Grenada Broadcasting Network, Grenada
Oct 13 2006
TURKEY CONDEMNS GENOCIDE
12th October, 2006
Turkey has condemned a French parliamentary vote which would make it
a crime to deny that Armenians suffered “genocide” at the hands of
the Turks.
Turkey called it a “serious blow” to relations and has threatened
sanctions. The vote was also criticised by the EU.
The bill, tabled by the opposition but opposed by the French
government, needs approval from the Senate and president.
Armenia says Ottoman Turks killed 1.5 million people systematically
in 1915 – a claim strongly denied by Turkey.
There are accusations in Turkey that the Armenian diaspora and
opponents of Turkey’s European Union membership bid are using the
issue to stop it joining the 25-member bloc.

The Daily Telegraph
Oct 13 2006
Turkey angered over France genocide denial move
By David Rennie, Europe Correspondent
(Filed: 13/10/2006)
The French parliament triggered a fresh crisis yesterday in Turkey’s
relations with Europe by approving a bill that would make it an
offence punishable by jail to deny that Armenians suffered a genocide
at the hands of Ottoman Turks.
The Turkish foreign ministry said the vote in the French Assemblée
Nationale had dealt “a heavy blow” to bilateral relations.

Patrick Devedijan, a French deputy of Armenian descent, addresses the
National Assembly
Turkey denies that massacres of Armenians between 1915 and 1923
amounted to genocide, saying large numbers of Turks and Armenians
died in civil war.
Ali Babacan, Turkey’s economics minister, said it was too soon to
know whether the Turkish public would heed calls from nationalist
groups to boycott French goods.
“As the government, we are not encouraging that, but this is the
people’s decision,” he said. “I cannot say [the vote] will not have
any consequences.”
The Socialist-backed law was widely criticised in Turkey as another
attempt by European politicians to place obstacles in the path of
Ankara’s painful progress towards membership of the European Union.
Polls have shown that 60 per cent of the French public is opposed to
Turkish entry into the EU.
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France would impose a one-year prison term and a 45,000 euro
(£30,000) fine for anyone denying the Armenian genocide, following
the lead of an earlier law on denying the Nazi Holocaust.
The vote came months ahead of French presidential and parliamentary
elections, in which the 400,000-strong Armenian community in France
will form a formidable voter bloc.
The bill does not have government support and it seems likely to fall
in the upper house, the Senate.
Both President Jacques Chirac, and Segolene Royal, the Socialist
presidential front-runner, say that Turkey must acknowledge the
genocide of the Armenians before joining the EU. Nicolas Sarkozy, the
conservative front-runner, is opposed to Turkey’s EU entry under any
conditions.
The Turkish parliament scrapped plans for a tit-for-tat law that
would have made it illegal to deny that French colonialists committed
genocide against the Algerians in their war for independence. Prime
Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan told MPs: “You don’t clean up dirt with
more dirt.”
He repeated calls to Armenia jointly to research the killings by
opening the historical archives of both countries to historians.
The European Commission, which will next month unveil a key report on
Turkey’s progress towards meeting EU admission standards, said the
vote threatened to silence the first signs of debate inside Turkey on
the Armenian issue.
Krisztina Nagy, the EC’s enlargement spokesman, said: “It is
important to see that there is an opening in Turkey to conduct debate
on that issue.” The bill, if it became law, “could have a negative
effect on debate”.
Ankara is under intense pressure to improve free speech rights, and
abolish the notorious Article 301 of its penal code, which allows for
the prosecution of anyone who insults “Turkishness”.

The Daily Telegraph, UK
Oct 13 2006
Nobel prize for Turkish author who divided nation over massacres
By Oliver Poole in Istanbul
(Filed: 13/10/2006)
Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish novelist prosecuted for “insulting
Turkishness” after commenting on the scale of the Armenian massacre,
was yesterday named winner of the Nobel Prize for literature.

