An Interview with Hilmar Kaiser

By Khatchig Mouradian

Hilmar Kaiser is a scholar of the Armenian genocide who is also known in scholarly circles and the Armenian community for the controversy he generates with some of his lectures and interviews. We first sat down at the editorial offices of the Aztag Daily in Beirut on Sept. 22, 2005, for a fascinating interview about the Ottoman archives and the Armenian genocide.

Kaiser received his PhD from the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. He specializes in Ottoman social and economic history as well as the Armenian genocide. He has done research in more than 60 archives worldwide, including the Ottoman Archives in Istanbul.

His published works—monographs, edited volumes and articles—include “Imperialism, Racism, and Development Theories: The Construction of a Dominant Paradigm on Ottoman Armenians,” “At the Crossroads of Der Zor: Death Survival and Humanitarian Resistance in Aleppo, 1915-1917,” “The Baghdad Railway and the Armenian Genocide, 1915-1916: A Case Study in German Resistance and Complicity,” “1915-1916 Ermeni Soykirimi Sirasinda Ermeni Mulkleri, Osmanli Hukuku ve Milliyet Politikalari,” “Le genocide armenien: negation a ‘l'allemande’” and “From Empire to Republic: The Continuities for Turkish Denial.”

In this interview, conducted in Boston in Dec. 2007, Kaiser discusses the archives and speaks about his views on Turkish scholars—both the liberals and state-sponsored genocide deniers.

Khatchig Mouradian—Let’s talk about your Turkish colleagues and how they approach the Armenian issue.

Hilmar Kaiser—When I looked in Turkey over the past year for organized “academic” treatment of the Armenian issue, I could identify at least eight centers, which are in competition with each other; and then, within the centers there is competition. What you have there is a flourishing chaos. This is also understandable because the Turkish government puts money into it. The government puts money into the project without having a right assessment, so they burn a lot of money on staff that has zero impact.

There has to be a realization in certain circles—especially at the Turkish Historical Society—that this level doesn’t suffice. Some people claim “our product is inefficient because it’s only in Turkish and no one can read it.” They should understand that it is good that no one can read it, because once it is translated, it will do more damage than anything else. Some authors areas if talking in their own bathroom.

But now within the Turkish Historical Society and among some others there is agreement that production has to meet U.S. University press standards and anything else is a total waste of time.

We agreed that we disagree, and then we had discussions about the concept of genocide, we have now discussed joint projects. It’s something else if that will happen or not, but we at least explored what can be done together, in areas where basically you wouldn’t burn the house. After two and a half years in the Turkish archives, they got used to me being in Turkey, there was no scandal, slowly they got used that I am a reality and they get more comfortable and confident about the situation.

Personally, I have no problem talking to official historians or genocide deniers because these guys have the nationalist credentials. They don’t have to prove that they’re not Armenian spies so they are very cool about it. They are very surprised that I don’t talk to the “liberals” about it, and I tell them very clearly that it is, in my view, a self-deception to think that a few Turkish scholars—regardless of how good or how bad their work is, how respectable or unrespectable they are—who represent a very small layer, a very privileged layer of Turkish society, the société, the upper one percent, will change the country.

These people teach at very few places where very few students go to and they basically dismiss a whole state university system with tens of thousands of history students. So I just ignore them. If you want to talk to people who train the teachers in Turkey, who go to countrywide universities, you have to talk to other people.

From a German perspective—I am German and it inspires me given the dialogue of the 1970s and 1980s between east and west—it was always clear that engaging the other side is inevitable and you make them part of the solution. We can’t get rid of all of those we don’t like and then start everything from the beginning, because these people will fight to the end if they have nothing to lose. Respectable scholarship has nothing to do with the name of the person who has written it—it is assessed on its own merit. So people might change and agreements might replace disagreements. Never give up too easy.

