Taner Akçam
Ayhan Aktar, a Turkish academician, published in Turkish the memoirs of Sarkis Torossian in 2012. The memoir is about the story of an Ottoman Armenian soldier. In the story, the soldier fights for the Ottoman Empire during First World War. He is brilliant and earns a military reward. However, he changes sides when his family is killed by the government. Historians Halil Berktay and Hakan Erdem found factual and logical mistakes in the book. They concluded that the story was fake. But their research was published in Turkish. People, who lived outside Turkey, couldn't read them. Taner Akçam and Ayhan Aktar falsely told the Western press that the memoirs were true. They also falsely claimed that Turkish people denied the memoirs because of political and racist reasons. After that, historian Edhem Eldem published an article that criticized Taner Akçam for his dishonesty.