ARBITERS OF MORALITY: FRANCE AND THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE
by Vinay Lal

The Daily Star, Bangladesh
d611281502114.htm
Nov 28 2006

The French have long believed in themselves as one of the supreme
arbiters of the moral history of humanity, as exercising a unique
civilizing mission on less fortunate parts of the world, and the
ardor with which they cling to an exalted vision of themselves as
moral legislators has clearly not diminished over the years.

On October 12, the French Assembly approved, by a vote of 106-19,
legislation that would make it a crime in France to deny that the mass
killings of Armenians which took place between 1915-17 in Ottoman
Turkey constitute "genocide." The Senate vote is still awaited,
but following in the wake of legislation from 2001 under which the
mass killings of Armenians are recognized as genocide, the present
legislation seems headed for approval.

France has nearly 500,000 Armenians, more than any other country in
Western Europe, and it would be idle to pretend that politicians do not
court minorities. However, Turks too number over 300,000 in France,
and one can be certain that the recent legislation will aggravate
their mood of discontent. Whatever the appeals to the Armenian-French
constituency, this legislation must clearly be located within the
vortex of a more complex geopolitics.

Among the considerations that weigh most heavily, one must number the
strained relations between Turkey and the European Union, the suspected
alienation of Muslim minorities from the dominant European cultures
amidst which they find themselves, the growing tensions within the
Muslim ummah, and the wave of Islamophobia which has swept European
countries. The bill will doubtless convey to Turks the message that
they have not yet attained that state of enlightenment which might
warrant their admission into the European Union.

Among the critics of the French legislation is the Turkish writer
Orhan Pamuk, who last year admitted in an interview that Turkey
should be held responsible for the genocide. He was put on trial
for, in effect, insulting the nation and denigrating "Turkishness,"
but immense pressure, largely from the European Union, contributed
to his acquittal by the court. It is altogether likely that the
bill may have been partly motivated by the desire to strengthen the
hand of Turkish secularists and "moderate Muslims," such as Pamuk,
who are viewed as being locked in battle with Muslim extremists and
nationalist hard-liners.

Pamuk nonetheless has criticized the French legislation as an
attempt to stifle freedom of speech and as a betrayal of the ideals
championed by France for over two centuries. In Pamuk’s critique,
framed very much by the parameters of Western liberal thought, when
two or more interpretations vie for attention the more sound position
always prevails.

In 1972, France passed a law which makes it a crime to deny the
Holocaust. Though the Holocaust is far from being the only genocide in
a violence-filled century, it occupies in the West a singular status
as furnishing the paradigmatic instance of genocide and crimes against
humanity. The obsession with the Holocaust has, so to speak, obscured
the recognition of other equally horrific atrocities. The Socialist
legislator, Christophe Masse, in his defense of the bill described it
as helping to "ease the unhealthy rivalry that exists among victims
of genocides and that is fueled by their inequality before the law."

Ironically, this, the only defense of the legislation of any merit
that one might invoke, is also the one that will be categorically
rejected in Europe and the Anglo-American world, and even adduced as
an expression of support for anti-Semitism. Whatever else might be
permitted in the West, any interpretation of the Holocaust which merely
questions its canonical status as the ultimate form of victimhood
opens itself to vicious attack and ridicule.

That a genocide of Armenians took place under Ottoman Turks is
beyond question. Succeeding Turkish governments have not only fudged
the numbers, but claim, astoundingly, that Armenians died mainly on
account of war, disease, and hunger. In Turkey, by way of contrast with
France, the admission of an Armenian genocide can lead to criminal
prosecution. However, not only is there overwhelming evidence to
establish that the death of Armenians was the consequence of a policy
of deliberate policy, but the Turkish government at the conclusion of
World War I itself court-martialed, before the world, the Young Turks
(or CUP leaders) by whose orders a genocide was perpetrated.

As Peter Balakian has so amply demonstrated in The Burning
Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America’s Response (2003), the
government-appointed Commission of Inquiry gathered insurmountable
evidence of the massacres and it became part of the official record.

If the Turkish government of that day set an example to the world
in creating the model for war crimes trials, the present Turkish
government has unfortunately chosen to make a foolish spectacle of
itself by its denial of the genocide.

But what of France? The history of French colonial rule in Algeria,
Indochina, Haiti, the Ivory Coast, Congo Brazzaville, and elsewhere
is littered with corpses of colonized people. The assassinations
of Algerians settled in France remain unpunished more than four
decades after Algeria’s declaration of independence, and it is no
more shocking that the French National Assembly in February 2005
passed a law requiring school children to be taught "the positive
role of the French presence overseas, notably in North Africa."

As the unrest of recent years suggests, France’s treatment of its
own North African minorities leaves much to be desired. If France
wished to be daring, it might consider enacting legislation that
would make it an offence to deny French colonial atrocities. That is
exceedingly unlikely. Colonizing nations can be stripped of their
colonial possessions, but they find it exceedingly difficult to
shed their past and their habits of evasion of responsibility. The
passage of the recent legislation on the Armenian question, far from
signifying any enlightened view, is the most decisive indicator of
France’s inability to own up to its wretched colonial past.