Orhan Pamuk: Overjoyed
This could bring renewed claims that the prize is now politicised
after Harold Pinter, a critic of the Iraq war, won last year despite
his last acclaimed stage work having been written in 1978.
Yesterday’s announcement was particularly contentious as it came on
the day French MPs voted to make it a crime to deny that the Armenian
massacre occurred, a move that provoked fury in Turkey.
Pamuk, 54, is lauded for novels such as Snow and My Name is Red that
deal with Turkey’s coming to terms with its imperial past and its
position as a crossroads between East and West.
But last year he became better known as a symbol for free speech
campaigners after he was put on trial for rejecting the official line
on the Armenian massacre, which the Turkish government says was not
genocide. Pamuk told a Swiss newspaper that Turkey was unwilling to
face the reality that “30,000 Kurds and one million Armenians” had
been killed in the country’s recent history.
advertisementHe faced up to three years in prison, but the case was
dropped on a technicality in January.
However, Pamuk’s comments resulted in death threats and a provincial
governor calling for his books to be burnt. At one point he had to go
into hiding abroad.
Horace Engdahl, the head of the Nobel academy, stressed that Pamuk
had been chosen for his literary achievements. “It could lead to some
political turbulence but we are not interested in that,” he said. “He
is controversial in his own country, but so are almost all our
prize-winners.”
Pamuk was selected because he “enlarged the roots of the contemporary
novel” through his links to both Western and Eastern culture.
The citation for the award praised his latest work, Istanbul:
Memories of a City, as a “quest for the melancholic soul [in which
he] has discovered new symbols for the clash and interlacing of
cultures”.
The Turkish cultural ministry chose to dwell on Pamuk’s achievement
in becoming the first Turk to win the prize rather than the recent
court case, or his decision in 1998 to reject the accolade of State
Artist. “I am concerned only with Pamuk as a novelist,” said Mustafa
Isen, the ministry’s under-secretary. “I congratulate him.”
Pamuk was born into a wealthy, westernised family and turned to
writing after deciding he did not have the talent to become a
painter. He has published five novels and won the International IMPAC
award for My Name is Red.
Pamuk, who will receive a gold medal and a £750,000 cheque, described
his writing as a study of “international themes. . . seen through my
Turkish window”.
It is a vantage point that has enabled him to examine East-West
issues and subsequent clashes between Islam and secularism, tradition
and modernity. In My Name is Red and Snow, he explores “the confusion
in-between” that occurs when the cultures attempt to exist together.
The study of Istanbul, written in a room overlooking the Bosphorus,
celebrates the “melancholy” atmosphere caused by the impact of
westernisation on a city filled with reminders of a glorious but
abandoned imperial past.
Embracing that emotion, he says, at least offers the citizens a
chance to escape from the far more painful belief of cultural
triumphalism.
Pamuk, at present a visiting professor at Columbia University, New
York, said that he was overjoyed by the award.
It was “an honour bestowed upon the Turkish literature and culture I
represent”.
Kemal Kerincsiz, who leads a group of ultra-nationalist lawyers that
helped bring the charges against Pamuk, said he was ashamed by the
award.
“I don’t believe it was given for his books or literary identity. It
was given because he belittled our national values, for his
recognition of the genocide. As a Turkish citizen I am ashamed.”

The Brunei Times, Brunei Darussalam
Oct 13 2006
French MPs vote on Armenia `genocide’ bill despite Turkish fury