There’s a substance on which you can move on and I have been involved in it during the last few years. There are hopeless cases among historians in Turkey, of course. At one dinner, one outed himself as a fan of Adolf Hitler. In Germany, I would report him to the police and he wouldn’t leave the country for what he said. This was, at the same time, Holocaust denial, racism and a call for inter-ethnic violence. You don’t have to deal with those guys. There are clear standards. These standards are not to be compromised. But the other guys, I don’t boycott them, clearly.

K.M.—You criticize the liberal scholars. But most of the decent scholarship by Turks on the Armenian genocide is done by the liberal scholars and not the ones on the state’s payroll, am I wrong?

H.K.—You have to look at the footnotes. Every book tells you what you have done, at least what you claim to have done. Much of it is based on published resources. It shows that they are not at the cutting edge. If you want original research on a certain issue, given the low state of our knowledge because of archival issues and other issues, you have to put in the time. All these concepts about the Armenian genocide are developed on generalization of a very narrow source basis. We have developed a lot of Holy Grail items that we hear over and over again, but these are generalizations of local events that didn’t necessarily spread. There is a lot of crap that we have to throw out, and we have the documents to make that point. One has to be more humble and more relaxed about it and be careful about one’s findings.

K.M.—Talk about your relation with the head of the Turkish Historical Society Yusuf Halacoglu

H.K.—I met him at the Istanbul conference almost two years ago. Then I visited him at the Historical Society’s conference about a year ago, where he received me in a very friendly manner. Then we had little contact and I visited him in June and in November again. Halacoglu is the only Turkish historian who has put material on the table I cannot reconcile with my current knowledge. He is an extremely smart guy, very professional. He is ahead of me in some regards.

K.M.—Why do you say that?

H.K.—He has the material on the prosecution of war criminals during the war. Meanwhile, I have obtained my own copy of the material, but there has to be academic respect—it means, he has the right to publish it first.

According to this material, people who stole money, killed etc., were punished. The list identifies the perpetrators, what they did and what their punishment was. We know, for example, that the murderers of Zohrab and Vartkes Effendi were executed by Djemal, and there were other executions. People who stole money from the Armenian population and put it in their own pocket instead of transferring it to the government got punished. We know this but we need a careful analysis of it. We have no decisive answer yet.

K.M.—But they aren’t punishing them for stealing from the Armenians, are they?

H.K.—We haven’t researched that. This element is surely part of it, but do we really fully account for it?

K.M.—How would you qualify Halacoglu’s scholarship…

H.K.—The book on the 16th century is very good…

K.M.—No, I mean his scholarship on the Armenian genocide…

H.K.—This is not so easy, you have to see who is he. He is the representative of the Turkish state. If there is a real debate between persons with intellect and command of sources, Halacoglu leads the Turkish team.

Dismissing him for past weak scholarship or political fanaticism—or whatever argument you want to bring up and you may even have something in support of your point—will not necessarily be productive. Don’t underestimate Yusuf Halacoglu. I respect him. I might disagree with him emphatically but I’m comfortable that I don’t have a fight with him at this point. The academic resources of an entire state converge on this one person. The Armenians have nobody coming even close to the shadow of him.

On the other hand, he is not antagonistic like the fascist I just mentioned. Halacoglu is interested in dialogue, the question is on what terms. He has no problem to talk with me, to talk with others…

K.M.—The way you are describing a notorious genocide denier might come as a surprise to many…

H.K.—First of all, the description of deniers as a group is false. You have people who are fully paid talking heads who have nothing to offer; they are, unfortunately, the people who write the briefs for Erdogan when he goes abroad. Then you have the kind of politically well-connected third-rate academic creatures who are only interested in escalating the situation because they can only live on escalation, because they have nothing to offer. And then you have people who have serious disagreements with you.

The way Turkish materials have been used in one recent English-language publication in this country—which is celebrated as great research—is totally unscholarly. The celebration is there because no one is able to check the sources. If that publication had been an Armenian genocide denial publication, there would have been an outcry. Same methods of misrepresentation of sources, speculation, you name it. It’s all there.

K.M.—Can you give a concrete example?

