FRENCH AGAINST TURKS: TALKING ABOUT ARMENIAN GENOCIDE
>From the desk of James McConalogue
Brussels Journal, Belgium
Oct 21 2006
Why has the French government now chosen to punish its citizens for
denying the Armenian genocide? On Thursday 12 October, the lower house
of the French Parliament adopted a bill which would provide a jail
sentence and a heavy fine to anyone denying the genocide committed
by Ottoman Turks against the Armenians in 1915. The bill was passed
in the National Assembly by 106 votes to 19. The punishment to be
issued for the denial of the Armenian genocide – set at a maximum
of one year prison term and 45,000 euros (£30,000) fine – is equal
to the punishment already dealt under French law for the denial
of the holocaust. To many states in the international community –
in particular Turkey – this move aggressively counters an already
problematic Turkish law, under which a writer may be prosecuted for
the opposite: proposing that there were a set of atrocities in 1915
that the government should accept as "genocide".
To be clear, according to the UN and many Western scholars, the
Armenian genocide did happen. International authorities do recognise
the event as the Armenian genocide of 1915, a direct case of that
led to the persecution and death of 1.5 million Ottoman Armenians. To
date, the Turkish government and a number of Turkish nationalists do
not recognise those series of events as constituting anything like
"genocide." There is, in this sense, a huge open public space prepared
for discussion.
Yet in this new legislative development, it seems important to ask
why the French government has adopted the bill? Will this bill greatly
disturb Franco-Turk relations? Why have the French chosen to intervene
on the free expression of the Armenian genocide at this peculiar time,
marked by the attempted Turkish EU-membership and the high profile
controversies surrounding the freedom of speech in Turkey? In my view,
there is a decisive background to how the French authorities have
adopted the "denial bill" – but there is a huge vacuum in explaining
why it has asserted the bill at the cost of infuriating Turkey. The
French government has passed a bill which first, not only threatens the
freedom of expression on the Turk-Armenian genocide issue but second,
will possibly damage Euro-Turk political and economic relations
irretrievably.
The adoption of the French "anti-denial bill" was taken as an insult
by the Turkish government. The Turkish had warned France not to pass
the legislation. Furthermore, almost as soon as the bill had been
passed in the National Assembly, the Turkish Foreign Ministry issued
the following statement: "Turkish-French relations, which have been
meticulously developed over the centuries, took a severe blow today
through the irresponsible initiatives of some short-sighted French
politicians, based on unfounded allegations." Given the degree of
disgust experienced by the Turkish authorities, why did the French even
choose to consider the nightmare legislation? The only alleviation
of the tension seems to have come from President Chirac’s subsequent
half-hearted apology to the Turkish Prime Minister – and perhaps the
fact that the bill has yet to pass before the Senate and the President
before it can finally become law.
In several high profile literary controversies, it became immediately
noticeable that the Turkish penal system opposed the free discussion,
publishing and writing on the Armenian genocide. The most influential
of those trials were those of Orhan Pamuk – who has since won the
Nobel Prize for Literature – and Elif Shafak – who courageously gave
birth as her trials were being held. Both authors faced charges
of "insulting Turkishness" under the notorious Article 301 of the
Turkish Penal Code. In late December 2005, Orhan Pamuk was charged
with "insulting Turkishness" after the author had claimed in a Swiss
newspaper that 30,000 Kurds and one million Ottoman Armenians were
killed in Turkey yet nobody in the Turkish population would dare
talk about it. The trial was dismissed by the Turkish Ministry of
Justice at the beginning of 2006. Later this year, author of Bastard
of Istanbul, Elif Shafak, also faced charges of "insulting Turkishness"
under the antediluvian legislation. Subsequent to an earlier dismissal
in the year, the seventh High Criminal Court had revived the charges
made by Kemal Kerincsiz’s nationalist jurist group, ‘The Unity of
Jurists.’ Fortunately, in the final week of September, Shafak was
immediately acquitted – but not without significant intimidation of
her novel-writing which delved into the dialogues of the 1915 genocide.
The suppression of free expression in Turkey has occurred for writers
and journalists such as Pamuk and Shafak because of the notorious
Article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code, prohibiting "insulting
Turkishness". Ironically, the troubled legislation was passed in
2005 as a measure of bringing Turkish law into alignment with the
Copenhagen criteria of the European Union. After the Shafak trial,
the EU Commission spokesperson, Krisztina Nagy, insisted that Article
301 "continues to pose a significant threat to freedom of expression
in Turkey and all those who express a non-violent opinion." That,
in many respects, reflects the majority-opinion of the EU.
Then, more recently, it became visible that the Turkish genocide
issue was not only angering the French government but it was an
identifiable issue upon which the French were pushing for Turkish
EU-access membership to be granted – i.e. ‘the Turkish should be
pushed to admit the Armenian genocide, and if they refuse, then they
shall forfeit a place as an EU-member state’. The opposing French
Socialist Party – which pushed through the legislation – held that
the bill protects and rewards the Armenians in exile from a country
that still refuses to accept the atrocity. Then, on 30 September,
in a visit to Yerevan, the French President confirmed his position:
"Should Turkey recognize the genocide of Armenia to join the EU? … I
believe so. Each country grows by acknowledging the dramas and errors
of its past. … Can one say that Germany which has deeply acknowledged
the holocaust, has as a result lost credit? It has grown."
I subsequently reported on how France had been left alone on this
position since other EU-member states seemed ready to treat Turkey
softly on this issue – I also speculated, quite rightly, that
this would have detrimental diplomatic relations with the Turkish
government, by arguing: "It might also be thought that Chirac
could not afford to push the condition too far, since it may bring
substantial damage to Franco-Turk relations before Turkey has even
begun to attempt its progress towards European harmonization." Now,
that problematic tension has evolved, it is clear enough for us
all to see the aggravation caused, illustrating both bilateral and
multilateral tensions.
The various European institutions, eager not to be seen as possessing
double-standards, have been as strong in their condemnations of
France’s new bill as they have been of Turkey’s Article 301 in the
past. Both pieces of legislation condemn the freedom of discussion on
the 1915 genocide issue; in opposition, the respective governments
only recognise the acceptance of the genocide (France) or the
rejection of it (Turkey). EU Enlargement commissioner, Olli Rehn,
has issued many warnings to Turkey over the literary controversies for
"insulting Turkishness" but on 9 October, he turned to France to issue
a similar warning: "…The French law on the Armenian genocide is of
course a matter for French lawmakers, but there is a lot at stake for
the European Union as well, and the decision may have very serious
consequences for EU-Turkey relations … This [legislation] would
put in danger the efforts of all those in Turkey – intellectuals,
historians, academics, authors – who truly want to develop an open
and serious debate without taboos and for the sake of freedom of
expression." That is to say, in a nutshell, that the predicament of
problematic tensions is characterised by a removal of free expression
on a very pertinent political issue as well as the damage to Turkey’s
future relations in Europe.
The most flawed of all the French proponents of the bill was French
MEP, Patrick Gaubert, claiming that "Europe is a continent where
freedom of speech is guaranteed in an extraordinary manner. But free
speech ends when the memories of a people are abused and their feelings
are suffering from lies." Obviously, Gaubert needs to radically revise
his reviews since that is not the accepted view of defending free
expression and contrary of his opinion, it is more important to talk
about sensitive issues such as "genocide" than to lock people up for
them. Unfortunately for France, it is widely recognised that one of the
most fundamental defences of free expression in relation to a diversity
of religious and political doctrines derives not from a French source
but from one of Britain’s great philosopher’s, John Stuart Mill. In
the doctrine of John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, published in 1859,
the right to freedom of expression and its conditions are stated
concisely and transparently.
The most fundamental principle of a freely operating liberal society
is the right to the "freedom of opinion." The only exception in
which Mill could conceive that this freedom might be limited was if
it were to impose severe physical harm onto others – and only under
very rare conditions could this exception be true. As a result,
the French government’s intervention into a literary controversy
should not have been at all possible. In France’s peculiar rationale,
it somehow thought that the socialist cause, with the backing of
the free vote from the ruling Union for a Popular Movement (UMP),
was enough to bar free expression. For the rest of Europe, that is
not reason enough to bar the fundamental right to free expression. Nor
does the new French reasoning seem reasonable enough to destroy further
diplomatic relations with Turkey – whether it enters the EU or not.
— Boundary_(ID_HMkRoH70E4VfIG6JJ/jtOw)–