Ataturk Society UK

Clinton sidesteps dispute between Turkey and France over genocide legislation

Ataturk Society UK — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 12:35:22 +0000

Washington Post

By Associated Press,

January 26 2012

WASHINGTON — Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton on Thursday sidestepped a delicate dispute between two allies over the World War I-era killing of Armenians in Turkey.

Clinton was asked why the United States has not matched a move by French lawmakers to criminalize denial that the killings were genocide. The French legislation has enraged Turkey, which has threatened sanctions if French President Nicolas Sarkozy signs the bill.

The U.S. administration has avoided calling the killings genocide despite support for recognition by both Clinton and President Barack Obama when they were senators.

Clinton said the administration was wary of compromising free speech. She said the issue was best left for scholars.

“To try to use government power to resolve historical issues, I think, opens a door that is a very dangerous one to go through,” Clinton said at an event with U.S. State Department employees.

Historians estimate that up to 1.5 million Armenians were killed by Ottoman Turks around the time of World War I, an event widely viewed by scholars as the first genocide of the 20th century. Turkey denies that the deaths constituted genocide, saying the toll has been inflated and those killed were victims of civil war and unrest.

The issue has also previously roiled U.S.-Turkish relations. A move by a U.S. congressional panel in 2010 to advance a resolution by the House of Representatives recognizing the killings as genocide caused Turkey to temporarily withdraw its ambassador to Washington. The resolution was opposed by the Obama administration. Ultimately, the full House of Representatives did not bring the measure up for a vote.

Clinton said Thursday that the issue should be debated, but not settled by governments.

“We need to encourage anyone on any side of any contentious historical debate to get out into the marketplace of ideas,” she said. “Muster your evidence, put forth your arguments, and you know, be willing to engage.”

LETTER TO MR DANIEL HANNAN Re: Armenians suffered terribly in 1915, but France is wrong to insist on labels

Ataturk Society UK — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 20:21:31 +0000

26/01/2012

Dear Mr Hannan,

I congratulate you in your well considered and just argument about the unacceptable French vote. Turkey and Turks historically always seem to get a bad deal in Europe, especially the double standards imposed on them regarding the EU membership.

So called genocide issue is certainly for the history scholars and if necessary for the lawyers and certainly not for governments or political parties. There are numerous books and articles written by very respectable academics such as J MacCarthy, M Perincek and B Lewis who have used Ottoman, Russian and other archives as well as SS Aya’s purely foreign archive based books and CDs, clearly disproving any claims of genocide. There is no reason for Turkey to accept lies and fabrications, some of which have originally been thought up by the British propaganda machine by the way. There is the notorious Blue Book which is still being used by the Armenian Diaspora and some of our own Lords (Eric Avebury) and MPs. Do you not think it is about time that this book is denounced in the Parliament in the same way that the propaganda book about Germany was? This would be a real act of decency on the part of UK government.

I do not agree with your claims about the AKP government which seems to be dismantling the secular and democratic basis of Turkish Republic and jailing hundreds of innocent people because they have been critical.

I would like to hope that you take some action besides writing an article which deserves praise.

Yours sincerely,

Betula Nelson

Foreign Media Coordinator

Ataturk Society UK

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Daniel Hannan – Armenians suffered terribly in 1915, but France is wrong to insist on labels

The Telegraph 23/01/2012

Daniel Hannan

Gwynne Dyer: The Armenian massacres and the French presidential elections

Ataturk Society UK — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 17:38:42 +0000

By Gwynne Dyer,

January 24, 2012

I go to France quite often, but after this article is published, I may be liable to arrest if I set foot in the country.

The French parliament has just passed a bill, proposed by President Nicolas Sarkozy’s party, that will make it a crime to question whether the Armenian massacres in eastern Turkey in 1915 qualified as a genocide. Sarkozy will doubtless sign it into law next montime for the presidential elections.

