmic by-product of this conflict. Genocide and Holocaust scholars, Armenian area specialists, and human rights activists will consider this an essential addition to the literature.

This is a paperbound reprint of a 1999 book. Genocide of any form or level presupposes a preexisting conflict between perpetrator and victim-group, and it is undertaken by the perpetrator as a radical means of resolving that conflict, argues Dadrian (director of the Genocide Study Project sponsored by the Guggenheim Foundation). He examines the underlying causes of the Turkish genocide of the Armenians in the early part of the 20th century, discussing demographic, ideological, and political issues such as the concentration of Armenians in six provinces, which gave rise to Turkish fears that they could lose the territory to Imperialist Russia; the Turkish creed emphasizing uniformity and the view of Armenians as outside the pan-Turkism of the Ittihadist Young Turks; and, crucially, the power differentials between the Turks and the Armenians and the correct perception that outside powers would not intervene. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Vahakn N. Dadrian is director of the Genocide Study Project sponsored by the Guggenheim Foundation. From 1970 to 1991 he was professor of political sociology at the State University of New York, Geneseo.