A book entitled Judgment at Istanbul: The Armenian Genocide Trials was published by Berghahn Books of New York and Oxford.

In the aftermath of its disastrous defeat in WWI, Ottoman Turkey had to face the wartime crime of the destruction of its Armenian population. An inquiry commissioned by the Ottoman government in 1919 presented enough preliminary evidence to organize a series of trials involving the perpetrators of these crimes. It is the record of these trials and the unparalleled details they provide on the planning and implementation of these heinous crimes that has brought together the two most renowned scholars of the Armenian Genocide, Professors Vahakn Dadrian and Taner Akcam, in their first joint publication.

After years of research and analysis, the authors have compiled for the first time in English the complete documentation of the trial proceedings and have set these findings in their historical and legal context, Zoryan Institute announced.

In describing the book, Prof. Dadrian commented, “This is a most important work, for two reasons. First, it is based on authentic Turkish documentation, which the Ottoman government was forced to release during the trials. Second, unlike most books on the Armenian Genocide, which are historical interpretations, this study, for the first time is based also on the testimony of high-ranking Ottoman officials, given under oath, on the magnitude of the crimes against the Armenians, and in this sense, serves as a legal case study of the Armenian Genocide.”

During his more than fifty years of research on the subject, Dadrian discovered that the Takvim-i Vekâyi, the official Ottoman government’s gazette, was not the only major source of information on these military tribunals. In fact, Renaissance, a French language Armenian newspaper in Constantinople at the time, reported summaries of many of the trial proceedings taken from the reports of the Ottoman language newspapers of the day, which were otherwise not accounted for in official government records.

Prof. Akçam, the book’s co-author, noted that “While the official government record lists only twelve trials, newspapers provide us details on sixty-three. For the first time, information from the Ottoman newspapers of the era has been utilized to reconstruct the trials. A great deal of effort was required to track down all issues possible of fourteen different Ottoman newspapers, which meant visiting many libraries in different cities. Often, the articles we were looking for had been cut out of the paper in one location, but we were able to find a copy in another location.”

The Zoryan Institute sponsored the collection of these newspapers, their translation and transliteration, as part of the long-term project known as “Creating a Common Body of Knowledge,” and retains copies in its archives.