IHT: Turks Seething Over French Bill On Genocide

TURKS SEETHING OVER FRENCH BILL ON GENOCIDE
By Dan Bilefsky International Herald Tribune

International Herald Tribune, France
Oct 16 2006

ISTANBUL Anger over the French Parliament’s approval of a bill making
it a crime to deny that Armenians were victims of genocide is so
potent here that even national pride in the news that the novelist
Orhan Pamuk had been awarded a Nobel Prize was tinged with resentment.

"A great moment for Turkey has been made sour," Sinan Ulgen, a Turkish
commentator, said over the weekend. "That it happened on the same
day the French law was adopted is seen by some as a slap in the face."

Pamuk went on trial in January on charges of "insulting Turkishness"
after he said in comments published in a Swiss newspaper that one
million Armenians had died in Turkey during World War I. The case
was later dismissed on a technicality. While Pamuk’s status as a
cultural hero in Turkey has been cemented by the Nobel Prize, he
remains a nemesis to many critics for drawing worldwide attention to
a historical taboo that many Turks would like to forget.

About 100 demonstrators gathered outside the French Consulate in
Istanbul on Sunday, several pelting it with eggs to protest the French
bill, which was approved Thursday by the National Assembly and now
goes to the Senate.

"The EU wants any excuse to keep out Muslim Turkey, and the Armenia
issue is just the latest example," Oznur Tufan, a 30-year-old social
worker, said as she passed the barricaded consulate. A policeman added,
"Some Turks now want to make France an enemy."

Ankara has rejected calls for an all- out boycott of French goods,
but Turkish officials say some lawmakers are considering retaliatory
measures, including blocking French defense and energy companies from
bidding for Turkish contracts. Ordinary Turks speak of making their
own symbolic protests, like selling their Peugeots.

Such talk reflects the visceral indignation over what many Turks see
as the hypocrisy of France, a country that they say claims to uphold
free speech but is using the genocide bill to try to limit it.

Pamuk captured the national mood Friday when he said, "Freedom of
expression is a French discovery, and this law is contrary to the
culture of freedom of expression."

Turkey acknowledges that a large number of Armenians died during the
collapse of the Ottoman Empire in World War I, but it rejects the
contention that the deaths constitute genocide. Armenians argue that
as many as 1.5 million of their ancestors were victims of a systematic
genocide between 1915 and 1923. The topic is so sensitive here that
it is largely glossed over in official history books.

Beyond reopening a historical wound, analysts say, the consequences
of the French law could go far deeper – undermining Turkey’s political
reforms, which are already on shaky ground, and intensifying a backlash
against the European Union at a time when support for joining the
bloc has reached an all- time low. The EU has been pressing Turkey to
improve its human rights record, in particular insisting that Ankara
remove an article from its penal code that has led to the prosecution
of Turks for insulting Turkish identity.

French officials say President Jacques Chirac is fuming over the French
bill, which he fears could divide his already squabbling conservative
party while pushing Turkey away from democratic reforms.

On Saturday, Chirac telephoned Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan
to say he understood why Turks were so upset.

But Chirac and the two leading contenders to replace him as president –
Nicolas Sarkozy and Segolène Royal – have also called for Turkey to
acknowledge the Armenian genocide, or risk undermining its chances
of joining the European Union.

Such demands have done little to mollify the growing anger here.

Many Turkish critics of the French bill warn that the measure could
backfire by playing into the hands of nationalists who argue that
reforms, including laws encouraging free speech and better rights
for minorities, are a step too far.

The author Elif Shafak, who was recently put on trial because
characters in her latest novel, "The Bastard of Istanbul," say that
the Armenians were massacred, contends that the French law risks
emboldening forces in Turkey "who staunchly oppose Turkey’s EU bid
and would like to keep the country as an insular, xenophobic nation
cut off from the West."

The French legislation has already strengthened nationalist voices
and weakened the governing Justice and Development Party of Erdogan,
who has referred to the French bill as a "systematic lie machine" and
is pressing for difficult economic and political reforms before an
election year. After the bill’s adoption, Onur Oymen, deputy leader
of the opposition Republican People’s Party, and Sukru Elekdag, a
former ambassador to Washington, called for Turkey to retaliate by
deporting 70,000 Armenian residents living in Turkey.

The Turkish Parliament’s Justice Committee, meanwhile, has discussed
a retaliatory law that would make it illegal to deny that France
was responsible for a colonial-era genocide in Algeria, which France
ruled from 1830 to 1962.

Others, however, including prominent members of the Justice and
Development Party, have pleaded for restraint. Addressing a town hall
meeting in Gocek, a seaside town on Turkey’s southern coast, Egemen
Bagis, a Justice and Development lawmaker and a senior adviser to
Erdogan, told the crowd that it should not "match France’s mistake"
by caving in to intolerance.

Bagis added that the adoption of the bill reflected the limits of
Turkish immigrants in France. Many here question why France’s small
but influential Armenian population was able to lobby for the bill
while France’s unassimilated Turks looked on. "This is a mistake for
France, but it is also our mistake," Bagis told the crowd, "While
Armenians can influence the debate, Turks have not assimilated as
much as the Armenians, and they need to be active players in France
by being more integrated."

But Ismet Yilmazer, an 80-year old nightclub owner, retorted that
democracy was "upside down if a country like France, with more than
60 million people, adopts a law to get the vote of 450,000 French
Armenians."

Turkish officials said the law had a particular sting in a country
whose founder, Kemal Ataturk, had modeled the modern Turkish Republic
on France, insisting, like France, on a separation between religion
and the state.

"It is unacceptable that France, the country of ‘Egalite, Fraternite,
Liberte,’ should tell us what we can and cannot say," said Zeynep
Damla Gurel, a lawmaker from the opposition Republican People’s
Party. "It’s not for another country to dictate to us our history."