H.K.—For example, one scholar claims that the president of the Ottoman Chamber was going to Germany in March 1915 to coordinate the decision of the Armenian genocide, and he gives the source. The source says exactly the opposite. I don’t want to go now into detail because I am publishing it.

K.M.—Talk about the Ottoman archives. What has changed in the past couple of years?

H.K.—The Directorate for Demography in the Ministry of the Interior was reopened. This collection was open for some time in the 1990s and was closed for at least two years since 2005. This was a reopening, not a new opening of collections.

The opening of other files is rapid, tremendous. They have opened the Ministry of the Interior files for the Abdul-Hamidian period until the second constitutional period. This is massive.

They have also opened the files of the Paris embassy and they are opening more embassy files now. This is at a pace that has never been there.

However, there are still files—collections we spoke of in our previous interview, like the files of the so-called abandoned property commissions—that are not made available. We also don’t have possibly the most crucial files on WWI concerning the Armenians, because they were removed in 1919 from the files that were opened so far and have been put in a new collection for the purposes of the government. So this is not—as some people now claim—a cleansing of archives. This is just that certain files were carried from one office to another office in the context of administrative organization. This stuff, from what I understand, is not going to be opened soon, not because the archivists are not motivated, not because they are not interested, but simply because you have so many people and so much work. There is a lack of resources.

There is no political opposition now towards declassification and processing. What they simply don’t have is sufficient resources, which is regrettable.

K.M.—What is the significance of the embassy files regarding the Armenian issue?

H.K.—I haven’t worked with this, but, for example, the catalogs indicate that the embassy files of London, St. Petersburg, Paris provide a lot of insight into the massacres of the 1890s. Also, the embassies were spying outposts. They were spying on the Armenian diaspora communities and the spying was directed by the Ministry of the Interior through the embassies. So you find a lot of Ministry of the Interior material in embassy files and you find embassy reports to the Ministry of the Interior. This is very important because we might have lost some material—physically totally rotten—because of maintenance problems. So you might lose the draft in the Ministry of Interior file but since the letter went out to the embassy, you can have it in the embassy file, because the Paris embassy had a better storage facility. Some of these files have been very recently repatriated, which is exciting.

K.M.—You are talking about hundreds of thousands of files, and among them, thousands of files might have relevance regarding the Armenian issue. How many people are actually involved in researching these files?

H.K.—There is increasing interest among Turkish historians in Istanbul and the provinces who have not been involved in organized campaigns so far against Turkish “traitors” who say it was a genocide or against “Armenian allegations.” But what has transpired now during my talks is that the Armenians have become a topic. One scholar is publishing 16th-century tax registers from Yerevan—in Istanbul, not Yerevan. This has nothing to do with the genocide but is very important for Armenian history. We have 19th-century income tax registers, 1840s, very important again. So where we are going right now is a periodization of the Armenian cause/issue/problem, as it is called in Turkey. The people no longer mix together the Tanzimat era, Abdul-Hamid era, second constitutional period with the genocide and then the occupation period. We see now increasingly very well-respected and motivated scholars working on it not just because they want to prove or disprove something—that might be just one aspect in it—but because there is interest in the material.

From the outside, Dr. Taner Akcam was there some time ago for three weeks, and now he lectures us on the Ottoman archives, for which I’m very thankful. Then, Garabed Moumdjian was there with me in 2006 for two weeks working on the Young Turks on the ARF. He has sent shock waves through the whole establishment. Every time I think about it I’m laughing. An Armenian walked in, he spoke better Turkish than the Turks, he read Ottoman, handwritten documents like we read the New York Times, he talked to the archival staff in Arabic... The idea of the ARF, fanatic, blood-drinking killer and so on got a devastating blow. There’s no one else. He’s the only Armenian who went there possibly in decades (before, only Ara Sarafian went). Which shows that these programs, whatever they do, don’t do one thing: They don’t bring people to that point where many people had hoped they would bring them. So we’re at that point and, this year, it seems I was alone.

K.M.—There’s so much research that needs to be done in these archives. Why is the interest by scholars from outside Turkey so little?