It won’t just be a crime in France to deny that hundreds of thousands of Armenians, perhaps as many as a million, were killed in eastern Anatolia in 1915, and that it was the responsibility of the Turkish state. That is a historical fact, and only fools, knaves, and Turkish ultra-nationalists deny it. It will also be a crime, punishable by one year in prison and a fine of up to 45,000 euros ($58,000), even to question the use of the word “genocide”.

“Genocide” doesn’t just mean killing a lot of people, even a lot of civilians. If it did, then the United States would be guilty of genocide because of Hiroshima. Genocide is a deliberate attempt to wipe out much or all of a specific ethnic, linguistic or religious group.

Words matter. The descendants of the Armenians who were killed in 1915, most of whom now live in Lebanon, France, or the United States, desperately want what happened to their great-grandparents to be defined as a genocide and not just a calamity of war. They have even been accused of “Holocaust envy”: the belief that they are being short-changed if the Armenian tragedy is not given the same status as the Nazi genocide of the European Jews.

The state of Israel, interestingly, has never been comfortable with this claim, and avoids the word “genocide” when discussing the massacre of the Armenians in 1915.

Of course, this might just be a Jewish desire to ensure that no other group’s tragedy is seen as comparable to that of the European Jews. But there are concrete reasons for the Israeli unease with the simple equation: Jewish holocaust

= Armenian genocide.

About half of the Jewish population of Europe in 1939 was dead by 1945; about half of the Armenians living in eastern Turkey in 1914 were dead by 1918. But what distinguishes the Holocaust from most other atrocities is not the number of deaths, or even the proportion of the population that was killed. It is the motivation behind the killings.

The European Jews were killed as an act of deliberate German policy: a peaceful civilian population was rounded up and transported to camps where they were systematically murdered. What happened to the Armenians of Turkey was less systematic, and probably unplanned.

There is no equivalent in Turkish history to the Wannsee conference of January 1942, at which the Nazis planned the “final solution” to the “Jewish problem”. The mass deportation of Armenians in the First World War, during which hundreds of thousands of them died, took place as Russian troops invaded eastern Anatolia and Armenian revolutionary groups staged uprisings in support of them.

The Armenian uprisings of 1915 were tiny and ineffectual, but the Dashnak and Hnchak revolutionaries had indeed been conspiring with both the Russians and the British to support planned invasions of eastern Anatolia. The British attack was switched west to the Dardanelles quite late in the planning process, but the Russian offensive actually happened.

The Turkish government was panicked by the uprisings behind the front and ordered the mass deportation of the civilian Armenian population to Syria. Regular Turkish troops could not be spared from the fighting, so most of the job of “guarding” the columns of Armenian deportees marching through the mountains to Syria was given to Kurdish tribesmen, who proceeded to rob, rape, and murder them in huge numbers.

But Armenian civilians living in the cities of western Turkey were not massacred or deported in 1915. Many Armenians in eastern Turkey who were rich enough to buy train tickets to Syria only had to walk where the tracks had not yet been laid. Most of the Armenians who made it to Syria alive were held in camps there, but they were not murdered and burned in ovens. It was horrible, but does it qualify as a case of genocide?

Successive Turkish governments have undermined their own case by insisting that it didn’t happen at all. That is dishonest and stupid. There were certainly horrendous massacres, though the exact numbers of dead cannot be known. However, the use of the word “genocide” remains open to question—but it will soon be a criminal offence in France to say so.

Have the French politicians gone mad? Not at all. It’s election time, and there are half a million voters of Armenian descent in France.

The Armenian massacres were officially recognized as a genocide in France just before the 2001 elections. A law criminalizing any questioning of that definition was passed by the National Assembly just before the 2007 elections, but narrowly rejected by the Senate. This time it made it through the Senate, too. So if you’re in France, watch what you say.

http://www.straight.com/node/589961

French Senators Begin Collecting Signatures to Carry Armenian Bill to Constitutional Court

Ataturk Society UK — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 17:23:20 +0000

TurkishNY.com

TUESDAY, 24 JANUARY 2012

A group of French senators began collecting signatures to carry an Armenian bill adopted at the French Senate on Monday to the French constitutional court.

