FRANCE-TURKEY: WHAT WENT WRONG?
Hurriyet Daily News
Jan 14 2012
Turkey
The Orwellian bill punishing the “denial” of the unsubstantiated
“Armenian genocide” claims will be discussed at the end of January
in the French Senate.
France is alone in such a case. However, France has the longest
tradition of alliance with Turkey. It was the first major power to
understand what Armenian nationalism really is, and as a result,
to break its alliance with the Armenian committees after WWI and
sign peace with the Kemalists, who even received weapons against
the Greek invaders whose crimes were publicly denounced by French
diplomacy in 1922, by order of the President of the Ministers Council
Raymond Poincare.
So, beyond the sui generis case of Nicolas Sarkozy, what went wrong?
Having arrived en masse in France as soon as the 1920s, the Armenian
nationalists secured, through a long-term effort, the unconditional
support of a few dozen MPs. But this is not the main problem: The
overwhelming majority of the deputies did not attend the vote of Dec.
22, 2011, chiefly because they did not dare to express their opposition
to the bill.
The main problem is the Turkish immigrants in France are, as a whole,
the less educated and the less organized in the West. For years, this
community was rather neglected and received too little encouragement
to organize itself. There are definitely improvements, but they are
still ongoing and too recent to prevent the vote in the National
Assembly or the principle of a discussion in the Senate.
Regarding the Armenian issue, virtually no scholarly book rejecting
the “Armenian genocide” label was translated into French since 1991.
In contrast, Kâmuran Gurun’s “Armenian File” was published in French
in 1984, one year after the original Turkish edition and two years
before the English edition. The resources of the anti-defamation French
legislation, more protective than the U.S. one, were very rarely used
against the hate propaganda of Armenian and Kurdish nationalists.
Regardless, the U.S. case can provide a certain inspiration. There was
an absurd crisis between Ankara and Washington in 1974, when Congress
decided, because of the Greek and Armenian lobbies, to forbid the
sale of military weapons to Turkey. In large part because of that,
the Assembly of Turkish American Associations was eventually created
in 1979. The serious problems which took place at the beginning of
the 2000s (Armenian resolution in 2000, Iraq War and its aftermath)
led to the creation of the Turkish Coalition of America, Turkish
Cultural Foundation and Turkish American Legal Defense Fund.
What the shared Franco-Turkish interests need, as does the value of
free speech, are a similar and coherent strategy of organization,
education and legal defense. That means a quick conclusion of
the preliminary work to establish the Coordination Committee
of Franco-Turkish Associations; an effort to diffuse widely the
Turkish culture in France by stressing the old, historical ties;
permanent structures of big business, politicians and others to
fight anti-Turkish propaganda and bills; and a permanent structure
of legal defense.
An opportunity to crush the Armenian nationalism in France was missed
because the anti-ASALA legal cases from December 1984 to November
1986, remarkably managed, were incomplete; Jean-Marc “Ara” Toranian
in particular, spokesman of ASALA from 1976 to 1983, now co-chairman
of the Coordination Council of France’s Armenian Associations, was
never sued for the glorification of crime and contempt of court. The
current opportunity should not be missed: There is an exceptionally
widespread exasperation, in the country of Voltaire and Diderot,
against the special ethnic interests which advocate a drastic
limitation of free speech and are damaging the relations of France
with a rising regional power.
Maxime Gauin is a researcher at the International Strategic Research
Organization (USAK-ISRO) and a Ph.D. candidate at the Middle East
Technical University Department of History.
From: A. Papazian