H.K.—I was criticized by some less-informed elements in the Armenian diaspora for going to the archives because now they cannot say it’s closed anymore. Why did we push for having it open if we don’t want it open? For some people, this was obviously just political talk. I have to be very critical about this. All these donations the community put into research, obviously none of it is coming there. So when I am going there, people should not think that I am going on an Armenian ticket. If there was five percent Armenian money in it, it would be nice.

My colleagues ask me in Turkey where all these Armenians are. They feared that the moment they opened the door, a mob would raid their place. So you had basically the cavalry waiting for the Indians to attack and in four to five years one lone Indian has showed up. And so they understand that their projections of a big Armenian conspiracy is just a formulation of their own fears that has relatively little to do with reality.

When I say the archives are open, it’s limited, clear, but there certainly is no excuse not to do it. It’s a very simple thing. Crucial evidence, about whose existence we know, is not available at this time. But there is no excuse not to exhaust what they have made available, because this has to be done anyhow. If people say, Well we want to see the rest and then we’ll do something, well that is unprofessional. One has to be at the cutting edge of research. I think this kind of concept is not present.

K.M.—What do you think about Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan’s proposal for a joint historical commission?

H.K.—A commission would have little to do. We have gone pretty well through the Ottoman archives and not much is left on World War I. So what should a commission do? Xerox the documents a second time? That would be perfect nonsense. The cataloging of WWI files has to make rapid progress to provide an archival basis for a commission. The issue is an illustration that Erdogan does not have the best advisors when it comes to the Armenian genocide. These people develop ideas without checking first whether the pre-conditions for their own proposal exist within their own institutions.

Another matter is getting rid of such obstacles as Article 301. I cannot expect anyone to agree with me when that would mean he would be regarded as a criminal for doing so. The AKP government in Ankara has inherited a mess created by its predecessors over decades. So it is small steps for the time being, while hoping that the AKP does its homework and continues its overall positive course.

NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J. (A.W.) On March 28, the Armenian Club of Rutgers University hosted a lecture by Hilmar Kaiser at the Student Activities Center.

Kaiser received his PhD from the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. He specializes in Ottoman social and economic history as well as the Armenian genocide. He has done research in more than 60 archives worldwide, including the Ottoman Archives in Istanbul.

During the lecture, Kaiser presented an overview of the Armenian genocide, based mainly on his research in the Ottoman archives. In the days following the lecture, statements were disseminated over the internet about what Kaiser said at Rutgers, portraying him as a denier of the Armenian genocide.

Kaiser is known in the community for his controversial statements and for criticizing other genocide scholars, which he did at the Rutgers lecture. And while many scholars and readers may not agree with some of his analysis or conclusions on the genocide, at no point did Kaiser deny the genocide. He consistently used the term "Armenian genocide" when referring to 1915-16, clearly made the point that the massacres were centrally planned, and put the number of "losses" at 1-1.5 million. The Turkish members of the audience were anything but happy with Kaiser's documentation of the genocide and threw all kinds of denialist and revisionist arguments at him during the question and answer session.

Kaiser parts ways with many genocide scholars on the issue of when the decision to carry out the Armenian genocide was made. While most scholars talk about a blueprint for the massacres, or a specific date when the decision was made, Kaiser argues that there were not one but several decisions for mass murder, all centrally planned and executed.

Below, we provide the transcript of Kaiser's lecture, with the hope that it will set the record straight and generate a healthy discussion. Kaiser did not read from a prepared text. This transcript, shortened due to space constraints, is from a digital recording taken by Armenian Weekly editor Khatchig Mouradian.

The ARF and the Ottoman government The Armenian community is a democratic, complex and politically competitive community. And when I now say that the leading political party was the ARF, some in the community might be offended. I just reflect the views of the Ottoman Ministry of Interior and Ottoman Intelligence. The only political group that was seen as politically of any relevance was the ARF.

The Ottoman government approached the ARF and proposed an alliance, because the ARF was also present behind the Russian lines as a Russian political party in Trans-Caucasia. The offer was that the ARF should start attacking and sabotaging Russian lines of supply and communication, thereby facilitating the Ottoman victory and, in return, the Ottoman government would then grant them the political concession they denied the Armenian community for years.

