A FRENCH PROPOSAL TO OUTLAW GENOCIDE-DENIAL INFURIATES TURKEY
Dec 31st 2011
Watch your words
No closer to resting in peace
FEW Turks had heard of Valerie Boyer, a deputy for Nicolas Sarkozy’s
ruling UMP party in France. That was until she sponsored a bill
that would make it a crime in France to deny that the mass killings
of Ottoman Armenians in 1915 constituted genocide. On December 21st
France’s lower chamber approved the bill, which would make denying any
officially recognised genocide punishable by a one-year prison sentence
and a fine of ~@45,000 ($59,000). Within hours Turkish hackers had
defaced Ms Boyer’s website. The deputy says she has been inundated
with death and rape threats. (Separately, the Israeli Knesset has
begun discussing whether to recognise the 1915 killings as genocide.)
“This is politics based on racism, discrimination and xenophobia,”
thundered Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s prime minister, before
announcing a set of sanctions. These included recalling the ambassador
in Paris, banning French military aircraft and warships from landing
and docking in Turkey, freezing political and economic consultations
and deciding on a case-by-case basis whether to let French military
aircraft use Turkish airspace.
Mr Erdogan has threatened to take further action should the French
Senate approve the bill. Turkish officials have ruled out trade
sanctions because they would violate Turkey’s customs union with
the European Union, but have suggested that “consumers might take
matters into their own hands.” A popular Bosphorus fish restaurant
soon declared it was no longer calling itself “Le Pecheur”.
France is Turkey’s fifth biggest trading partner. Two-way trade
is worth around $14 billion and France is lobbying to build a
multi-billion nuclear plant on Turkey’s Black Sea coast. French
manufacturers account for a fifth of Turkey’s lucrative car market.
The chill in relations has been prompted largely by Mr Sarkozy’s
fierce opposition to Turkish membership of the EU. Expanding the
club to take in a large, poor and Muslim country would dilute French
influence. Moreover, Mr Sarkozy is facing a difficult re-election
battle in the spring and may be seeking to exploit the genocide to
court ethnic-Armenian votes. Not everyone in France is convinced by
the merits of the bill. Alain Juppe, Mr Sarkozy’s foreign minister,
describes it as “unhelpful and counterproductive”.
But Turkey is hardly in a position to preach about free speech. Its own
laws, in a mirror image of the French proposal, prohibit descriptions
of the 1915 killings as genocide. More than 100 journalists are in
jail, many of them on flimsy charges of backing terrorism.
As for Mr Sarkozy’s manoeuvres, many Armenians would say they
are no more cynical than Turkey’s decision in 2009 to sign a set
of protocols establishing formal ties and reopening borders with
Armenia just as the United States Congress was gearing up to pass
a genocide-recognition bill. In the event Barack Obama convinced
American lawmakers to desist. Turkey promptly shelved the protocols,
reverting to its old line that they could be enacted only if Armenia
withdrew from territories it occupies in Azerbaijan.
Yet civil-society initiatives between Turkey and Armenia are
flourishing. Debate about the fate of the Ottoman Armenians in Turkey
is louder and more vocal than ever. But the passage of the French bill
has rekindled nationalist anger, and with it fears of reprisal among
Turkey’s tiny ethnic Armenian community. One of the loudest critics
of the French law, which first came before parliament in 2006, was
Hrant Dink, an Armenian newspaper owner who was murdered in Istanbul
by an ultranationalist youth in 2007. Mr Dink had said that he was
willing to be jailed in France for denying that the events of 1915
counted as genocide, just as he was willing to be jailed in Turkey
for saying the opposite. Healing the wounds of history was best left
to Turks and Armenians, he said, not to vote-mongering politicians.
From: A. Papazian