TURKISH LEGISLATOR PROPOSES BILL THAT SAYS FRENCH COMMITTED GENOCIDE IN ALGERIA
AP Worldstream
May 18, 2006
A legislator from Turkey’s ruling party on Thursday proposed a bill
that would make it a crime to deny that France committed genocide
against Algerians.
The proposal was a tit-for-tat move, and the latest expression of
Turkey’s disapproval of NATO ally France, whose parliament on Thursday
postponed voting on a similar bill that would make it a crime to deny
that Turks committed genocide against Armenians around the time of
World War I.
Mahmut Kocak, a legislator from Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development
Party representing the city of Afyon, said his proposal included making
May 8 of every year “The Genocide Carried out against the Algerians”
day. Under Kocak’s proposed law, anyone who denied that the French
committed genocide against the Algerians could be put in jail and
fined up to 100,000 Turkish lira (about US$70,000).
Turkey’s government has argued that designations of genocide should
be debated by historians, and not legislated by politicians.
Nonetheless, several countries, including France, have passed
resolutions recognizing the killings of as many as 1.5 million
Armenians in Turkey as genocide.
The bill in the French parliament would have taken recognition one step
further, however, by making it a crime to say Turks did not commit
genocide, similar to a French law that makes it a crime to deny that
Nazi Germans committed genocide against the Jews during World War II.
Turkey vehemently denies that it committed genocide against Armenians,
saying many were killed as the Ottoman Empire fell but it was not
part of an organized genocidal campaign.
The Turkish legislator’s remark was aimed to hit a sore spot in
French history.
Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika recently said French
colonization was a form of genocide for Algeria’s culture and
traditions, prompting the French foreign minister to warn him that
“this type of term should never be overused.