Senator Nathalie Goulet told the AA that they began a signature campaign on Tuesday to take the Armenian bill to the French constitutional court.

The signatures of at least 60 senators or parliamentarians are needed to take the Armenian bill to the French constitutional court within a period of a month.

The Armenian bill adopted at the French Senate on Monday criminalizes any denial of the Armenian allegations pertaining to the incidents of 1915.

The Armenian bill must be signed by the French President Nicolas Sarkozy within 15 days and published in the Official Gazette in order to become a law.

French Senate passes Armenian genocide law

Ataturk Society UK — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 00:19:45 +0000

BBC NEWS EUROPE

Thousands of people took to the streets of Paris on Saturday to demonstrate against the bill

23 January 2012

The French Senate has approved a controversial bill that makes it a criminal offence to deny that genocide was committed by Ottoman Turks against Armenians during World War I.

Armenia says up to 1.5 million people died in 1915-16 as the Ottoman empire split. Turkey rejects the term genocide and says the number was much smaller.

The measure will now be sent to President Sarkozy for final approval.

The bill’s passage in the lower house caused major tensions with Turkey.

Ankara froze ties with France after the vote last month and promised further measures if the Senate backed the proposal.

In the event the Senate approved the bill by 127 votes to 86.

The BBC’s correspondent in Istanbul, Jonathan Head, says stronger Turkish measures could include the withdrawal of ambassadors and creating more barriers to French businesses in Turkey.

In the first reaction from Ankara, Justice Minister Sadullah Ergin condemned the bill.

“The decision made by the Senate is a great injustice and shows total lack of respect for Turkey,” he told the CNN-Turk television channel.

The Turkish embassy in Paris warned that if President Sarkozy approved the bill, the damage done to relations between the two countries would be permanent.

“France is in the process of losing a strategic partner,” Turkish embassy spokesman, Engin Solakoglu, told AFP news agency.

Armenia described the vote as “historic”.

“This day will be written in gold not only in the history of friendship between the Armenian and French peoples, but also in the annals of the history of the protection of human rights worldwide,” said Armenian Foreign Minister Edward Nalbandian, in a statement carried by AFP.

Free speech

The Turkish government argues that judging what happened to the Armenian community in eastern Turkey in 1915-16 should be left to historians, and that the French law will restrict freedom of speech.

Continue reading the main story

Turkish officials acknowledge that atrocities were committed but argue that there was no systematic attempt to destroy the Armenian people – and that many innocent Muslim Turks also died in the turmoil of the events, in the middle of World War I.

France formally recognised the killings as genocide in 2001, one of more than 20 countries which have done so.

The current bill means that anyone denying the deaths were genocide would face a jail term and a fine of 45,000 euros (£29,000; $58,000).

The bill was put forward by President Sarkozy’s UMP party.

France has half a million citizens of Armenian descent, and correspondents say their votes may be important in this year’s presidential elections.

Ahead of the vote, a spokesman for the French foreign ministry called for “calm,” saying Turkey was a partner and a very important ally of France.

Daniel Hannan – Armenians suffered terribly in 1915, but France is wrong to insist on labels

Ataturk Society UK — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 19:11:42 +0000

The Telegraph

By Daniel Hannan

Daniel Hannan is a writer and journalist, and has been Conservative MEP for South East England since 1999. He speaks French and Spanish and loves Europe, but believes that the European Union is making its constituent nations poorer, less democratic and less free.

December 23rd, 2011

Turks: on our side more often than not

In any spat between Turkey and France, we surely know whom to back. Ankara has recalled its ambassador following the passage of a French law which makes it a criminal offence to deny that the massacres of Armenians in 1915 constituted a genocide.

They were tangled and tragic events, and historians have wrangled ever since about precisely what occurred. When the Ottomans joined the First World War, and fighting began along the Caucasian frontier between the two empires, many Armenians threw in their lot with the Russians. The Young Turks, at war on two fronts and foreseeing the overthrow of their regime, feared that their entire Armenian population would rise in revolt. Brutal repressions ensued, with arrests, executions, evacuations, forced marches and at least some deliberate pogroms.

