GENOCIDE VOTE ANGER
By Charles Bremner

The Times, UK
Oct 12 2006

FRANCE was on a collision course with Turkey and the European Union
last night as MPs prepared to vote today on a Socialist Bill that
would make it a criminal offence to deny that Turkish massacres of
Armenians in 1915-17 constituted genocide.

President Chirac’s Government has distanced itself from the draft law,
which has also been condemned by academics in France and Turkey as a
dangerous attempt to legislate history. The law would punish denial
with a maximum one-year prison term and a fine of up to ~@45,000
(£30,000).

France’s existing law banning denial of the Nazi Holocaust is
different, the critics say, because it is aimed against anti-Semitism.

With 400,000 French citizens of Armenian descent, and with elections
seven months away, many MPs from the ruling Union for a Popular
Movement (UMP), are expected to refrain from opposing it.

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