Houston Chronicle, TX
Oct 14 2006
Legislating truth
French lawmakers strangle their own principles by forbidding anyone
to deny Armenian genocide
One of the first weapons against human rights catastrophes is the
simple act of speaking out. It’s simple, but not always safe. Turkish
novelist Orhan Pamuk found that out last year, when he was prosecuted
in his homeland for "insulting Turkishness."
The government of Turkey charged Pamuk in 2005 after Pamuk dared to
tell a Swiss reporter that Turks were in denial about their country’s
massacre of up to 1.5 million Armenians in 1915. Pamuk’s insistence
on speaking out clearly and persuasively in novels has earned him
this year’s Nobel Prize for literature.
As works of conscience do, Pamuk’s words reverberated far beyond the
culture he described. His novels, the Nobel Academy’s chief said,
"enlarged the roots of the contemporary novel" by blending Western
literary tradition with that of the East.
During the same week, French lawmakers embarrassed themselves by
seeking to make it a crime to speak freely. The culture whose
ancestors refined the novel and defined free speech is debating a law
that would ban denial that Turks committed genocide against the
Armenians.
Turkey, unsurprisingly, voiced official outrage at the law. But a
government that prosecutes its citizens for far less offensive speech
is in a poor position to complain.
Turkey’s indignation is even more suspect because its officials
insist on qualifying and rationalizing the Armenian atrocities not as
a genocide, but as a side effect of war. The harping on semantics,
rather than on the crime, confirms Pamuk’s portrayal of a nation in
denial.
In a better world, semantics would be enormously important. The term
genocide actually was coined after World War I by Raphael Lemkin, a
lawyer of Polish-Jewish descent, who spent his life trying to
convince the world that exterminating an ethnic group should be a
punishable crime. Yet even now, calling such killings genocide does
little to mobilize the world community.
Precisely because Turks’ resistance to facing their past continues,
though, the discussion must take place in full detail. Muzzling
anyone who wants to argue over the definition of genocide also gags
anyone able to make the opposite case.
France’s new bill emerges in several larger contexts: widespread
reluctance to let Turkey join the European Union, and an election at
home in which France’s half-million citizens of Armenian descent play
a big role. Neither situation merits stifling free speech.
By trying to legislate history, France’s parliament might silence
"genocide doubters." That’s different from persuading them. By
smothering debate, France also silences its best advocates for truth
– voices, perhaps, like those of Orhan Pamuk.