TURKEY, FRANCE: ANKARA SEEKS FRENCH BUSINESSES’ HELP AGAINST ARMENIAN GENOCIDE BILL

Monday Morning, Lebanon
Oct 16 2006

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has asked French companies
to lobby French legislators against a parliamentary bill making it
an offense to deny that Armenians were the victims of genocide

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan met in Istanbul with
representatives of French companies doing business in Turkey in a bid
to enlist their support against a controversial French bill that has
threatened to poison bilateral ties.

The bill, to be debated in the French Parliament, makes it an offense
to deny that Armenians were the victims of genocide under the Ottoman
Empire during World War I.

"Erdogan asked French companies to lobby French legislators to try
to abort the bill", Mustafa Abdullahoglu, an executive with a firm
he did not name, told reporters after the meeting. "He said the bill
would damage bilateral ties if adopted".

Abdullahoglu said he feared a boycott of French goods in Turkey if
the bill was passed.

Representatives of carmakers Peugeot and Renault, the food giant
Danone, the construction materials producer Lafarge and supermarket
chain Carrefour were among the participants in the meeting.

Members of a Turkish-French business group flew to Paris to lobby
against the bill, which calls for a five-year prison term and a fine of
45,000 euros (57,000 dollars) for anyone who denies that the massacres
of Armenians constituted a genocide.

The Turkish Foreign Ministry warned that the adoption of the bill
could jeopardize "investments, the fruit of years of work, and France
will — so to speak — lose Turkey".

The bill was first submitted in May but the debate ran out of
parliamentary time before a vote could be held.

The head of Turkey’s largest business group TUSIAD also condemned
the bill, calling it the reflection of "fears that Turkey’s bid
for European Union membership can materialize" and an attempt at
"disrupting efforts for constructive dialogue and analytical debate".

"I appeal to French politicians: Don’t you see that you are
jeopardizing all the political, economic and social relations that
France has had with Turkey for centuries for the sake of your own
political interests?" Omer Sabanci said in a statement, carried by
the Anatolia news agency.

In 2001 France passed a resolution recognizing the killings as
"genocide", prompting Ankara to retaliate by sidelining French
companies from public tenders and cancelling several projects awarded
to French firms.

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 rebelled against Ottoman
rule in Eastern Anatolia and sided with invading Russian troops as
the Ottoman Empire was falling apart.