DYER: A GENOCIDE BY ANY OTHER NAME WOULD STILL STINK

VUE Weekly, Canada
Oct 19 2006

Words matter. The Holocaust of the European Jews during the Second
World War was a genocide. The mass deportation of Chechens from their
Caucasian homeland during the same war was a crime but not a genocide,
even though half of them died, because Moscow’s aim was to keep them
from collaborating with German troops who were nearing Chechnya, not
to exterminate them. Which brings us to the far more controversial
case of the Armenians and the Turks.

On Oct 12, the French parliament passed a law declaring that anyone
who denies that the mass murder of Armenians in eastern Turkey in
1915-17 was a genocide will face a year in prison. But the French
foreign ministry called the law "unnecessary and untimely," and
President Jacques Chirac telephoned Turkish Prime Minister Recep
Tayyib Erdogan to apologize.

Why would the conservative majority in the French parliament
deliberately set out to annoy the Turks, knowing that the law would
eventually be vetoed by the president? Because they hope to provoke a
nationalist backlash in Turkey that would further damage that country’s
already difficult relationship with the European Union.

French public opinion is already in a xenophobic mood over the last
expansion of the EU, with folk-tales of "Polish plumbers" working for
peanuts and stealing the jobs of honest French workers causing outrage,
especially among right-wing voters who never much liked foreigners
anyway. The prospect of 80 million Turks-Muslim Turks-joining the
European Union, even if it is at least 10 years away, is enough to
make their blood boil.

So a big row with Turkey should attract lots of votes to the right’s
presidential candidate in next May’s election, who is likely to be
none other than current prime minister Nicolas Sarkozy-who announced
last month that Turkey should never be allowed to join the EU: "We
have to say who is European and who isn’t. It’s no longer possible to
leave this question open." The new law is not really about Armenians
or Turks. It’s about the French election.

Meanwhile, in Turkey, anti-EU nationalists have their own game
underway. While Turkey was busy amending its penal code to make it
conform to EU standards over the past few years, hard-line lawyers and
bureaucrats smuggled in a new law, Article 301, which provides severe
penalties for "insulting Turkishness." In practice, that mainly means
trying to ban public discussion of the Armenian massacres, and some 70
prosecutions have already been brought by the ultra-right-wing Union of
Lawyers against Turkish authors, journalists and other public figures.

For several generations the Turkish government flatly denied any guilt
for the Armenian massacres, insisting that they didn’t happen-and,
if they did, it was the Armenians’ own fault for rebelling against
the Turkish state in wartime. Latterly, a new generation of Turkish
intellectuals has been saying that a million or more Armenians did
die in the mass deportations from eastern Anatolia, and that Turkey
needs to admit its guilt and apologize-though most still refuse to
call it a genocide, as that would put it in the same category as the
Jewish Holocaust.

Israel, too, refuses to use the term "genocide" for the Armenian
massacres, on the grounds that there was some provocation (Armenian
revolutionaries conspired with both Britain and Russia in 1914-15
to launch local uprisings in support of their planned invasions
of Turkey), and that the Turkish state’s actions, though brutal,
illegal and immoral, were not premeditated. Most Armenians, of course,
desperately want the label "genocide" to be applied to their ancestors’
suffering, since they feel that any other term demotes it to a lower
rank of tragedy. But there is room for dialogue and even reconciliation
here, if people can get past the issue of nomenclature.

The prosecutions for "insulting Turkishness"-even against Turkey’s
greatest living novelist, Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk-are not just
an attempt to stifle this dialogue among Turks, or between Turks and
Armenians. The ultra-nationalists also want to derail the negotiations
for EU membership by painting Turkey as an authoritarian and intolerant
state that does not belong in Europe. They are, in effect, Sarkozy’s
objective allies.

But Prime Minister Erdogan will probably repeal Article 301 once
next year’s elections are past. France’s law, which requires people
to discuss the Armenian massacres in precisely the terms that 301
bans, will probably be vetoed by Chirac. And Turkey’s best-known
Armenian journalist, Hrant Dink, who has already been prosecuted
several times under 301, has just announced that he will go to France
"to protest against this madness and violate the (new) law … And
I will commit the crime to be prosecuted there, so that these two
irrational mentalities can race to put me into jail."

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress