SANDRO CONTENTA
EUROPEAN BUREAU
LONDON—A French bill making it a crime to deny that Armenians suffered genocide at the hands of Ottoman Turks is being widely described as a blow to Turkey’s chances of joining the European Union.
The bill — also denounced by critics as an attack on free speech — was approved by France’s lower house of parliament yesterday. But either the Senate or President Jacques Chirac is expected to block it from becoming law.
Still, the vote caused a political storm, not least because some interpreted it as a bid by leading candidates in the presidential election next year to exploit anti-Turkey feelings in France.
France’s Armenian community, one of the largest in Europe at an estimated 500,000, had pushed hard for the bill. It sets the same penalty as a French law that makes denial of the Nazi genocide of Jews a crime — a one-year prison term and a 45,000 euro ($64,000) fine.
“Does a genocide committed in World War I have less value than a genocide committed in World War II? Obviously not,” Philippe Pomezec, an MP with the ruling Union for a Popular Movement (UMP), said during the parliamentary debate in Paris. Turkey denies the premise of the bill, that some 1.5 million Armenians, most of them Christians, were systematically massacred or starved to death during the disintegration of the Ottoman empire in 1915.
It argues that thousands of Turks and Armenians died during inter-ethnic violence when Russia invaded the empire’s eastern provinces in World War I. Modern Turkey, an officially secular state with a largely Muslim population of 70 million, was established in 1923.
The bill passed the same day that Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk won the Nobel Prize for literature.
Pamuk was recently charged with “insulting Turkishness” after telling a Swiss newspaper that no one in Turkey dared mention the Armenian massacre. The charges were dropped during the trial.
To some defenders of free speech, France’s bid to criminalize denial of the massacre was no different than Turkey’s attempts to punish those who mention it.
“Voltaire must be spinning in his grave,” said Andrew Duff, a British member of the European Parliament, referring to the 17th century French philosopher and civil libertarian.
France’s centre-right government didn’t support the bill — proposed by the opposition Socialist party — but allowed its UMP members to vote freely. The government promised to block the bill in the Senate, but Turkey said the damage had been done.
“French-Turkish relations … have been dealt a severe blow today as a result of the irresponsible false claims of French politicians who do not see the political consequences of their actions,” the Turkish Foreign Ministry said in a statement.
Turkish analysts said the vote exposes the depth of anti-Turkey feeling in France, a founding member of the European Union.
They predicted a backlash in Turkey that boosts nationalist sentiment and weakens support for the legal reforms necessary to join the 25-nation EU.
The possible entry of the first Muslim nation into what is now an exclusively Christian club raises anxieties in a number of European countries, even though negotiations between Turkey and the EU are expected to last at least a decade.
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