Basically, the offer was, "You join the war on our side, take the risk, and then we promise you what we have denied you for years." So it wasn't really a good offer. What would happen to the Armenian community in Russia?

The ARF declined the offer and assured the Ottoman government that the Armenian community in the Ottoman Empire would faithfully serve the common Ottoman war cause, and the Armenians in Russia would serve the country they were citizens of. This was the decision. But there was a minority opinion [in the ARF] that was voted down. The minority opinion was a group of more radical ARF members who said, "OK, the Russians are coming. We support the advance and get the benefits." But this minority opinion was overvoted, and the party line was at every single time upheld, with even strong measures by the ARF leadership to assert the party line.

However, the internal communications of the meetings of the ARF had been compromised and the details of the minority opinion were within days available to Minister of Interior Talat. And the Ottoman government decided to take the minority opinion that had been voted down as the real policy of the ARF and began acting on it. They did this despite repeated intelligence reports from the Eastern provinces, from Erzerum, Van, Bitlis, and Kharpert, that the ARF and the Armenian community supported the war effort by answering to the draft much more faithfully to the Muslim population. They were supporting the regular units more than the Muslims and they were absolutely reliable.

Campaign of repression From October 1914 right into May 1915, the Ottoman government began a campaign of repression. Before the start of the war, the ARF had reactivated an earlier, secret, semi-clandestine armed wing of the party, the Self-Defense Organization. This was an organization that was created to protect Armenian villages in remote areas especially from attacks by tribal Kurdish groups, bandits, and other outrages that occurred regularly. Now this sounds like a huge organization, but per village, it was maybe 6-10 armed men, plus, regionally, some so-called "mobile units," another 10-12 people who would be rushed to this or that village. This was a defensive body that lacked heavy weapons and automatic weapons like machine guns, and was not capable to really strike.

The Ottoman government knew who the militants were, they began taking out local party leaders one by one and also tracking down the members of the organization, thereby trying to destroy it. This was very easy because in those days the winters in Armenia and Kurdistan were very severe in 1914-15, high snow, so there was no way for the militants to escape to the mountains and hide; and even if they were to leave the villages, there's a trace.

The ARF leadership, based in Van, decided that it had to put up with the situation.

And now comes a very important document, dated March 25, 1915. The document has been used by Justin McCarthy in the book The Van Rebellion, but it seems Professor McCarthy was so overworked that he could only use half the document. I use the other half. In the second part of the report by Cevdet, the governor, to Talat (there is not a single decision at Van that was not supervised and approved by the central authorities), it says that the Armenian population is entirely peaceful, calm, doing nothing; however, in reality they are rebels, they are only waiting for the Russians to come and then they will kill every Muslim.

Van At this point, the Ottoman government decided that it does not make a difference at all if an Armenian would be fulfilling his civic duties, obeying the law, or would be in open rebellion. He would be killed anyhow. On March 25, the Ottoman forces decided to attack the Armenian community in Van and wipe them out. It didn't work.

Several Armenian leaders sacrificed their life (Ishkhan and Arshag Vramian). Knowing that they would be murdered, they went to the other side to negotiate, to win time. They knew that they were on a suicide mission going to the other side to negotiate. Basically, the negotiator was going to his own executioner in order to win a day, or in Vramian's case, even a couple of hours. And then the defense started. It was a defense, not a rebellion. The defense was successful by accident.

The letter the Central Committee of ARF Van sent to the other Central Committees says, We have done everything to avoid a clash. The last moment has come, we will be killed, we will make our last stand. There was nothing we could do.

The party line was to hold out until the last moment. They said, The last moment has passed, we cannot hold out anymore. They explain to the rest of the party why they are doing this. Basically, what they said was, Farewell, there is no chance. We will just make a stand.

