Turkey outraged by French vote on Armenia genocide
PARIS – Infuriating Turkey, a thin turnout of French lawmakers Thursday approved a bill that would make it a crime to deny that mass killings of Armenians in Turkey during the World War I era amounted to genocide.
In Ankara, angry Turks threw eggs at the French Embassy amid growing calls to boycott French goods, although the bill could face an impossible struggle to become law – or even make it to the upper house for further discussion.
“No one should harbor the conviction that Turkey will take this lightly,” Turkey’s Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul said.
Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan called the legislation a “great shame and black stain for freedom of expression. A historical mistake has been committed.”
Armenian Foreign Minister Vartan Oskanian said the bill’s approval is “a natural reaction to the intensive, aggressive and official (denial) of the Armenian genocide by the Turkish state. They have undertaken a premeditated, planned assault on the truth.”
Armenia accuses Turkey of massacring Armenians during World War I, when Armenia was under the Ottoman Empire. Turkey says Armenians were killed in civil unrest during the collapse of the empire.
France has already recognized the killings of up to 1.5 million Armenians from 1915 to 1919 as genocide; under Thursday’s bill, those who contest it was genocide would risk up to a year in prison and fines of up to $56,000
The bill passed 106-19, but the majority of the 557 lawmakers in France’s lower house did not take part in the vote.
President Jacques Chirac’s government opposed the bill, although it did not use its majority in the lower house to vote it down. Instead, most ruling party lawmakers did not vote on the text that was brought by the opposition Socialist Party.
Chirac’s government is thought to be unlikely to forward the bill for passage by the Senate.
The French president did not comment on the vote Thursday, although he previously has said that the bill “is more of a polemic than legal reality.”
His former spokeswoman Catherine Colonna, now France’s minister for European affairs, told parliament Thursday that the government did not look favorably on the bill.
“It is not for the law to write history,” she said shortly before the vote.
The Armenia genocide issue has become intertwined with ongoing debate in France and across Europe about whether to admit mostly Muslim Turkey into the European Union. France is home to hundreds of thousands of people whose families came from Armenia.
Chirac says he favors Turkey’s membership in the EU. But on a visit to Armenia last month, he also urged Turkey to recognize “the genocide of Armenians” in order to join the EU.