Adam LeBor
Ottoman Atrocity
Rebel Land: Among Turkey’s Forgotten Peoples
By Christopher de Bellaigue
Bloomsbury 270pp £20 order from our bookshop
Hidden in a pile of documents given to the Turkish writer Murat Bardakçi by the widow of Talat Pasha, one of the architects of the Armenian genocide in 1915, is a piece of paper whose stark human accounting should lay to rest the debate over the destruction of the Ottoman Armenian community.
Armenian historians and activists, and a few brave Turkish academics such as Taner Akçam, author of A Shameful Act, have already set out a convincing case that a premeditated genocide took place. Turkish officials argue that the deaths were regrettable, but were the inevitable result of war and
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