And indeed, the ARF, together with (this is one of the few moments of unity in Armenian history) Hnchagians and Ramgavars fought together and they survived. But had the Russian and Armenian volunteers arrived 24 hours late, it would have meant total disaster. The Ottomans did not know that they had overwhelmed the defenders.

Deportations At this point, the Ottoman government realized that it had failed to take out the outer defense unit in the area and probably in other areas. Therefore, my conclusion (I don't have a document that says this...) is that the only way to avoid the potential threat of Armenians aiding the Russians was to deport them. So in the last phase of the defense of Van, the Ottoman government decides the deportation of Armenians in the area of the Van province, adjacent to the Bitlis province and then in the northern Erzerum province, exactly on the front line.

In the middle of June, the head of the Third Army (that's the eastern front) decreed the deportation of all Armenians within the Third Army area. This adds Kharpert, Sivas, Dikranagert and Trebizond to the deportation. It's the bulk of the Armenian population.

At the end of July, the Ottoman government orders an immediate count of all Armenians empire-wide and at the same time orders the deportation of Armenians from the remaining provinces.

So what you have here is the successive waves of deportation that resulted, by the end of September, in the total uprooting of Armenians, with the exception of parts of Constantinople, Smyrna, Aleppo, and very small groups of Armenians in Antalya.

How were these deportation organized? Basically, they weren't organized at all in the beginning. They were just decreed. They said the local administration takes care of the welfare of the Armenians. There were no precise orders on how to secure the welfare of Armenians.

However, in a process that I would describe as "learning by doing," the ideal size of an Armenian deportation caravan was established. One thousand Armenians per deportation caravan was the best economy in the use of accompanying gendarme forces. If the deportation caravan shrinks considerably, the convoy is stopped and parked until a second convoy arrives that has shrunk as well. Then they merge to the 1,000 number. So what you have here is a filter, and the system of economy shows you that the deportation was already a form of destruction, extermination. The concern was about the economy, the best efficient use of the gendarmes or the militia who accompanied the deportees. And they didn't try to stop the shrinking, by the way.

You have to understand that these were Ottoman citizens, protected by Ottoman law. At no point in the entire time was the Ottoman penal code cancelled. The government was breaking Ottoman law in the process.

These people were then sent to Der Zor, which, as a desert district, had very weak infrastructure. What we see here is that in August/September, the Ottoman central government established a deportation administration in the Der Zor, Ras ul Ein, and along the Euphrates.

Andonian was not lying One of these officials was Naim Bey, the famous Naim Bey of Aram Andonian. We have identified him. He existed, the name was right, Andonian's description of him as corrupt was right, and also his workplace at Meskene was right. Andonian was not lying.

The Der Zor massacre In 1916, the Der Zor massacre. Possibly the worst massacre of the Armenian genocide. Why did it happen? Why in 1916? And why do I say that it was not planned in 1915?

Der Zor had such a weak administrative infrastructure that it was overwhelmed. And because Der Zor was directly linked to the central government and not first to a provincial governor, it reported directly to Talat.

In early 1916, Talat ordered an acceleration of deportation of Armenians into Der Zor. He was really urging regional authorities to speed up and not to let the Armenians stray. Then Talat ordered the authorities in Der Zor to stop sending the Armenians to another settlement, Kirkuk€ ¦’·which was in the Mosul province€ ¦’·because the commander of the Sixth Army had complained that these Armenians would be a security risk as the British were advancing in Iraq. So what you see here, the overflow area of Der Zor, Kirkuk, was closed-off because the army in Iraq said we don't want to have them there.

So Der Zor became a cul de sac, a dead end. And even the one caravan that made it to Mosul was sent back to Der Zor on the orders of Talat. Mind you, we have survivor memoirs of people who were in the caravan. Then, the central authorities say, No more Armenians into Homs, Hama. Only Der Zor. Cannot go south, cannot go east.

Next order: The deportees in Ras ul Ein were sent into Der Zor.