No one, not even the most hardline Turkish nationalist, denies that guiltless Armenians perished. Similarly, no one, not even the most vengeful diaspora reparationist, denies that many Armenians died in Tsarist uniforms. (The argument is fiercer between expatriate Turks and expatriate Armenians than between the Turkish and Armenian states, which have been progressively improving their relations since the mid-1990s.)

The question is whether the deaths and atrocities amounted to a policy of deliberate genocide. While I have read a certain amount about the period, it’s not a question I feel competent to settle, since it is at heart a legal rather than a historical one. Defining a particular set of killings as genocidal goes beyond semantics. A series of juridical consequences flow: the matter can be lifted from the courts of the state concerned to supranational level, and the argument can swiftly move on to reparations.

As I say, I am not competent to pronounce definitively about 1915. Where I do feel competent is in condemning the French decision that, from now on, even to question one side of the argument is a criminal offence. In any free society, the right to say what you believe surely trumps the right not to be offended. This, though, is not even one of those ludicrous ‘hate crime’ issues. What is being proscribed here is intellectual enquiry.

Turkey is right to react as it has. French lawmakers would never dream of legislating to restrict a free discussion of, say, Stalin’s deportations, or the Belgian atrocities in the Congo – or, indeed, France’s own abuses in the Algerian war. Turks are being picked on because French politicians believe that there are votes in Turcophobia, just as Nicolas Sarkozy calculates that there are votes in Anglophobia.

There is no question where Britain’s sympathies should lie. Palmerston, Disraeli and Salisbury would have sided unhesitatingly with the Sublime Porte, and so should David Cameron. Indeed, though he will be far too polite to say so, I’m quite sure that he does. After all, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey’s impressive leader, has never called him a spoilt kid. Nor has he set out to maim the City of London. On the contrary, he heads arguably the most Anglophile government in Europe.

More to the point, Erdoğan is right to be offended at such behaviour from France – a state which happily lectures Turkey about repressive legislation. Turks and Armenians have a difficult past to excavate together, and the excavation should be carried out with the care and patience of an archaeological dig – slowly, reverently and with gentle brushwork. President Sarkozy has instead decided to slam his shovel brutally through the middle. That does no one any favours – least of all the dead.

Patrick Cockburn: Is Turkey’s economic miracle about to fade away?

Ataturk Society UK — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 18:59:42 +0000

While its neighbours stumble, the country that is a role model for Islamic democracy could become a victim of overconfidence

PATRICK COCKBURN

SUNDAY 22 JANUARY 2012

INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY

Are the Turks seeing the Ottoman Empire reborn or are they going to be the next victims of economic chaos in Europe and political turmoil in the Middle East?

Is Turkey about to pay a price for the overconfidence bred by a decade that brought it triumphant success while its neighbours suffered decline or disaster?

The mood is buoyant. Turkey’s successes are recent and quite real. In a country used to covert or open military tutelage since its foundation, a democratically elected government is at last dominant; its economy has surged spectacularly, making it the 15th largest economic power in the world; it is lauded worldwide as a moderate Islamic state which ought to be the role model for Arab Spring countries.

Turkish optimism has ominous parallels with the self-regarding opinions once heard in Ireland and Greece. As with Turkey, both these countries had histories of poverty and emigration which made them psychologically receptive to the self-deceiving idea that they had at last attained the prosperity so long and so unfairly denied them. Excessive belief in their own booms produced disastrous economic bubbles.

Will Turkey be similarly damaged by myths about its own recent success? Some experts there fear so. Atilla Yesilada, an economic consultant at Istanbul Analytics, part of Globalsource, says: “It is as if the entire nation is hypnotised and drugged into believing we are unique and we have created our own successful economic model.” He suspects that Turkey is about to be hit by a devastating credit crunch. “Our belief in our own invulnerability means that the ultimate crash will be all the worse when it comes,” he says.

