Economist.Com
October 12, 2006 Thursday
Denial and bad law
French MPs vote to make it a crime to deny that a genocide took place
in Armenia in 1915, provoking anger in Turkey and raising doubts
about freedom of speech
French MPs vote to make denial of genocide in Armenia a crime
"I DON’T like what you say, and I will jail you for saying it". That
inversion of the definition of free speech commonly attributed to
Voltaire sounds so unappetising that it is hard to see why anyone
should support it. But that is just what is happening. The lower
house of the French parliament voted on Thursday October 12th to make
it a criminal offence to deny what is commonly called the "Armenian
genocide" of 1915.
Many Armenians, especially in the wealthy and well-connected
diaspora, feel that until Turkey relaxes its stance on what they call
the genocide of 1.5m compatriots, negotiations on its membership of
the European Union (EU) should be blocked (Turkey denies a genocide
took place). Many in the diaspora, especially in France, also want it
to be a crime for anyone to claim that a genocide did not occur.
There is a precedent: denial of the Nazi Holocaust is illegal in a
dozen European countries. Armenians say recognition for their
historical suffering should be protected in the same way. Though many
countries’ parliaments have voted to recognise the Armenian genocide,
few have gone further.
The French government, mindful of its ties with Turkey, is calling
the vote "unnecessary and untimely" and is trying to make sure that
it remains symbolic. To become law, the bill needs the backing of
both the upper house of parliament and the president. But the vote
has already prompted fury in Turkey, where discussion of the issue is
seen as a hypocritical Western ploy, manipulated by Turkey’s enemies
abroad. Yet the very discussion of what happened in 1915 is fraught
with legal difficulties within Turkey. Writers and scholars who raise
the matter are prosecuted, and sometimes imprisoned. One of these
writers, Orhan Pamuk, who had faced trial in December for talking
about the deaths of the Armenians, was awarded the Nobel prize for
literature on October 12th.
Many Turks recognise that hundreds of thousands of Armenians died
during "relocation" to other parts of the then Ottoman empire in
1915, but they argue that this was not a deliberate policy of mass
murder, and that the deaths took place in a context of internal
rebellion and inter-communal warfare. One problem is that the
archives concerned are not easily accessible. They are written in
archaic Ottoman Turkish, using the Arabic script, rather than the
Latin alphabet introduced by the Turkish republic’s founder, Kemal
Ataturk. Allowing the production of a scholarly and accessible
edition of the relevant files would be a big step forward–but for
many nationalist Turks even that would be an unwelcome move towards
their critics.
Turkish officials doubt this issue will affect negotiations for EU
membership (Cyprus is a far more serious concern). But the country is
trying to counter-attack in the propaganda war. Turkish deputies want
to introduce a law making it a crime to deny that the French
committed genocide in Algeria. That seems a big stretch: France
conducted a brutal colonial war, but no reputable scholar argues that
its aim was the mass extinction or expulsion of an entire ethnic
group.
The bigger question is whether laws on Holocaust or genocide denial
are a good thing in principle. Most of the countries which forbid it
were Nazi-occupied, or Nazi allies, during the second world war. They
generally passed the laws in the early years of post-war democracy,
typically along with bans on Nazi symbols, songs and regalia. That
may have been justifiable when a clean break with the past was vital;
it seems less so today.
Many scholars are convinced that making it a crime to deny the
Holocaust is a mistake. Fines and jail sentences create martyrs; they
do not deter those who hold outlandish views. The proposed law in
France, for example, sets a one-year prison term and E45,000
($56,570) fine, the same punishment as for denying the Nazi genocide.
Enforcing that against the thousands of Turks living in France for
whom denying the Armenian genocide is part of national identity,
would be all but impossible. Passing unenforceable laws looks like
gesture politics, rather than good jurisprudence.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