13-Oct-06
FRENCH MPs yesterday adopted a bill that would make it a crime to
deny that the 1915-1917 massacres of Armenians by the Ottomans was
genocide.
The draft law which has provoked the fury of Turkey, the modern state
that emerged from the Ottoman Empire will now be sent to the Senate,
or upper house of parliament, for another vote.
If it becomes law, it would make it a crime in France to deny that
the killings of the Armenians were genocide. Those violating the law
would face up to one year in prison and a fine of up to +euro+45,000
(US$57,000).
Ankara reacted swiftly, with the foreign ministry saying France had
dealt “a heavy blow” to its relations with Turkey, while parliament
speaker Bulent Arinc called the vote “shameful” and reflecting a
“hostile attitude”.
Turkey has threatened economic reprisals against France if the
legislation passes, warning that French firms could be excluded from
public tenders and that a boycott of French goods might be imposed.
The MPs in the lower house, the National Assembly, passed the bill,
introduced by the opposition Socialist Party, by 106 votes to 19.
Most of the parliamentarians from President Jacques Chirac’s ruling
conservative party were absent from the 577-seat chamber for the
vote.
The vote was the first step in what could be a lengthy legislative
passage for the bill, which has supporters and opponents ranged
across party lines. Turkey, though, is united in slamming the draft
law.
“If the bill is adopted, Turkey will not lose anything, but France
will lose not only Turkey, but something of itself as well,” Turkish
Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul said on Wednesday. Ankara contests the
term “genocide” for the killings and strongly opposes the bill’s
provisions.
It says 300,000 Armenians, and at least as many Turks, died in civil
strife when Armenians took up arms for independence and sided with
invading Russian troops as the Ottoman Empire fell apart during World
War I. Armenians claim up to 1.5 million of their ancestors were
slaughtered in orchestrated killings that can only be seen as
genocide.
Around 400,000 people of Armenian origin are estimated to live in
France, the most famous being the singer Charles Aznavour, born
Chahnour Varinag Aznavourian to immigrant parents. One French MP of
Armenian descent, Patrick Devedjian, who belongs to the ruling UMP
party, told RTL radio that “I see no reason why the right shouldn’t
vote” in favour of the bill.
He said an amendment he had attached to it which would exclude
scientists, historians and academics from the provision of the law
made the bill “more reasonable ”. Turkey was simply trying to
employ “denial propaganda” over the Armenian killings, he claimed.
A Socialist MP, Jean-Michel Boucheron, took an opposing position,
saying “no parliament has the right to impose an ‘official’ history,
especially regarding a foreign country…. What would we say if the
Turkish parliament tried to shape France’s history?”
France in 2001 already adopted a law officially calling the massacres
a genocide sparking a first found of Turkish anger that had
short-lived negative consequences for French firms in Turkey.
The new bill would go further by making it illegal to deny that
genocide took place, much in the way denial of the Holocaust during
World War II is a crime in France.
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has called the proposed
law “a blunder” and Turkish newspapers Thursday were scathing in
saying the bill undermined France’s commitment to freedom of
expression. “Liberty, equality and stupidity”, was how one daily,
Hurriyet, headlined its opinion. AFP

The Guardian, UK
Oct 13 2006
A Nobel winner for our times
Margaret Atwood
Friday October 13, 2006
The Guardian

‘Pamuk gives us what all novelists give us at their best: the truth’
… Orhan Pamuk. Photograph: Spencer Platt/Getty

Orhan Pamuk, the celebrated Turkish novelist, has won the Nobel prize
for iterature. It would be difficult to conceive of a more perfect
winner for our catastrophic times. Just as Turkey stands at the
crossroads of the Muslim East/Middle East and the European and North
American west, so Pamuk’s work inhabits the shifting ground of an
increasingly dangerous cultural and religious overlap, where
ideologies as well as personalities collide.
It’s no exaggeration to say that you have to read Pamuk if you want
to begin to understand what’s going on in people’s hearts, minds and
souls, not only in Turkey, but also in Britain, where the current
Jack Straw headscarf controversy eerily mirrors the subject matter of
Pamuk’s recently-translated 1996 novel, Snow (in which we are
reminded that Ataturk’s ruthless modernisation campaign included a
much-disputed banning of headscarves.
Pamuk has felt the shockwaves from such factional collisions. He has
never been one to duck controversy: just a year ago he was facing
prosecution on charges of “un-Turkishness” – he’d been so rash as to
have mentioned the fate of the Armenians at the beginning of the 20th
century, a taboo subject for the authorities. Possibly in response to
international outcries, the charges were dropped, but many
lesser-known Turkish writers have not been so lucky.
He has already won many literary prizes, including the 2003 Dublin
Impac Award for his sixth novel, My Name Is Red. In Turkey, he is far
more than a novelist: people rush to read his novels as if he’s a
kind of sure-fire prophet, or a hugely popular singer, or a national
psychoanalyst or a one-man newspaper editorial page. There is nothing
programmatic about his novels; he simply writes out of the centre of
the whirlwind both his characters and his Turkish readers feel swept
up in every day.
Where is Turkey going? How will it come to terms with its
once-glorious, often-troubled history, and resolve the conflict
between old and new, and handle the power struggle between
secularists and Islamists, and find self-respect, or peace of mind,
or inner wholeness or a new direction? Pamuk’s novels don’t provide
cut-and-dried solutions, but they follow the tortuous lines of such
questionings with anguished and wrenching fidelity. Sometimes his
characters are almost literally torn apart by choices they don’t know
how to make, but are forced to make. His power as a novelist stems in
part from his refusal to judge the choices his characters make: their
tragedy is that no matter what path they take, they can’t be at ease;
and, worse, some other element in their society is bound to condemn
them.
Thus Pamuk’s heroes – they are typically heroes, not heroines –
wander through the plots of their books as if in caught in a
particularly anxious and threatening collective dream.
I wrote of his novel Snow in the New York Times Book Review: “The
twists of fate, the plots that double back on themselves, the
trickiness, the mysteries that recede as they’re approached, the
bleak cities, the night prowling, the sense of identity-loss, the
protagonist in exile – these are vintage Pamuk, but they’re also part
of the modern literary landscape.”
It is not unusual for a Pamuk protagonist to end up dead at the hands
of persons unknown.
Pamuk’s heroes are pestered by Turkey’s former pre-eminence: they may
stumble upon architectural fragments of the huge, opulent Ottoman
empire, or see an Armenian church standing empty, or be reminded of
earlier Russian rulers, or glimpse a fly-spotted picture of the once
revered Ataturk, whose attempts to forge a fully westernised, secular
Turkey now seem futile. Where has all the power gone? such echoes
say. The Christian Byzantine city of Constantinople casts a long
shadow, and the European west and the Muslim east are seen as
mirror-opposite twins ensnared in a net that traps them both.
Pamuk gives us what all novelists give us at their best: the truth.
Not the truth of statistics, but the truth of human experience at a
particular place, in a particular time. And as with all great
literature, you feel at moments not that you are examining him, but
that he is examining you. “No one could understand us from so far
away,” says a character in Snow. Reader, it’s a challenge.

The Guardian, UK
Oct 13 2006
French MPs anger Ankara over Armenian genocide vote
Angelique Chrisafis in Paris
Friday October 13, 2006
The Guardian
Turks demonstrate outside the French consulate in Istanbul over
France’s plans to make it a crime to deny that Armenians suffered
genocide at the hands of Ottoman Turks after the first world war.
Photograph: Reuters

The French national assembly yesterday passed a bill making it a
crime to deny that Armenians suffered genocide at the hands of
Ottoman Turks during the first world war, sparking anger in Turkey
and condemnation from Brussels.
The bill, proposed by the opposition Socialist party, states anyone
who denies that the mass murder of Armenians from 1915-1917 was
genocide should face a year in prison and a 45,000 (£30,000) fine.
The bill is unlikely to become law as it faces opposition from the
French government and president Jacques Chirac.
But Ankara’s foreign ministry said relations between the Nato allies,
France and Turkey had been dealt “a severe blow” and warned of
“political consequences”. French businesses which exported 4bn of
goods to Turkey last year feared a consumer boycott.
Turkish commentators said the proposed law could boost Turkish
nationalists and undermine pro-EU liberals by exposing the depth of
anti-Turkey feeling in France, a founder member state. Some MEPs
warned that the French bill would hamper efforts by Turkish
intellectuals to develop an open debate on the Armenian question,
sending a hypocritical message that an EU country was prepared to
lock people up for expressing a particular view of history just as
Europe is pressuring Turkey to promote freedom of expression.
Richard Howitt, Labour MEP and foreign affairs spokesman, told the
Guardian the French move was the “worst kind of hypocrisy and
provocation”. He said the bill reflected problems in France, and was
“partly racially motivated against Turkey which is a majority Muslim
state”. He said French politicians were also courting the Armenian
community in France – which at more than 400,000 is the largest
Armenian diaspora in western Europe.
A European commission spokeswoman said: “It is not up to law to write
history. Historians need to have debate.”
Turkey’s official policy is to acknowledge that large numbers of
Armenians were killed by Turks, but to reject the overall estimate of
1.5m deaths as inflated. It maintains that deaths occurred as part of
civil unrest during the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and thousands
of Turks also died. Saying otherwise can lead to prosecution and some
of Turkey’s literary names have faced trial over the issue.
The French government yesterday tried to limit the damage by
stressing its “solid ties of friendship and cooperation” with Turkey,
vowing to oppose the bill. The French parliament’s lower house
approved the bill by 106 votes to 19.
The European commission said recognition of an Armenian genocide was
not a precondition for Turkey entering the EU. But Jacques Chirac and
two likely candidates for next year’s presidential elections, Nicolas
Sarkozy and Ségolène Royal, have all stated that Ankara must accept
the genocide before joining the EU.