The Turkish economic miracle depended on the inflow of foreign capital, and this may soon stop. European banks are beset by problems of their own and Turkey may not look such a rosy prospect to them as it once did. Sumru Altug, a professor of economics at Koc University in Istanbul, says that everybody accepts that Turkey is going to have a much lower level of economic growth this year. She warns: “Turkey is playing a risky game.”

In foreign policy Turkey may likewise have seen the high tide and the turn. Twenty years ago it was ringed by hostile countries, but by 2009 these had largely become friends. Turkey was becoming an important influence in Iraq and Syria and other parts of the Middle East. It was a close ally of Bashar al-Assad of Syria and friendly with Muammar Gaddafi in Libya. Trade followed the flag. “Turkish companies are even collecting the garbage in Baghdad and Basra,” an Iraqi friend said last year.

The sort of moderately Islamic democracy the Arab Spring protesters were demanding sounded very like what Turkey had already achieved. The Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, received an ecstatic reception in Egypt where he astonished many Turks – and dismayed Egyptian Islamists – by praising the virtues of the secular state even for committed Muslims such as himself.

Mr Erdogan’s government likes to bet on winners. Turkey adeptly if cynically broke ties with Gaddafi and adopted the rebel cause. Soon Turkish hospital ships were sent to succour the besieged Libyan insurgents in Misrata and Libyan state money deposited in Turkey was channelled to the rebel government in Benghazi.

With Syria, Turkey has been much less successful. Indeed, Soli Ozel, a lecturer in international relations at Kadir Has University in Istanbul, says flatly that “Turkey’s Syria policy is an abject failure”. He argues that it has ended up with having no leverage in Damascus and took excessive offence over being misled by the Syrian government over the latter’s willingness to compromise. “Not to have a decent dialogue with the regime puts you at a disadvantage,” he says.

As with the economy, overconfidence led to serious mistakes. At first, Turkey wrongly imagined it had enough influence in Damascus to get President Assad to implement serious reforms, share power with his opponents, or even step down. It then became clear that the Syrian leadership had no intention of doing this and was simply muddying the waters and stringing the Turks along.

In Iraq, Turkey has a significant but still limited presence. It has, rather remarkably given their past hostility, good relations with the Iraqi Kurdish leaders, more fearful these days of Baghdad than of Ankara. But in Iraq as a whole, Turkey has expended a lot diplomatic energy without getting great benefits. Its main success has been commercial: Iraq is its biggest export market after Germany.

Turkey helped to set up the opposition party to the Iraqi Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, during the last parliamentary election. Not surprisingly he was not pleased and criticised Turkey for meddling. “What have the Turks gained in Iraq for all their efforts?” a senior Iraqi official asked me last year. “They have a few politicians in their pocket, but nothing else.”

Not all the news is bad. Turkey has truly become a regional power. Its idea of its own strength may be exaggerated, but states that once had some strength – Egypt, Syria, Iraq and even Libya – are today divided and unstable. Iran is less powerful than it once was and Greece will take years to recover. Turkey also benefits from good relations with the US, which needs Turkey as a reliable ally.

Could Turkey’s moment as a coming power be passing at the very moment when it is still being lauded as one of the world’s few success stories? Expectations that it would enter the European Union gave momentum to reform in Turkey, ending the predominant role of the military. EU accession talks gave confidence to investors and underscored Turkey’s development into a liberal democracy. The failure of these talks with the EU to get anywhere has undercut legal reform, the dismantling of the security state, the search for a settlement of the Kurdish insurgency and progress towards a deal over Cyprus.

The EU’s relationship with Turkey remains crucial. It is by far Turkey’s largest trading partner and the main source of its foreign investment. Turkish options in the Middle East are deceptively alluring, but not necessarily very rewarding.