Then comes the order that Armenians should not be employed by the government anymore. It means the Armenians don't get paid for their work anymore. If you don't get paid but you have to pay for work, who feeds you? The government. You see the problem that's building up? A lot of Armenians, very expensive, very few resources, and then comes the big thing. The presence of Armenians threatens the supply lines of the Iraqi army along the Euphrates. They must not stay along the Euphrates. If you are not allowed to stay at the Euphrates, if you are not allowed to leave the area, where to put you? Then in July, Talay says, Move the Armenians away from Der Zor. What was the direction? Cheddadiyye. What we also see is that Talat coordination in late July, in rapid succession, the deployment of additional mounted gendarmerie or militia forces in Der Zor. There's a build-up.

Then in August, the Armenians are massacred. And you don't find much on this in the archives. The only thing you find in some Turkish military memoirs is a description of the bone fields.

The Young Turk government did not have one decision for mass murder, they had several decisions for mass murder, and these various decisions for mass murder add up to this total wipe out, destruction.

Concentration camps When we talk about concentration camps, we all think about Auschwitz or Germany in World War II. In the Armenian genocide, you don't have that. You do not need barbed wire. The desert was much more effective. In the Syrian desert, you don't have to fence the Armenians. Once you control the exits to the water, you control the movement of the people because the people have to go to the water to survive.

Gendered genocide The Armenian genocide is a highly gendered genocide. The Armenian genocide is a history of the women and the children, because the men were in the army or were killed early in the deportation. The historiography of the Armenian genocide is also highly gendered. It's written by the males.

Number of victims The Ottoman Armenian population was approximately 1.8-2.2 million people. Depending on the estimate, between 1 and 1.5 million Armenians were "lost." When I say "lost," I mean killed, but also taken into Muslim households. "Lost" to the community, not returned.

It turns out the Armenian Patriarchate figures are surprisingly reliable. I obtained documents from the Ottoman archives where you find Armenian in small numbers in villages where, according to the Patriarchate, there were no Armenians.
The Armenian Weekly April 5, 2008

Adrienne McOmber, wife of Richard McOmber, and mother of Armen McOmber, just phoned me to tell me that she and her husband went to a lecture last night at Rutgers University to hear Dr. Hilmar Kaiser, an event unfortunately sponsored by the Armenian Students Society wherein Hilmar, as he has done for the past several years, badmouthed and denigrated just about all Armenian genocide scholars in the US and Europe, including Vahakn Dadrian and Taner Akcam, and put into question the very reality of a genocide sponsored by the Young Turk government against the Armenians in 1915-1923.

The lecture was attended by some apparently high-ranking Turks who smiled and nodded throughout the lecture. They then invited Hilmar to dinner today! They talked with Hilmar in Turkish, but we had Turkish speaker present who understood what was going on.

He is attempting to put into question all the valuable scholarship produced by Armenians and their cohorts regarding the Armenian genocide and thus deny that the genocide was sponsored by the Turkish central authorities, making it only a series of massacres carried out on the local level. This is subversive activity at its worse.

Unfortunately, an important Armenian patriotic organization had unwittingly sent Hilmar on a speaking tour around the United State a couple of year ago, wherein he did the same thing. I received phone calls from all over the United States warning me about what was going on. Knowing his itinerary, I asked people to record his "lectures" so I would have proof of what he was doing. I then contacted his sponsors who replied that "he attracted young people" and was therefore useful. Finally I had to contact some higher ups who then caused the organization to warn Hilmar that if he spoke against Armenian genocide scholars his tour would be brought to an end.

Now Hilmar is back on the road on a speaking tour, offered free to Armenian student organizations, wherein he is now doing the same badmouthing and putting the Armenian genocide, as a genocide, in question. He will speak at Villanova University on Monday, March 31.

The man is a clear and present danger. If he puts into question the work of our best genocide scholars, then the Turks have a natural and effective ally against us. He worked for me several years ago and I had to fire him for his dishonesty. I still have the records.

All Armenian student groups and all Armenian organizations must be warned not to sponsor his talks and also to attend his lectures when they are inevitable, record the lectures and send a copy to me, and be prepared to defend our genocide scholars against his false accusations.