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  • French Genocide Bill Provokes Uproar, Sparks Debate: Turkish Overrea

    Center for Research on Globalization, Canada
    Dec 31 2011


    French Genocide Bill Provokes Uproar, Sparks Debate: Turkish
    Overreaction May Backfire


    by Muriel Mirak-Weissbach

    The bill voted up on December 22 by the French parliament (Assemblee
    Nationale), which would make denial of genocide (including the 1915
    genocide against the Armenians in Ottoman Turkey) a crime, has
    provoked strong reactions from the Turkish government and sparked a
    debate among Turks and Armenians worldwide. The bill, which must still
    be debated by the senate, would penalize anyone denying the genocide
    with up to one year in prison and a 45,000 fine. (1)

    The response from Ankara was swift and furious. Prime Minister Tayyip
    Erdogan announced that he had recalled his ambassador from France,
    frozen all military cooperation with France, and suspended economic
    and political meetings. (2) In addition, Turkish President Abdullah
    Gul urged that France withdraw from the Minsk Group, on grounds it
    could no longer claim to be impartial in the Nagorno-Karabach dispute.
    (3)

    There were not a few ironies to the development. First, Turkish
    opponents to the bill claimed it would criminalize free speech and
    hamper historical research - yet, according to Turkey's penal code
    Article 301, any mention of the Armenian genocide, in so many words,
    is deemed an offense and is punishable -- so much for free speech and
    historical research. Over the past months, scores of Turkish
    intellectuals, journalists, and civil society leaders have been jailed
    on allegations of affiliation with terrorist organizations because
    they have spoken out regarding Kurdish civil rights and the Armenian
    issue. For years writers who addressed the Armenian case, even those
    who judiciously avoided using the proper term genocide, have been
    jailed, mishandled, and, in the case of Hrant Dink, murdered. A
    further irony lies in Erdogan's charge that France has no right to
    launch such accusations when it was itself guilty of genocide against
    Algerians in the independence war. As many journalists noted, this was
    a back-handed admission of wrongdoing on the part of the Ottoman
    Turks.

    Finally, criticism from Ankara pointed out that French President
    Nicolas Sarkozy, whose UMP party presented the bill, was doing so
    because it was speculating on winning support from the estimated half
    million Armenian voters in France in the next elections. No irony
    here: it is quite obvious that Sarkozy is using the Armenian issue as
    a political football. This is, sadly, not the first time that the
    genocide issue has been cynically exploited. Whenever Washington would
    get upset with some foreign policy initiative coming out of Ankara,
    the knee-jerk reaction would be to threaten to use the `g-word' at the
    White House. Recently, the Israeli Knesset has brought up discussion
    of the Armenian genocide, as a not-so-subtle response to Turkey's
    having put bilateral relations on ice. Such exploitation of mass
    murder is morally repugnant and only adds to the offense against the
    memory of those who perished in 1915-1917.

    That said, there are a couple of intriguing questions provoked by the
    French legislators' move worth mention. First: is the vote truly
    representative of the French parliament's viewpoint? According to
    French press reports, the bill passed by a `large majority of the
    fifty or so parliamentarians present,' and `about half a dozen voted
    against it.' Out of a total of 577 members of parliament, this does
    not strike me as constituting an overwhelming mandate. But numbers
    aside, is it in principle the prerogative of any elected parliamentary
    body to determine by vote whether or not genocide has been committed?
    To most honest intellectuals, the Armenian genocide is a historical
    fact documented through primary sources on various sides, including
    American, Danish, German, as well as Armenian and Turkish. Secondly,
    can one legislate morality, by criminalizing denial of historical
    facts? If it becomes illegal to deny the genocide, does that make its
    affirmation somehow `more true?' Does that mean that those who deny it
    will, under threat of punishment, alter their views? Is it not wiser
    to thrash out the issues of the controversy, as prominent genocide
    historians continue to do, in the patient effort to convince the
    doubting Thomases or ideological denialists that what they
    hysterically reject did in fact occur?

    This leads to the real point, and the one occupying center stage in
    the debate inside Turkey, a debate ironically nourished in part by the
    French vote. The real point is Turkish recognition of what occurred in
    1915. Why cannot the Turkish establishment acknowledge the historical
    record, relieve itself and its people of the burden of collective
    guilt, apologize to the descendants of the victims, and work towards
    reconciliation? Energized by the debate about the French vote, it
    appears that a growing number of individuals and civil society
    organizations are accelerating their efforts to arrive at just such a
    goal. The Human Rights Association Istanbul Branch, put out a press
    release on December 22, entitled, `Let's Raise Our Voice Against
    Denial, Not the French Parliament.' (4) In their view, denial of a
    crime against humanity, like genocide, could not be considered a
    violation of freedom of expression. On those grounds, they called on
    intellectuals and others to end their campaigns against the French
    parliament and instead `work for the recognition of the Armenian
    genocide, the Assyrian genocide and the ethnic cleansing of Greeks by
    the state and the society as a whole.'

    On December 24, the DSIP (Revolutionary Socialist Workers' Party) put
    out a press release arguing along similar lines, and urged recognition
    of the genocide including all relevant legal, cultural, and political
    aspects.