Turkey still has a self-confident feel, but it is at the heart of an unstable region. In speaking of the economy – though it might also be true of Turkey’s future – Mr Yesilada says: “We may see the ‘Turkish miracle’ turn into the ‘Turkish disappointment’.”

Review Essay: A Scrutiny of Akcam’s Version of History and the Armenian Genocide

Ataturk Society UK — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 15:08:22 +0000

ERMAN SAHIN

Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, Vol. 28, No. 2, August 2008

A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility TANER AKCAM, translated from Turkish by PAUL BESSEMER, 2006 New York: Metropolitan Books

Abstract

The tragic fate of the Ottoman Armenians during World War I, the massacres that accompanied their forced migration, and the role of the Committee of Union and Progress—the ruling faction in the Ottoman government during World War I— constitute one of the murkiest chapters in the modern history of the Middle East. This article argues that those who have dealt with this complex subject have not always respected the limits set by scholarly ethics and have failed to use their sources scrupulously while engaging in distortions, deliberate quoting out of context and doctoring of data. At this point Taner Akcam’s book, translated and distributed by the Zoryan Institute, deserves particular attention, and therefore it is essential to examine this work with a closer scrutiny by checking and comparing the original sources utilized by the author. The article will illustrate this point by a case study presenting the discrepancies between the texts preserved in the original sources and those presented by the author in his work.

Conclusion

The examples displayed in this study cast doubt on Taner Akcam’s approach as being impartial and scholarly. To the contrary, such manipulations point to an extremely

Downloaded By: [TÜBTAK EKUAL] At: 16:50 11 October 2008316 Erman Sahin

partisan attitude, dominated by preconceived ideas that in turn have led the author to manipulate the sources he has utilized in service of his pre-arranged conclusions.

Akcam’s work suffers from a lack of honesty with which he has evidently approached his subject, and the implications of his intentional manipulations shed considerable light on the credibility that could be attached to his work. As Akcam himself stated elsewhere, “suspicion within the academic community as to whether or not sources have been honestly and accurately presented is something that can poison the entire scientific milieu”.46 Within this framework, Taner Akcam’s dishonesty—which manifests itself in the form of numerous deliberate alterations and distortions, misleading quotations and doctoring of data—casts doubt on the accuracy of his claims as well as his conclusions. Accordingly, serious readers and researchers alike should approach Akcam’s work and claims with a great caution. This tainted volume can neither be considered “the state of the art in this field”, as Erik Jan Zurcher has written, nor the “best book ever written on Armenian Genocide”, as Stephen Feinstein claims, but as an example of poor editing, badly supported conclusions and, most importantly, of unethical and partisan scholarship that calls for further, more balanced and thorough research.

See http://www.tc-america.org/files/news/pdf/Erman-Sahin-Review-Article.pdf for the full article and

http://www.mepc.org/create-content/book-review for another review by Erman Sahin

Le Monde Newspaper reports on the demonstrations against the French bill; 30 000 to 40 000 attended.

Ataturk Society UK — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 14:22:08 +0000

Des milliers de manifestants à Paris contre le texte sur le génocide arménien

LEMONDE.FR avec AFP | 21.01.12 | 18h32 • Mis à jour le 21.01.12

Entre 15 000 et 40 000 Européens d’origine turque ont manifesté samedi à Paris contre le texte, qui doit être voté lundi, pénalisant la négation du génocide arménien.AP/REMY DE LA MAUVINIERE

Au moins 15 000 Européens d’origine turque, en majorité des Turcs de France, ont manifesté samedi 21 janvier à Paris pour dénoncer le vote prévu lundi au Sénat d’une loi pénalisant la négation du génocide arménien de 1915.

“Nous manifestons pour dénoncer ce harcèlement. Il se passe quelque chose de très grave”, explique Ahmet Ogras, un des organisateurs de la manifestation qui a rassemblé, selon lui, “30 000 à 40 000″ personnes. “Les Arméniens font du lobby auprès des sénateurs. Il y a une épée de Damoclès sur la tête des sénateurs qui veulent s’abstenir ou se prononcer contre cette loi”, a ajouté M. Ogras, président de l’Union des démocrates turcs européens.

