PERINCEK APPEALS SWISS VERDICT ON ‘GENOCIDE’ DENIAL

The New Anatolian, Turkey
March 14 2007

The New Anatolian with AP / Lausanne

A Turkish politician has filed an appeal against a racism conviction
by a Swiss court for denying that the early 20th century deaths of
Armenians was genocide, his lawyer said Monday.

Lawyer Laurent Moreillon said that Dogu Perincek, the leader of the
Turkish Workers’ Party (IP), had lodged the appeal with the Cantonal
Court in Vaud, where he was convicted by a lower tribunal earlier
this week and ordered to pay a fine of 3,000 Swiss francs ($2,450),
along with a suspended penalty of 9,000 francs.

Perincek was charged with breaking Swiss law by denying during a visit
to Switzerland in 2005 that the World War I-era deaths of up to 1.5
million Armenians amounted to genocide. He has since repeated the
claim, including during his trial earlier this week. Perincek accused
the judge of "racial hatred" toward Turkey and said he would appeal
the verdict with Switzerland’s Supreme Court.

Perincek also said that he would take his case to the European Court
of Human Rights if necessary.

The IP leader, who submitted 90 kilograms of historical documents,
argued there had been no genocide against Armenians, but there had been
"reciprocal massacres."

The case was seen as a test of whether it is a violation of
Switzerland’s anti-racism law to deny that the Turks committed
genocide in the deaths. The legislation has previously been applied
to Holocaust denial.

The case has caused diplomatic tension between the Alpine republic and
Turkey, which insists Armenians were killed in civil unrest during
the tumultuous collapse of the Ottoman Empire and not in a planned
campaign of genocide.

In his closing statement, Judge Pierre-Henri Winzap described the
defendant as an intelligent and cultivated person, but added that
to deny the Armenian genocide was an arrogant provocation because it
was an accepted historical fact.

The Turkish Foreign Ministry, in a written statement on Friday,
expressed Ankara’s uneasiness with the Swiss court’s decision.

Saying that the decision would not be accepted by Turkey, the statement
added, "We hope that decision will be corrected by independent Swiss
judicial officials which we believed that there were in Switzerland."

Turkey strongly opposes the claims that its predecessor state, the
Ottoman government, caused the Armenian deaths in a planned genocide.

The Turkish government has said the toll is wildly inflated and that
Armenians were killed or displaced in civil unrest during the empire’s
collapse and conditions of World War I. Ankara’s proposal to Yerevan
to set up a joint commission of historians to study the disputed
events is still awaiting a positive response from the Armenian side.

After French lawmakers voted last October to make it a crime to deny
that the claims were genocide, Turkey said it would suspend military
relations with France.

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress