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**1.5 million** · 11-30-2005, 11:28 PM

An Interview with Hilmar Kaiser

By Khatchig Mouradian

Thursday, 22 September, 2005

In recent years, the Turkish government has repeatedly stated that the Ottoman archives are fully open to researchers studying the Armenian genocide of 1915. As recently as 16 September, 2005, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, answering a question regarding two recent resolutions adopted by the Committee on International Relations of the US House of Representatives, said: 'We clearly say that Turkey's archives are open and Armenia should open its archives, if it has. We shall speak on the basis of documents and information. I do not understand on which basis unrelated countries take decisions about the so-called Armenian genocide. These decisions are all political in nature and do not serve world peace.�

To find out about how open the Ottoman archives are at the moment, I recently spoke to Hilmar Kaiser, a historian who was banned from the archives in 1996, but was admitted back in July 2005 and was provided access to archival material he had repeatedly been denied a decade ago. As the interview reveals, assertions that the Ottoman archives are open are partly true at most.

Hilmar Kaiser received his Ph.D. from the European University Institute, Florence. 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�.

Khatchig Mouradian - In July 2005, almost a decade after being banned from the Ottoman State Archives, you were given access to the archives once again. How did you get in?

Hilmar Kaiser- I got to Istanbul on a Sunday. I went to the archives the next morning. At the entrance, they asked me whether I have a reader ticket, I said �no�. I was asked to go to the application office and fill out the usual application form. They scanned in my data from the passport, when they entered the data I was asked if I was at the archives before, because they saw there was entry; I confirmed. Then I was issued my new reader ticket. After a few minutes, I was in the reading room with the catalogs and the documents.

It was basically the same procedure as in any archive I worked in.

K.M. - Some scholars who have worked in the Ottoman State Archives have repeatedly complained that the documents they ask for are first �cleared� by a control commission and only then provided to them. Did you encounter such a problem?

H.K.- In the early nineties when I was there, there existed an unofficial�not acknowledged, even denied�so called �control commission� that read everything I got. I don�t have any evidence that this happened this time.

K.M. � The media, especially the Turkish and Armenians news sources, often speak about the Ottoman archives being open or closed. However, what is meant by Ottoman archives is rarely explained. Can you shed some light on this issue?

H.K. - The Ottoman archives are the abbreviation of �the Turkish Prime Minister�s Ottoman Archives� located in Istanbul. The Turkish national archives (devlet arshivleri) have 2 main branches: the Ottoman archives (until 1923) and the republican archives (after 1923), but of course there is some overlap.

K.M. - What about the military archives?

H.K. - There are the military archives that are attached to an institution of the General staff.

K.M. � And these archives aren�t open, are they?

H.K. - I don�t know. I applied once in 1991s and I was not allowed in, so my experience is limited to the Ottoman archives, as explained earlier; not to the republican archives or the military archives.

K.M. - What about the archives of The Committee of Union and Progress (CUP)?

H.K. - I do not think the archives of CUP have been cataloged anywhere as such.

K.M. - Were they destroyed?

H.K. - I doubt it. I do not know. We should be really careful about not mixing information. Anything about the CUP archives is sheer speculation. We don�t have any indication that they have been destroyed.

K.M. � Can you comfortably say that the Ottoman archives are open?

H.K. - I can go to the archives, I can see the catalogs and get the documents that are in the catalogues. I don�t get documents that aren�t catalogued; this isn�t something special. In all archives, there�s a constant cataloguing process as long as the archives take in new material and it�s working on files that have been processed. However, I know of some important collections at the Turkish Prime Minister�s Ottoman Archives that have been cataloged but these catalogs are not at the reading room. So there are material that have been processed and catalogued but are still withheld. One such collection is the Armenian collection of the Ottoman Directorate for Public Security (2nd Division), which is a subdivision of the Ministry of the Interior.

What is available, for instance, are the Ottoman Ministry of Interior Cipher Bureau files which contain a large number of deportation orders and other orders connected to the deportation of Armenians. For example, direct orders concerning the deportation of Zohrab and Vartkes Efendis, and direct orders concerning individual ARF (Armenian Revolutionary federation) members. However, the responses to these orders, are, as far as I can see, contained in the second Division (see above) of the Ministry of the Interior and we don�t have those documents available. So we know what the orders were, but we don�t know the response. Other orders are contained in the Ministry of the Military archives. To get the whole picture, we need the cipher department, second department, plus the military archives. This is what we know now. According to some sources, there are other collections in these archives which are not available yet and are very important, but since I don�t have any printed information on this, I cannot say anything.