Les manifestants venaient de toute la France, mais également de Belgique, des Pays-Bas et du Luxembourg. Selon la préfecture de police de Paris, “14 500 personnes” ont défilé entre la place Denfert et la rue Médicis, près du Sénat.

Des manifestants portent une affiche représentant Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, bâtisseur de la République turque sur les décombres de l’Empire ottoman.AP/REMY DE LA MAUVINIERE

Les franco-turcs ne sont pas des objets politiques mais des citoyens”, pouvait-on lire sur les pancartes devant le Sénat. Les manifestants, appartenant à plusieurs associations turques, ont défilé au cri de “J’aime la France des libertés”, “J’aime la France de l’égalité”, “Halte aux lois électoralistes”.

Les sénateurs doivent se prononcer lundi sur cette proposition de loi, déjà approuvée par les députés fin décembre. La commission des lois du sénat a rejeté mercredi ce texte, exprimant les fortes réticences d’une partie des sénateurs. Elle a voté une motion d’irrecevabilité, jugeant le texte “contraire à la Constitution”. Mais ce texte devrait toutefois être voté lundi en séance, une majorité semblant se dessiner en sa faveur. La proposition de loi, qui a provoqué une crise diplomatique majeure entre Ankara et Paris, prévoit de punir d’un an de prison et 45 000 euros d’amende la négation d’un génocide reconnu par la loi française, dont le génocide arménien. LETTRES OUVERTES Les Turcs et les Arméniens de France ont par ailleurs publié samedi dans la presse des lettres ouvertes. Le Comité de Coordination des associations franco-turques de France, qui affirme représenter près de 500 associations et plus de 600 000 franco-turcs, estime dans une lettre publiée dans Le Monde et Libération “qu’il est immoral d’instrumentaliser une tragédie historique à des fins politiques”. Les associations franco-turques appellent “les sénateurs à privilégier la défense des valeurs républicaines de tolérance et de fraternité à l’exaltation d’une émotion communautariste basée sur la haine et le repli sur soi”. De son côté, le Conseil de coordination des organisations arméniennes de France a publié lui aussi dans Le Monde un appel au “respect pour les victimes du génocide arménien”. “Pour qu’enfin ce texte prenne force de loi, nous encourageons le président de la République, le gouvernement ainsi que les principaux partis, de gauche comme de droite, qui ont soutenu l’adoption de cette loi à confirmer leur geste en permettant sa ratification par le Sénat dans la législature actuelle”, écrit-il. L’appel est soutenu par des intellectuels, politiques, artistes et célébrités françaises. Un rassemblement aura lieu lundi devant le Sénat.

In France, genocide has become a political brickbat

Ataturk Society UK — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 14:19:21 +0000

- Timothy Garton Ash
- guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 18 January 2012

French foreign minister Alain Juppé is opposed to the bill.

Next Monday the French Senate is to vote on a bill that will criminalise denial of the Armenian genocide of 1915, along with any other events recognised as genocide in French law. The bill has already passed through the National Assembly, the lower house of the French parliament. The Senate should reject it, in the name of free speech, the freedom of historical inquiry and article 11 of France’s path-breaking 1789 declaration of the rights of man and citizen (“the free communication of thoughts and opinions is one of the most precious rights …”).

The question here is not whether the atrocities committed against the Armenians in the last years of the Ottoman empire were terrible, or whether they should be acknowledged in Turkish and European memory. They were and they should be. The question is: should it be a crime under the law of France, or other countries, to dispute whether those terrible events constituted a genocide, a term used in international law? While not minimising the suffering of the Armenians, the celebrated Ottoman specialist Bernard Lewis has in the past disputed that precise point. And is the French parliament equipped and entitled to set itself up as a tribunal on world history, handing down verdicts on the past conduct of other nations? The answers are: no and no.