    A day earlier, Today's Zaman carried an article by Ahsan Yilmaz who
    criticized the Erdogan government reaction as exaggerated and went on
    to suggest that the proper way to deal with the problem would be to
    seek `normalization vis-à-vis 1915.' Citing the official Turkish
    version of events, according to which `several hundred thousand
    Armenians were either massacred or died because of the terrible
    conditions during their forced deportation,' he put forward the view
    that the state had a duty to protect these citizens and had failed to
    do so. `Turkey has to apologize, he concluded, `at least for its
    inability to protect them. Then, it must invite Armenians abroad to
    come and get their inheritance in Turkey. Thirdly, Turkey must erect
    some monuments and build museums for these massacred, great people who
    had lived in these lands for thousands of years but faced extinction
    because of some secular-nationalist Committee of Union and Progress
    (CUP) dictators' faulty, to say the least, decisions and actions.'

    Although the author compromises with the official Turkish propaganda
    line, carefully side-stepping any reference to the documented intent
    to annihilate the Armenian people, what is noteworthy in his article
    is his insistence that Turkey must somehow finally deal with its past.
    That such an article could appear in a leading English-language
    Turkish publication indicates the breadth of the debate now raging in
    Turkey. The same Zaman carried a similar piece days later by Sahin
    Alpay, who saw the crux of the issue in the fact that, despite
    controversy over the term `genocide,' Armenians were killed through
    forced deportations, during which even denialists estimated that up to
    700,000 died. He concludes with a call for an official apology and
    cites a retired Turkish Ambassador, Volkan Vural, who said: `What
    happened in history is unworthy of the Republic of Turkey. If I were
    in charge, I would also apologize. A state like ours has to do this.
    The state must tell the deported Armenians and to Greeks forced to
    leave the country.... `I am extending citizenship to you and to your
    descendants.' The Armenian problem can be solved not by historians but
    by politicians. Historical facts are well known.'

    With all their limitations, what these articles illustrate is an
    unprecedented discussion process unfolding in Turkey. Robert Fisk, a
    seasoned journalist for the Independent, provided further insight into
    it in a piece entitled, `Turkey's long road to reconciliation'
    published on December 25. (5) He was reporting on a promotional tour
    in Turkey that he had just completed to push the Turkish translation
    of his book, The Great War for Civilisation. He had conducted a
    whopping 21 interviews with Turkish TV and press to introduce his
    book. And the book, he writes, contains a chapter on 1915 entitled,
    `The First Genocide,' - yes, `genocide' even in the Turkish
    translation -- despite Article 301. Fisk said that that most
    journalists did not even question his account, for the simple reason
    that, although officialdom denies it, `[f]or hundreds of thousands of
    Turks, the Armenian genocide is now a fact of history.' How so? he
    asks rhetorically. And he explains that it is because `[t]housands of
    Turks are digging into their own family histories. Why, they are
    asking, did they have Armenian grandmothers and great-grandmothers?'
    (6)

    Fisk poses the obvious question: why can't the Turks face up to this
    history as the Germans dealt with the Holocaust? He referred to
    Erdogan's admission just a few weeks earlier of the massacres of
    thousands of Kurds, adding that Zaman's coverage of that event had
    queried whether or not this might be a prelude to acknowledgement of
    the Armenian genocide. Again, Fisk pointed out, the phrase used by
    Zaman was not `alleged genocide' but `genocide.' Such ostensibly minor
    details might be considered nitpicking, but they are actually loaded
    with significance, and may indeed presage some positive developments.

    Looking at such events as part of a long but steady process of
    questioning inside Turkey, it appears that the French bill, quite
    irrespective of its merits or demerits, may have given a healthy nudge
    to that process.

    Notes

    1. For the vote and the text see
    http://fr.news.yahoo.com/les-d%C3%A9put%C3%A9s-votent-le-texte-sur-la-n%C3%A9gation-122750856.html,
    http://www.assemblee-nationale.fr/13/pdf/rapports/r4035.pdf,
    http://www.assemblee-nationale.fr/13/ta-commission/r4035-a0.asp

    2. See http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/dec/22/turkey-france-freeze-relations-over-genocide/,
    http://www.faz.net/aktuell/politik/tuerkische-vorwuerfe-gegen-paris-armenien-gegen-algerien-11578860.html

    3. http://www.todayszaman.com/news-266508-gul-urges-france-to-withdraw-from-minsk-group-if-genocide-bill-enacted.html

    4. http://www.armenianweekly.com/2011/12/25/turkish-rights-group-lets-unite-against-genocide-denial-not-against-france/

    5. http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-turkeys-long-road-to-reconciliation-6281198.html#

    6. The phenomenon of Turkish citizens` discovering their Armenian
    ethnic roots going back to the 1915 genocide first broke through
    public silence when Fetiye Cetin published her book, My Grandmother in
    2004. Since then numerous biographical studies have appeared in Turkey
    as personal memoirs or institutional studies documenting the fact that
    tens if not hundreds of thousands of Armenian chidren, especially
    girls, were spared death and forcefully assimilated as concubines,
    slaves, or wives of Turks. Their offspring and their descendants now
    bear witness to this fact. But how to interpret this unique
    occurrence? On the one hand, it shows that, although some Turks sought
    to exploit the Armenian females, others sought to save the young girls
    out of human compassion. On the other hand, it demonstrates a very
    fundamental principle: truth will prevail. If the thousands of
    Armenians slaughtered in the genocide can not come back and testify
    before a court of law as to what happened, their grandchildren, born
    of mixed marriages with Turks, can. They need not go to court. Their
    mere existence as Turkish citizens of Armenian descent constitutes the
    most damning proof of what happened almost 100 years ago. For a
    discussion of the implications of this phenomenon in Turkey today,
    see: http://www.reporter.am/go/article/2011-11-22-seminar-in-germany-focuses-on-inner-turkish-debate-of-1915-



    Muriel Mirak-Weissbach is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

    http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=28428


    From: Baghdasarian
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