Arab News, Saudi Arabia
Oct 13 2006
Editorial: Confronting the Past
13 October 2006

TURKS prize the characteristics of toughness and fixity of purpose
that have made the ordinary Turkish soldier such an indomitable and
ferocious foe on the battlefield. The elite Janissaries from the
country’s Ottoman past, with their alarming tactic of relentless
advance using an eccentric swaying march, epitomize a sturdiness,
which after the humiliations of defeat in 1918, the Turks reasserted
under Ataturk’s leadership and threw occupation forces out of the
country.
However, in this formidable stubborn strength lies Turkey’s weakness
as the country bids for EU membership, for which in many other ways
it is eminently qualified. Turkey’s obdurate denial of the massacres
that took place for three years after an Armenian insurrection in
1915 is a folly that helps only those who wish to exclude it from the
EU.
With the 1983 return of democracy under Turgut Özal, work was
actually begun on a public-relations campaign that would at last have
recognized the horrors in Eastern Turkey. It would have argued that
the government of Enver Pasha feared a czarist Russian-inspired
rebellion that could have opened a further front for the already
overstretched Turkish armed forces. The point would also have been
made that Kurds, who turned on their more prosperous Armenian
neighbors, did much of the killing. In the event the project was
abandoned in favor of publishing a collection of source documents
that majored on the atrocities committed by Armenian rebels. History
is never black and white. Unfortunately almost a century after the
fact, Turkey is still stubbornly committed to a denial, not only that
there was official sanction for the massacres of maybe up to 1.5
million Armenians, but also of the fact that the massacres took
place. In France, which has a very large Armenian community,
legislators are making denial of the Armenian massacres a crime.
Regardless of the wisdom of this curtailment of free speech (proposed
by the opposition Socialists), the move is only the latest by French
parties of all political colors to block Turkey’s EU entry.
Socialist presidential challenger next year Segolene Royal, her rival
Nicolas Sarkozy, and President Chirac have all called for a
referendum on Turkish membership. Given current anti-Muslim feeling
and the articulate and wealthy Armenian community, that vote would
likely go against Turkey. Even in Italy and the UK, Turkey’s leading
supporters, there is now some concern that though many reforms
demanded by Brussels are being implemented by Ankara, Turks have not
grasped the wider implication of EU membership: that Europe is built
on compromise often hammered out in exhausting all-night
horse-trading sessions.
As the French themselves have been learning in recent years,
`nationalism’ is a dirty word in the EU. National pride is fine, but
it cannot be carried over into nationalist policies that tear apart
this unique economic and political organization of nation states.
Turkey’s staunch nationalism and obdurate refusal to confront a
tragic past plays right into the hands of its opponents.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

People’s Daily, China
Oct 13 2006
EU concerned over French legislation on alleged Armenian genocide

The European Commission on Thursday expressed concern over French
legislation that would penalize denial of the alleged 1915-1917
Armenian Genocide by the Turks.
“If this law were to indeed enter into force, it would prohibit the
debate and the dialogue which is necessary for reconciliation on this
issue,” said a commission spokeswoman.
The legislation won approval in the French lower house National
Assembly on Thursday. But it now needs to go through the Senate
before it becomes law, said Krisztina Nagy, the commission’s
spokeswoman on enlargement.
Turkey is in accession negotiations with the European Union (EU).
Nagy said the law could have a negative effect on the important
debate opened by the Turks on the issue.
It should not be law that writes history, said Nagy. To write
history, historians and intellectuals need to debate.
Asked if the Armenian issue would be another obstacle to Turkey’s
accession to the EU, Nagy said the recognition of the issue was not a
criterion for Turkey’s entry into the EU.
Under French law, Turkey’s accession needs approval by a referendum
in France.
Turkey began accession talks in October 2005. But experts believed
the negotiations would last at least one decade.
The spokeswoman would not be drawn to comment on whether or not the
commission, the executive body of the EU, would act against France,
should the legislation finally become law.
The alleged Armenian Genocide refers to the forced mass evacuation
and related deaths in 1915-1917 of hundreds of thousands or possibly
more than a million Armenians, during the rule of the Ottoman Empire.
Some main aspects of the event are a matter of ongoing dispute among
the academic community and between parts of the international
community and Turkey.
Turkey rejects the term “genocide” and claims that the deaths among
the Armenians were not a result of a state-sponsored plan of mass
extermination, but of inter-ethnic strife, disease and famine during
the turmoil of World War I.

