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France Brings Armenian Genocide Bill One Step Closer To Law

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  • France Brings Armenian Genocide Bill One Step Closer To Law

    FRANCE BRINGS ARMENIAN GENOCIDE BILL ONE STEP CLOSER TO LAW
    By Robert Marquand

    Christian Science Monitor
    http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Global-News/2012/0124/France-brings-Armenian-genocide-bill-one-step-closer-to-law
    Jan 24 2012

    The French Senate today approved a controversial bill making it a
    crime to deny the Armenian genocide in what many see as a political
    ploy ahead of elections this spring.

    France poked Turkey in the eye last night by approving a new "genocide
    denial" bill, then this morning urged Turkey to "remain calm."

    But Turkish reaction was not especially calm.

    After the French Senate voted in the late hours Monday to criminalize
    a denial of the 1915 Armenian genocide - punishable with a year in jail
    and a $58,000 fine - Turkey's ambassador to France said he will leave.

    Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan today called the new law
    "discriminatory" and "racist" and a "massacre of free expression,"
    and pointed out that French President Nicolas Sarkozy's ancestors
    had once sought refuge in Turkey.

    RELATED: Think you know Europe? Take our geography quiz.

    Something's definitely out of whack in this diplomatic fallout. But
    it isn't entirely Turkey's inability to face its Ottoman past, which
    includes the killing or deporting of some 750,000 to 1.5 million
    Armenians during World War I.

    Even French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe, a member of the ruling party,
    thinks the new French law is a bad idea and "ill-timed."

    "I'm sure we'll find again a constructive relationship," Mr. Juppe told
    French TV. "I put out my hand and I hope it will be shaken one day."

    In fact, there are actual reasons why Turkey might see fit to remain
    calm, as Juppe urges. This law really isn't about Turkey. It's French
    politics.

    Turkish leaders take the genocide law as a matter of national dishonor
    and high principles, and point to French slaughters in Algeria,
    and speak of rights, including of independent thought, that France
    champions. It is highly emotional.

    Yet in France the new genocide law is seen with considerable cynicism,
    and with little emotion or much regard. It comes just ahead of national
    elections this spring. Along with its slightly craven appeal to the
    hundreds of thousands of French-Armenian voters, for whom the issue
    has always been a defining one, the law also gives President Sarkozy
    a way to remind conservatives that he's against a Muslim country
    joining Europe.

    Mr. Sarkozy has a problem with a poll-surging Marine Le Pen of
    the far-right National Front, who accuses him of overseeing an
    "Islamization" of France.

    The bill is "not entirely free of ulterior electoral motives
    considering that there is a 500,000-strong French Armenian community
    in France," as the French daily Liberation put it.

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