We want now to have access to those documents that have been catalogued but are not available. To put it in the political perspective, Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan said the Archives are open. Yes, they are open, and he made a true statement, but the further implication, what people assume that everything they have you can see, doesn�t apply. I hope other documents will also be made available. The Turkish government is on an excellent path now.

K.M. � Taking into consideration the denial policy of the Turkish government, how realistic is the hope that some documents that shed light on the �sensitive� aspects of the Armenian genocide will be made available?

H.K. - I cannot comment on documents I haven�t seen. Some people ask me if there are documents that have been cleansed. That would mean there are materials I have seen before, but they have disappeared. What I can say is this: I was there; I got material I had been repeatedly denied ten years ago. So this is a major step forward. I can also say that back then I had troubles with photocopying. There was a file with 54 pages, I got 36 back and 18 pages had disappeared in the process. This time, I got my photocopies very quickly and there was not the slightest reason for any kind of complaint; they did a very professional job. Obviously, the Turkish government has enough control over the archives to enforce its political will over the administration, which is very important, if we keep in mind that the Turkish government represents the political movement that has been in the opposition for decades and now for the first time it is in power.

I do not expect Mr. Erdogan to look at all the items in the archives, this is a process that has to be brought to his attention and after that, no doubt things will improve. Will they make material available that will damage their position? I think the Turkish position is evolving now; I spoke to people who were accepting that there were massacres of Armenians including participation orders by government officials, but not officials at the central government. So the position has evolved to acknowledge the participation of local and provincial authorities, but also to stress that the central government was not in line with those authorities. This makes there position more defendable; it means the Turkish position and the Armenian position become closer, but it means also that people who would deny the Armenian genocide are in a much more comfortable position themselves. While applauding Turkey for becoming open, it means also that the political debate becomes more complicated.

K.M. � You said you spoke to �people�. Were they government officials?

H.K. - I talked to very high ranking officials who turned up at a tea house; these include leaders from the ruling AK party, people who are concerned with security in Turkey, and also academics.

K.M. - Is this evolution you are talking about regarding the Turkish government�s position a new strategy of denial or is it a step towards facing the past?

H.K. - It�s both. We have to understand that the Turkish government has to represent Turkish interests; that�s what their job is. What�s happening right now is that we see a policy which is more of the making of Mr. Erdogan�s government. Definitely, it�s part of a strategy that has to do with Europe. Obviously, if you want to join the European Union, you need to have open archives. The Ottoman Archives contain other issues like Lebanon and Macedonia; the Armenian issue is only one part of the whole thing.

There�s a discussion going on in Turkey. As I talked, I was quite clear with government officials, but while in previous years they responded with a personal attack, this time around, they made their point clear and also asked questions. I also published an article in Turkey on Armenian abandoned property --the headline of the article reads �Armenian genocide�-- I was surprised to hear that the article was read and discussed in various universities. I also received a call for papers from the Turkish Historical Society and they asked me to send an application for next year. Which is also remarkable, because it means the Turkish Historical Society believes now that I�m a scholar and not just a propagandist. These are all steps in the right direction.

Nowadays, there is a very strong interest in Turkey towards the other position. The number of publications in Turkey has increased tremendously and there are some publications which I find very helpful. It�s not just crap they produce now. The printed books used to be a waste of trees, just reiterations, recycling of the recycled.

Where all this will end, I don�t know. But at the moment I�m pleased by what�s going on.

K.M. - You mentioned the issue of �abandoned property�. Some scholars who have studied that aspect of the Armenian genocide consider the theft of fixed and moveable assets as an integral part of the genocide and maintain that that theft was organized by the leadership of the CUP.

H.K. - It was the state. It was from the top of the government, from Talat and Ali Munif Bey. The Armenian genocide is the Ottoman government�s answer to the Armenian Question: Deportations can only be analyzed in terms of expropriation. It was grand theft. It was the surgical separation of Armenians from their movable and immovable property. The Ottoman government was very careful of not wasting any assets while being not concerned about the fate of the Armenians.