In a further twist, the bill would criminalise not just the “contestation” of the Armenian genocide but also “outrageous minimisation” of it. As Françoise Chandernagor of the Liberté pour l’histoire campaign points out, this introduces a concept vague even by the standards of such memory laws. If Turkish estimates of the Armenian dead run at around 500,000 and Armenian ones at 1.5 million, what would count as minimisation? 547,000? And should the Turkish prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, be arrested for such “minimisation” on his next official visit to France? (The bill envisages a fine of €45,000 and a year’s imprisonment.)

Taking a benign view of human nature in general, and French politics in particular, you might say that this is a clumsy attempt to realise a noble intention. That would be naive. There is a remarkable correlation between the appearance of such proposals in the French parliament and the proximity of national elections, in which some half a million voters of Armenian origin play a significant part. What happened to the Armenians was officially recognised as genocide in French law in December 2001, just before the presidential and parliamentary elections. A bill similar to this one was passed in the lower house in 2006 (but rejected by the upper) in the runup to the elections of 2007. And what’s happening this year? Yes, elections.

Not that all leading politicians of Nicolas Sarkozy’s UMP party have supported the bill proposed by one of their parliamentarians. The foreign minister, Alain Juppé, opposes it. But that’s because he’s worried about the implications for France’s relations with Turkey. The Turkish government’s reaction has been predictably vehement. It withdrew its ambassador in protest, and prime minister Erdogan said, “approximately 15% of the population in Algeria was subjected to a massacre by the French, starting from 1945. This is genocide.”

Thus a tragedy which should be the subject for grave commemoration and free historical debate, calmly testing even wayward hypotheses against the evidence, is reduced to an instrument of political manipulation, a politician’s brickbat. The corpse counts of yesterday are parlayed into the vote counts of tomorrow. You accuse me of genocide, I accuse you of genocide.

Meanwhile, Turkish intellectuals – such as the Nobel prizewinning writerOrhan Pamuk – who have bravely said that what was done to the Armenians was genocide are liable to get prosecuted in Turkey itself. What is state-ordained truth in France is state-ordained falsehood in Turkey.

Yet these are increasingly symbolic rather than effective acts. In a country like France, and with rather more difficulty in Turkey, the internet allows people to find those forbidden views anyway. They are just a couple more mouse-clicks away.

So this is but the latest instance of a much wider challenge. What should be the limits of free expression in the internet age? What should be the free speech norms of an interconnected world? And who should set them? These are among the questions being addressed in a project called Free Speech Debate (freespeechdebate.com) that we have just launched at Oxford University. Among the 10 draft principles we offer for debate, criticism and revision, one is especially relevant to the Armenian genocide controversy. It says: “We allow no taboos in the discussion and dissemination of knowledge.”

Memory laws such as the one proposed in France clearly fail this test; but they are not the only example. In Britain, the science writer Simon Singh had to defend a lengthy, costly libel action because of his criticism of claims made for chiropractic treatments. The Church of Scientology uses its copyright in the immortal words of L Ron Hubbard to prevent people seeing the higher secrets of the Operating Thetan. (Tip: if you’re interested, search for Operation Clambake.) Today, the English-language Wikipedia was blacked out for 24 hours to protest against the proposed US Stop Online Piracy Act, which, in the current version, will have a disastrous, chilling effect on the free, online dissemination of knowledge.

There are also more genuinely difficult cases. Late last year, the US National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity asked the journals Science and Nature to redact details of a study about an easily transmitted form of the H5N1 virus, or bird flu, for fear it could be misused by bioterrorists. And what about Aids denialism? When endorsed by president Thabo Mbeki of South Africa, this resulted quite directly in the death of hundreds of thousands of people who might otherwise have been properly treated. The “no taboos” principle needs to be tested against such hard cases.

France’s opportunistic, misbegotten bill is not a hard case. It’s a no-brainer. Next week, let the French Senate give an example to the US Congress in the defence of intellectual freedom.

Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales will be in conversation with Timothy Garton Ash, livestreamed on freespeechdebate.com, at 5pm UK time tomorrow