The Guardian, UK
Oct 13 2006
This ignorant act will only fan the flames of division
The French vote to outlaw denial of the Armenian genocide plays into
the hands of Islamist nationalists in Turkey
Fiachra Gibbons
Friday October 13, 2006
The Guardian
For those who enjoyed a country childhood beyond the reach of a
reliable TV signal, entertainment often consisted of watching two
farmyard animals headbutting each other to the point of
unconsciousness. Typically, two young bullocks would square up to one
another in the way the Turkish donkey and the French ass are doing
today over the Armenian genocide, the collected crimes of French
colonialism, the headscarf, the French insistence that it is their
liberal duty to publish every Muhammad cartoon ever drawn, and any
other raw nerve within reach. Stupider breeds of sheep can keep this
up for hours.
It is pretty poor sport, and one that must take a toll on the limited
reasoning capacities of the creatures involved. Which is why it makes
it all the harder that the supposed excuse for this release of
political testosterone is one of the great forgotten tragedies of the
last century: the massacre – or what some call the genocide – of
around one million Armenians in what is now eastern Turkey. “Who
remembers the Armenians?” Hitler remarked before he set his own
Holocaust in motion. Sadly, few did, even in France.
Turkey has been in headlong and hysterical denial of what was done
between 1915 and 1917 ever since, coming up with one mad face-saving
theory after another to explain how one of Anatolia’s most ancient
populations suddenly disappeared. It is true that Armenian rebels did
their share of slaughtering, and that famine, chaos and Kurdish
land-grabbers played their part as the Ottoman empire collapsed amid
multiple invasions and uprisings. But Ataturk, one of whose adopted
daughters was an Armenian survivor of the forced death marches,
should have – but never could – bring himself to face the truth,
possibly because of his shame at what his brother army officers had
ordered while he was in Gallipoli fighting off the British. (Nor must
we forget that Churchill urged the Armenians to rebel, with vague
promises of support to divert manpower from his sorry mess in the
Dardanelles.)
But the taboo about even mentioning the Armenians has been slowly
broken over the last four years, helped along by the brilliant and
the brave, chief among them the novelist Orhan Pamuk. He has been
prosecuted for “insulting Turkishness” by claiming that a million
Armenians died. What irony that the same Turkish nationalists who
wanted to lynch him then will today be celebrating his Nobel prize
win. Pamuk’s right to freedom of speech was yesterday on the lips of
the French parliamentarians who voted through the bill that would
jail for a year anyone who questions the use of the word genocide for
the killings. No one seemed to have heard that Pamuk himself, in
common with all Turkish liberals, had condemned the bill. It is of
course a cynical exercise to harvest the sizeable Armenian vote, but
so out of touch are the Parisian elite with their suburbs that they
fail to realise the size of the Turkish minority. Officially, of
course, it is illegal to count them, as everyone is French and
nothing else.
That the French – who last year voted to compel teachers in the
immigrant suburbs to teach children the benefits of colonisation
before seeing sense – should act now speaks of profound ignorance and
self-satisfaction. It may also prove to be one of their most
inopportune sallies from port since Villeneuve set sail for
Trafalgar.
For many in France this is not a fight for historic accuracy but
another excuse to point out the differences between the east and
west, between Islam and liberal values, and draw a line at where
Europe ends. France is the fiercest opponent of Turkey’s EU entry. It
is also a place in which the climate is such that a schoolteacher has
become a hero of free speech after unleashing a poisonous tirade
against Muslims in Le Figaro that would have landed him in court
elsewhere.
Turkey and France are seen, from Paris now at least, as
irreconcilable opposites, embodiments of the “clash of civilisation”.
Except, of course, they are not. They are in fact, peas in a pod – in
many ways the two most similar states in Europe. Both are fanatically
secular republics, saved from self-destruction by military strongmen
(Napoleon and Ataturk). Both ban the headscarf in schools and are led
by often-remote elites who see religion as a kind of mental
affliction. Both lost great empires but still have the mentalities
that went with them, and both are perpetually convinced that the rest
of the world is plotting to undermine their imminent resurgence.
While the French elite are still petrified by the old Napoleonic fear
of the mob, now transposed to the often nominally Muslim kids from
the suburbs, the Turkish military secular establishment see any show
of religious faith as a harbinger of a fundamentalist takeover. Entry
into Europe means relaxing the iron grip they have imposed in three
coups in a generation. That is why many in the Ankara barracks will
be happy to see Nicolas Sarkozy and Ségolène Royal compete with each
other to demand that, in their eyes, Turkey humiliates itself yet
again by making a full and frank confession before being admitted to
the top table of civilised nations.
This confirmation that Europe is a closed Christian club also plays
into the hands of the resurgent Islamist nationalists in Turkey,
whose ranks may or may not contain the present prime minister, Recep
Tayyip Erdogan, a man who one day presents himself as an advocate of
multicultural tolerance and the next as an old-fashioned Turkish
xenophobe. His own very hazy grip of history was demonstrated
yesterday when he declared that “in our history we never had any
inquisition, dark ages or colonialism” – curiously forgetting the
Ottoman empire, of which he is a fervent nostalgic.
Just as with butting heads, brains seems to suffer when talk turns to
clashing civilisations. The countless Armenian dead are testimony to
the danger of forgetting, and how the past cannot be ignored or
covered up. Equally we should remember that Nicolas Sarkozy’s
great-grandparents were also citizens of the Ottoman empire, living a
few streets away from Ataturk in Salonika, both comfortable members
of the Islamo-Judeo elite. That is not a combination of words we see
often now. What we forget in a few generations.
· Fiachra Gibbons is writing a book on the Ottoman legacy in Europe
[email protected]