To make the expropriation permanent, you have to replace the Armenians. The expropriation was part of a settlement program; this process created a surplus population and this surplus population was taken care of. The Armenians were mathematically a surplus population. Killing or, in the case of children and women, assimilating them solved that problem. What took place was genocide, not massacres.

In 1990, I spoke about the �so-called Armenian genocide.� I was a student in Germany and the library wasn�t good enough and for that reason, I wasn�t good enough myself. After I started my archival work, in one month, I spoke about the genocide, not the �so- called genocide�. I�m not just a believer in the Armenian genocide; I�m someone who has acquired that knowledge from his own work. No one taught me the Armenian genocide and no one taught me to use the word. It�s a result of my own work. I use the word because it�s the appropriate term that covers the phenomenon. The more I study the Armenian genocide, its various aspects and its systematic nature, the more it becomes evident that there is only one word. It�s not a question of having preferences; if you want to present yourself as a scholar, you have to use the word. If you want to talk about the massacres of Armenians in one village or the deportations in another village, you don�t have to use genocide, but the moment you want to put the wider perspective, you have to use the word. And every scholar that wants to play games, like some people going to Yerevan and telling everyone �don�t use the �G� word�, have a political agenda.

K.M. - Some Turkish scholars refrain from using the �G� word because they say that it�s highly politicized and that they do not want to get involved in the war between Turkish and Armenian nationalists.

H.K. - I don�t care about the Armenian and Turkish nationalists, no matter who my friends are and who are not my friends. I use the word �genocide� because it adequately describes the phenomenon. It�s the only term we have that describes it. If one day we have a better word, fine. The English, German, and Turkish languages have only one word to describe it. That this has a negative consequence on the Turkish government is something I can�t change; I can�t change history. I�m not prepared to haggle over it. If a Turkish scholar says it too politicized and he or she doesn�t want to use the word, then let him/her take a different subject. If you want to be part of this debate, apply proper terminology and if you don�t want to do it, you aren�t a scholar. I don�t like the fact that I get trouble from some Turkish quarters because I use proper terminology; but you have to face the music. If you don�t want to face the music then don�t play. That certain people living in Turkey had to take certain precautions at least in the past is unfortunate, that�s why I don�t provoke them, but I�m not dealing with people who have no academic knowledge on the issue suddenly turning up and trying to renegotiate academic terminology.

K.M. � You have published a number of papers on the German role in the Armenian genocide. What is reflected in your papers is that talking about a �German complicity� is going too far.

H.K. - Our knowledge of the German role is still limited, because Allied bombing destroyed the military archives in 1945. At least 99 percent of the chunk is gone. To make it worse, quite a bit of the German embassy archives were also lost. Fortunately, most of the Armenian files of the embassy have survived. Having said this, we have a pretty good idea what the German Foreign Office was doing and I have just described this in a new publication. The policy was helping Armenians when it wouldn�t hurt their interests and at the same time deeply resenting the Turks. That�s what they did. Their hands were tied, because the Turkish alliance was important. The private companies like the Baghdad railway company assisted the Armenians. Then you have the missionaries, some very good, and some, like Lepsius, making themselves more shiny afterwards. Not everything was as nice as certain researchers recently claimed. Then you have the officers; there was an officer, Boettrich, who actively assisted the deportation, there was another officer, Wolffskeel, who killed Armenians with his own hands, but he was recalled in punishment.

I have no evidence that the German government was supporting the Armenian genocide or even taking part in the killing, The evidence points more directly to the contrary. To get to a better understanding, we need to access the Turkish military archives which also contain German files. That�s why I�m saying that at the present moment everything is preliminary. But the real debate about Germans, especially the assumption that the Ottoman government was too stupid to know how to commit genocide and had to get Germans to tell them how to pull it off, and the attempts of comparing the role of the Germans in the Armenian genocide with the role of the Germans in the Holocaust is a kind of inferiority complex. The Armenian genocide can stand on its own. It doesn�t have to match the Holocaust to be validated. There are major and structural differences. The whole issue of German involvement is a kind of sidetrack. The real way forward is access to the Turkish archives.

The complicity of the Germans in the Armenian genocide is a political invention and does not withstand scrutiny

**Joseph** · 03-10-2008, 05:05 AM

An Interview with Hilmar Kaiser

By Khatchig Mouradian

The Armenian Weekly

March 8, 2008

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 in Sept. 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 soci�t�, 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 theTurkish 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.

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