The Calgary Herald (Alberta)
October 13, 2006 Friday
Early Edition
French genocide bill angers Turks
by: David Rennie, The Telegraph
The French parliament has triggered a new crisis in Turkey’s
relations with Europe by approving a bill that would make it a crime
to deny that Armenians suffered a genocide at the hands of Ottoman
Turks.
The Turkish Foreign Ministry said Thursday’s vote in the French
national assembly had dealt "a heavy blow" to bilateral relations.
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.
The Socialist-backed law was widely criticized in Turkey as another
attempt by European politicians to place obstacles in the path of
Ankara’s painful progress toward membership in the European Union.
Polls have shown that 60 per cent of the French public is opposed to
Turkish entry into the EU.
France would impose a one-year prison term and a fine of more than
$200,000 Cdn 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-member Armenian community in France
will form a formidable voter bloc.
The bill doesn’t have government support and seems likely to fall in
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.
Meanwhile, 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.