TURKEY MAY HIT BACK AT FRANCE WITH ALGERIA ‘GENOCIDE’ LAW
Agence France Presse — English
October 7, 2006 Saturday 9:11 AM GMT
Turkey may retaliate to a draft French law making it a jailable
offense to deny the Armenians were the victim of genocide under the
Ottoman Empire with a similar law on French killings under colonial
rule in Algeria, a senior lawmaker said in remarks published Saturday.
Koksal Toptan, head of the Turkish parliament’s justice commission,
told the mass-selling Sabah daily he had initially ignored proposals
made in May for Turkey to brand killings of Algerians under French
colonial rule as genocide and introduce prison terms for those who
deny it.
"I just swept them under the carpet," he said.
But following renewed attempts in France to pass a bill calling for
five years in jail to anyone who denies Turks committed genocide
against Armenians during World War I, Toptan said he had ordered
that the proposals be put on the commission’s agenda for Wednesday,
a day before the French draft is debated in Paris.
"What is France trying to do? Their attitude is damaging Turkish-French
ties and is doing no good to Turkish-Armenian ties either," Toptan
told Sabah.
"If the French parliament is acting like that, we must give a response
… in the name of our pride," he said.
The justice commission is the first instance where draft laws are
debated before being sent to a vote at the general assembly.
France already passed in 2001 a resolution recognizing the 1915-17
killings of Armenians as genocide.
The bill to criminalize genocide denial was first tabled in May but
the debate ran out of parliamentary time before a vote could be held.
Toptan said Turkish MPs had filed three proposals for retaliative laws.
According to parliamentary records, two of them call for the
recognition of the killings of Algerians under French colonial rule —
from 1830 to 1962 — as genocide and the introduction of jail terms
for those who deny it.
The third calls for the imprisonment of those who assert the Armenians
were victims of genocide under Ottoman rule.
All three proposals were sumbitted in May — apparently in reaction
to the debate in France.
Armenians claim up to 1.5 million of their kin were slaughtered in
orchestrated killings between 1915 and 1917.
Turkey rejects the genocide label, arguing that 300,000 Armenians
and at least as many Turks died in civil strife when Armenians rose
for independence in eastern Anatolia and sided with invading Russian
troops as the Ottoman Empire was falling apart.
On Friday, the Turkish foreign ministry warned that a positive vote
at the French parliament next week could jeopardise "investments, the
fruit of years of work, and France will — so to speak — lose Turkey".