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Armenian Law Designed To Keep Turkey Out Of The EU

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  • Armenian Law Designed To Keep Turkey Out Of The EU

    ARMENIAN LAW DESIGNED TO KEEP TURKEY OUT OF THE EU
    Gwynne Dyer, Arab News

    Arab News, Saudi Arabia
    Oct 31 2006

    Words matter. The holocaust of the European Jews during World War II
    was a genocide. The mass deportation of Chechens from their Caucasian
    homeland during the same war was a crime but not a genocide, even
    though half of them died, because Moscow's aim was to keep them from
    collaborating with German troops who were nearing Chechnya, not to
    exterminate them. Which brings us to the far more controversial case
    of the Armenians and the Turks.

    On Oct. 12, the French Parliament passed a law declaring that anyone
    who denies that the mass murder of Armenians in eastern Turkey in
    1915-17 was a genocide will face a year in prison. But the French
    Foreign Ministry called the law "unnecessary and untimely," and
    President Jacques Chirac telephoned Turkish Prime Minister Recep
    Tayyib Erdogan to apologize.

    "Chirac called me and told me he was sorry. He said that he is
    listening to our statements and he thinks we are right and he will do
    what he can in the upcoming process (of ratifying the legislation),"
    said Erdogan later. Since Chirac can veto the law, that should be
    the end of that, but the point of passing the law was never really to
    get it on the books. It was to alienate Turkish public opinion and to
    curry favor with the half-million French citizens of Armenian descent.

    Why would the conservative majority in the French Parliament
    deliberately set out to annoy the Turks, knowing that the law would
    eventually be vetoed by the president? Because they hope to provoke a
    nationalist backlash in Turkey that would further damage that country's
    already difficult relationship with the European Union.

    French public opinion is already in a xenophobic mood over the last
    expansion of the EU, with folk-tales of "Polish plumbers" working for
    peanuts and stealing the jobs of honest French workers causing outrage,
    especially among right-wing voters who never much liked foreigners
    anyway. The prospect of eighty million Turks - Muslim Turks - joining
    the European Union, even if it is at least ten years away, is enough
    to make their blood boil. So a big row with Turkey should attract
    lots of votes to the right's presidential candidate in next May's
    election, who is likely to be none other than current Prime Minister
    Nicolas Sarkozy - who announced last month that Turkey should never
    be allowed to join the EU: "We have to say who is European and who
    isn't. It's no longer possible to leave this question open." The new
    law is not really about Armenians or Turks.

    It's about the French election.

    Meanwhile, in Turkey, anti-EU nationalists have their own game
    underway. While Turkey was busy amending its penal code to make
    it conform to EU standards over the past few years, hard-line
    lawyers and bureaucrats smuggled in a new law, Article 301, that
    provides severe penalties for "insulting Turkishness." In practice,
    that mainly means trying to ban public discussion of the Armenian
    massacres, and some seventy prosecutions have already been brought
    by the ultra-right-wing Union of Lawyers against Turkish authors,
    journalists and other public figures.

    For several generations the Turkish government flatly denied any guilt
    for the Armenian massacres, insisting that they didn't happen and
    if they did, it was the Armenians' own fault for rebelling against
    the Turkish state in wartime. Latterly, a new generation of Turkish
    intellectuals has been saying that a million or more Armenians did
    die in the mass deportations from eastern Anatolia, and that Turkey
    needs to admit its guilt and apologize - though most still refuse to
    call it a genocide.

    Most Armenians, of course, desperately want the label "genocide"
    to be applied to their ancestors' suffering, since they feel that
    any other term demotes it to a lower rank of tragedy. But there is
    room for dialogue and even reconciliation here, if people can get
    past the issue of nomenclature.

    The prosecutions for "insulting Turkishness" - even against Turkey's
    greatest living novelist, Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk - are not
    just an attempt to stifle this dialogue among Turks, or between
    Turks and Armenians. The ultra-nationalists also want to derail the
    negotiations for EU membership by painting Turkey as an authoritarian
    and intolerant state that does not belong in Europe. They are, in
    effect, Sarkozy's objective allies.

    But Prime Minister Erdogan will probably repeal Article 301 once next
    year's elections are past. France's law, which requires people to
    discuss the Armenian massacres in precisely the terms that 301 bans,
    will probably be vetoed by Chirac. And Turkey's best-known Armenian
    journalist, Hrant Dink, who has already been prosecuted several times
    under 301, has just announced that he will go to France "to protest
    against this madness and violate the (new) law...And I will commit the
    crime to be prosecuted there, so that these two irrational mentalities
    can race to put me into jail."

    http://www.arabnews.com/?page=7&s ection=0&article=87543&d=31&m=10&y =2006
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