ISTANBUL — Turkey’s Armenians have raised their voice against a French bill that makes it a jailable offense to deny their ancestors were the victim of genocide under Ottoman rule, wary it will antagonize fellow Turks and further strain an already tense debate on the issue.
“Initiatives like the one in the French parliament are awkward,” Armenian journalist Etyen Mahcupyan told Agence France-Presse (AFP) Tuesday, October 10.
He said Turks see the proposed law as an imposition on them to accept the genocide and feared the French move could scupper a fledgling, timid debate in Turkey to question its past.
The draft law, to be debated and voted in the French parliament Thursday, October 12, calls for one year in prison and a hefty 45,000-euro (57,000 dollar) fine for anyone who denies that the World War I massacres constituted genocide.
Ara Kocunyan, editor of the small Armenian-language daily Jamanak, criticized what he called the feeling of “self-victimization” with which the Armenian diaspora in the West is pursuing its campaign to have the massacres internationally recognized as genocide.
“If we stick to the current priorities, I fear those weeping today for a father killed 90 years ago will find themselves weeping for little Armenia in 50 years’ time,” Kocunyan said.
Armenians claim up to 1.5 million of their kin were slaughtered in orchestrated killings between 1915 and 1917.
Turkey categorically rejects the genocide label, saying 300,000 Armenians and at least as many Turks died in civil strife when Armenians took up arms for independence in eastern Anatolia and sided with invading Russian troops as the Ottoman Empire fell apart.
Idiocy
“The EU must absolutely take a stand against this eclipse of reason in France,” said Erdogan.
Among the first to condemn the bill was journalist Hrant Dink, who is among a handful of taboo-breaking intellectuals in Turkey who have openly argued that the massacres were genocide, drawing nationalist ire and landing himself in court.
“This is idiocy,” the Turkish-Armenian Dink said in remarks to the liberal daily Radikal.
“It only shows that those who restrict freedom of expression in Turkey and those who try to restrict it in France are of the same mentality.”
Dink said he was ready to defend freedom of expression even if it means running the risk of imprisonment in France.
“I am standing trial in Turkey for saying it was genocide. If this bill is adopted, I will go to France and, in spite of my conviction, I will say it was not genocide,” he said in a television interview.
Dink, editor of the Turkish-Armenian bilingual weekly Agos, received a six-month suspended sentence last year for “insulting Turkishness” in an article about the 1915-1917 alleged massacres.
“The two countries can then compete to see who throws me in jail first.”
The Armenian Patriarchate had said the same thing in May, when the bill was first submitted but ran out of parliamentary time before a vote could be held.
“All initiatives creating obstacles to freedom of expression will jeopardize the process of dialogue between Turks and Armenians and will reinforce nationalist tendencies on both sides,” it said.
“Eclipse of Reason”
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan fired a broadside at France Tuesday in a mounting row over the draft law, calling the bill the product of “an eclipse of reason” and urging Paris to rethink its own colonial past.
“We expect Paris to avoid this blunder, this political accident that will harm Turkish-French relations,” Erdogan told the parliamentary group of his Justice and Development Party in a speech interrupted by applause.
Erdogan rejected suggestions by some Turkish lawmakers for Ankara to retaliate, if the bill is voted, with a similar law making it a crime to deny that the killings of tens of thousands of Algerians under French colonial rule amounted to genocide.
“No, we will not retaliate in kind — we do not clean filth with filth,” he said, but he urged the bill’s backers to closely examine their own past.
“Those vehicles of slander and lies should look at their own past… Let them look at what happened in Algeria between 1954 and 1962,” he said.
Erdogan said the bill will prevent free debate on a historical subject and violate freedom of expression, a basic EU norm that Turkey itself is under pressure to respect.
But he said the bill would not discourage Turkey from pursuing its bid to join the European Union.
“Minor snags will not deter us from pursuing our major goals… Work on our EU (membership) process continues unabated,” he said.
Ankara has warned France that it will be barred from potentially lucrative economic projects in Turkey, including a planned nuclear power plant, if the bill is adopted.
In a 2001 resolution, France recognized the Armenian massacres as genocide, prompting Ankara to sideline French companies from public tenders and cancel several projects awarded to French firms.
http://www.islamonline.net/English/News/2006-10/10/08.shtml
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