People’s Daily, China
Oct 13 2006
Turkey slams France over adoption of Armenian genocide bill

Turkish Foreign Ministry on Thursday slammed the French Parliament’s
adoption of a proposed draft law criminalizing any denial of the
alleged massacres of Armenians under the Ottoman Empire during World
War I.
Relations between Turkey and France have suffered “a heavy blow due
to irresponsible initiatives of several French politicians who are
not able to predict consequences of their policies,” the ministry
said in a statement.
“Despite our all diplomatic and parliamentary initiatives, and
efforts of our citizens living in France, non-governmental
organizations and business circles, the French parliament adopted the
bill submitted by the Socialist Party on criminalizing of any denial
of so-called Armenian genocide. We profoundly regret the adoption of
the bill,” the statement said.
French lawmakers on Thursday voted 106-19 for the bill, which calls
for up to a year in prison and fines of up to 56,000 U.S. dollars for
anyone who denies the Armenian genocide, according to the Turkish
media.
The bill must be passed by the Senate and signed by French President
Jacques Chirac, the reports said.
Reacting to the adoption of the bill, Turkish Parliament Speaker
Bulent Arinc said on Thursday, “It is a shameful and hostile
resolution. It is totally unacceptable.”
Arinc expressed his regret over adoption of the draft and said,
“France is considered the cradle of individual freedoms. This
decision contradicts with freedom of thought and expression.”
Turkey, a secular Muslim country which is seeking for the European
Union (EU) membership, has vowed to impose economic sanctions on
France if the bill is passed in the French parliament.
According to the Zaman daily newspaper, Turkey is the fifth- largest
customer of France outside the EU. The volume of trade between Turkey
and France is about 10 billion dollars. French exports to Turkey are
5.9 billion dollars while its import remains at 3.8 billion dollars.
Turkey has always denied that up to 1.5 million Armenians were
subjected to genocide in the period between 1915 and 1923.
However, it does acknowledge that up to 300,000 Armenians died during
fighting and efforts to relocate populations away from the war zone
in eastern Turkey.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress