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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
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