PRISON FOR DENYING GENOCIDE, PRISON FOR SAYING IT TOOK PLACE
by Charles Glass
The National
Jan 28 2012
UAE
The Armenian village of Kassab, amid the apple orchards of northern
Syria, boasts three churches. Each serves a branch of the Christianity
practised there, Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant. The Protestant
church, understandably, is the least ornate, lacking the Catholics’
rococo angels and the gold-leaf icons of the Orthodox. When I visited
in 1986, I was struck by a simple painting that I wrote about at
the time.
It showed Jesus Christ, the good shepherd, holding in his arms the
body of a slain boy, the boy’s head and arms dangling like Christ’s
own in Michelangelo’s Pietà. Behind him were the mountains of Armenia,
and at his feet were a mound of skulls and bones with the date “1915”
written on them.
An inscription in Armenian proclaimed: “So much blood. Let our
grandchildren forgive you.”
The grandchildren of the Armenian survivors of the First World War
massacres came of age years ago, and they have yet to forgive the
Turks. Turkey’s leaders have not made it easier for them by their
refusal to acknowledge the Ottoman Empire’s attempt to exterminate its
Armenian subjects. To me, as to anyone else who has listened to the
stories of old people who were children in 1915, Turkey’s attempted
“genocide” of the Armenians is an undeniable historical fact. The
sooner Turkey grows up and admits it, the sooner those grandchildren
can forgive.
The French parliament has weighed in, not merely to support the
view that the Armenians suffered genocide, but to punish with prison
and fines anyone who says otherwise. In 1990, it enacted a similar
prohibition against denying another historic genocide, that by the
Nazis of Europe’s Jews in the Second World War. The question is: can
any country legislate history? Doesn’t history along with other arts
and sciences require free inquiry, free research, free discussion
and the right to hold the wrong opinion?
Unfortunately, the French and Turkish governments have chosen to set
themselves up as history’s arbiters. France initiated its involvement
in Ottoman historiography in 1991, when parliament declared Turkey’s
wartime policy genocide. Making denial a crime this year puts the
French police, already busy tearing off women’s burqas, a further step
on the road to enforcing one view of history. When President Nicolas
Sarkozy signs the bill into law, anyone who states that there was no
Armenian genocide will be subject to a year in prison and a ~@45,000
(Dh 217,000) fine.
Turkey, despite its protests to Paris, has behaved with equal
determination to impose its historical beliefs by prosecuting writers
for daring to state that genocide took place. In France, you can
go to prison for stating one thing and in Turkey for maintaining
the opposite.
While Turkey is attempting to conceal its past and absolve national
heroes of murderous crimes, French politicians have been acting even
more cynically. The Paris daily Libération commented that passage
of the law by the French Chamber of Deputies and Senate was “not
entirely free of ulterior political motives, considering that there
is a 500,000-strong French-Armenian community in France”. The bill
was sponsored by a member of the lower chamber in President Nicolas
Sarkozy’s party, the Union pour un Mouvement Populaire, who represents
Marseille and its large Armenian population. This is an election
year that is expected to be close for both the presidency and the
parliament, and even minority votes count. Nonetheless, enthusiasm
for the measure in the Senate was so lukewarm that its Laws Commission
rejected it and 212 out of 348 Senators did not vote at all.
France is paying for the measure in terms of its relationship with
Turkey and the loss of its citizens’ freedom of expression.
Apparently, the traditional liberté, fraternité et égalité excludes
the liberty to espouse a view with which the state disagrees. When
some future French president needs the Arab vote, will he make it a
crime to deny the Nakhba under which three-quarters of the Palestinian
population were expelled and their property seized by Israel from 1947
to 1949? When he or she seeks the African vote, will historians be
banned from suggesting that Africans themselves participated in the
slave trade? (Actually, that is already the law in France.) If there
were a substantial Chinese vote in France, would the law criminalise
denying the rape of Nanking?
Turkey’s prime minister, Recep Tayyep Erdogan, recently stated that
France herself is not untainted by the genocide charge. “In Algeria,
an estimated 15 per cent of the population had been subjected to the
massacre of French from 1945 on. This is genocide.” An estimated
two million Algerians died during the struggle for independence,
about a half million more than the number of Armenians who died at
Ottoman hands.
France’s action makes it harder for any Turkish politician to address
his country’s history. All Turks are aware that France during World
War I played a decisive role in subverting the loyalties of Ottoman
subjects, particularly Christians. Are modern Turks more or less
likely to make a serious investigation of their country’s past
when France claims to have decided the issue for them? In recent
years, intellectuals such as Orhan Pamuk have found space in which
to bring up what was a taboo subject – the Ottomans’ murder and
dispossession of one and a half million Armenians. That space will
narrow considerably if the government, media and public identify such
intellectual discussion with interference by foreign powers.
Less than a century has passed since 1920, when French, British and
Greek troops marched through the streets of Istanbul in a futile
attempt to dictate terms to Turkey. Anyone who stands up to France
today can claim the mantle of Ataturk, who finally expelled the
European invaders and prevented Turkey from being colonised as its
former empire was.
The former Oxford historian Norman Stone, who moved from England to
Turkey, wrote: “The fact is that there is no proof of ‘genocide’,
in the sense that no document ever appeared indicating that the
Armenians were to be exterminated.”
If he wrote that in France today, he could find himself in prison. It
is better, though, not to grant him martyr’s status and let other
historians deal with him. His statement that “no document ever
appeared” perches on the same moral and historical plane as David
Irving’s assertion that no document ever linked the extermination
of Europe’s Jews to Adolf Hitler. Irving served time in an Austrian
prison for Holocaust denial, but his real penance is to have been
disowned by credible historians who have examined the corpus of
documents relating to the Nazi Final Solution, heard the testimony
of witnesses and examined the sites where the murders took place.
Investigation and argument, not laws, make history.
The great British historian Eric Hobsbawn wrote: “It is time to
re-establish the coalition of those who believe in history as a
rational inquiry into the course of human transformations, against
those who distort history for political purposes – and more generally,
against relativists and postmodernists who deny this possibility.”
Is it possible to establish a coalition of historians, when their
opponents are subject to imprisonment and fines for disagreeing? Must
historians seek refuge from governments that endorse their views,
like medieval scholars obtaining patronage from pope or emperor
depending on whose claim to supremacy they supported? If that day
returns, will they be historians or courtiers?
Charles Glass is the author of several books on the Middle East,
including Tribes with Flags and The Northern Front: An Iraq War Diary.
He is also a publisher under the London imprint Charles Glass Books