By RENÉ LEMARCHAND/ The New York Times
The decision of the French Senate to give final approval to a bill that threatens deniers of the Armenian genocide with a fine of €45,000 or one year in jail, or both, is politically inept and ethically objectionable. Although France’s Constitutional Council has yet to issue a ruling on the constitutionality of the law, it is not too early to denounce the limitation it sets on freedom of expression.
No serious scholar can deny the appalling losses suffered by the Armenians during the 1915 genocide, following the systematic slaughter of tens of thousands of them throughout eastern Anatolia in the 1890s. But it is not the place of a legislative body to prescribe what is a politically correct attitude toward the Armenian bloodbath, let alone impose a jail sentence and/or heavy fine for a dissenting opinion.
In this respect the position of the French Parliament is hardly more commendable than that of the Turkish authorities, for whom references to the Armenian genocide are seen as an insult to “Turkishness” and thus treated as a criminal offense under section 301 of the Turkish penal code. Asserting the reality of the Armenian genocide is no less risky in Istanbul than is contesting it in Paris.
Oddly, France envisions no such penalties for denying other cases of genocide. By fixating upon the Armenian genocide and leaving out of the accounting other instances of mass murder, one is led to conclude that neither the killing of about half a million Assyrians nor of tens of thousands of Pontic Greeks before, during and after World War I qualify as genocides. Which, in effect, is another form of denial.
There is no logic to this. Neither the greater scale of the Armenian carnage (1.5 million) compared with that of other Christian communities nor attempts to underscore its particular circumstances are plausible explanations. A meticulous study of the Assyrian tragedy by Hannibal Travis leaves no doubt about the genocidal nature of those killings. The same could be said of the deliberate extermination of Greek communities.
Could the key to the political puzzle lie in the potential electoral support of half a million French citizens of Armenian origin? The price of this misguided legislation, ranging from the cancellation of economic contracts to suspended military cooperation and diplomatic irritants, will far exceed the gains.
This latest attempt at brandishing legal sanctions against deniers is in keeping with a well-established tradition. No country as far as I am aware has passed as many laws aimed at regulating the nation’s collective memory, a trend beginning with the Gayssot law of July 1990, which makes the denial of the Holocaust a criminal offense. Since the passage of a 2001 law publicly recognizing the Armenian genocide, French legislators have ratcheted up pressure on Turkey, first with the 2006 law that stipulates a one-year prison term for anyone questioning the appropriateness of the term genocide to describe the Armenian slaughter, and now with even tougher sanctions. Little wonder if Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan responded with barely concealed anger to what he perceives as yet another affront.
Nor is it surprising that France’s censorious legislation has elicited strong criticisms from historians. The flash point was reached a few years ago when Parliament issued guidelines on how to teach colonial history. Pierre Nora, a prominent historian and member of the French Academy, reacted to the law of February 2005 (later repealed) that enjoined teachers to “recognize in particular the positive role of the French presence overseas, notably in North Africa” thusly: “It is not the role of the legislator to arbitrate the competing claims of victims. Why not pass laws on the massacre of the Albigeois, the horrors of the wars of religion or the Terror? This is an endless process because history is paved with crimes against humanity.”
Nora went on to excoriate “certain defenders of memory” for their “tendency to impose a tyrannical, sometimes terrorist memory vis-à-vis the scientific community” and for self-appointed custodians of memorial orthodoxy “to take hostage historical research.”
One wonders whether such well-known deniers of the Armenian Holocaust as Bernard Lewis in the United States and Gilles Veinstein in France, both recognized authorities on Ottoman history, will be held to account retrospectively. Lewis is on record for having publicly expressed the strongest doubts about putting the label of genocide on the murder of the Armenians. Veinstein takes a more nuanced position: While calling into question the appropriateness of the term genocide, he makes no bones of the fact that the killings of Armenians would qualify as “crimes against humanity.”
In his excellent discussion of the ravages of “négationnisme” in some of the more prestigious quarters of French academia, Yves Ternon, a genocide scholar, has had a field day tearing apart the arguments proffered by the two deniers. In the course of refuting their arguments Ternon also sheds a highly revealing light on the somber realities of the Armenian tragedy.
If denialism has any merit it is that it invites its own demolition. Quite aside from the heavy costs of their decision, this is a truth that has yet to sink into the consciousness of French legislators.
René Lemarchand, an emeritus professor, University of Florida at Gainesville, is co-author and editor of “Forgotten Genocides: Denial, Oblivion and Memory.”
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