French pass Armenian genocide law

FRENCH lawmakers have easily passed a measure to make it a crime to deny that the mass killings of Armenians in 1915 by Ottoman Turks amounted to genocide.

State TV in Turkey, which had promised retaliation if the bill passed, said the country’s ambassador, Tahsin Burcuoglu, to France would be withdrawn.

There was no official vote count in the ballot in France’s lower house, with passage determined by a simple show of hands. The measure must still be passed in the senate, where its fate is less clear.

The measure put France on a collision course with Turkey, a strategic ally and trading partner.

Turkey vehemently rejects the term “genocide” for the First World War-era mass killings of Armenians, saying the issue should be left to historians. It contends that France is trampling freedom of expression and that President Nicolas Sarkozy is on a vote-getting mission ahead of April presidential elections.

An estimated 500,000 Armenians live in France and many have pressed to raise the legal statute regarding the massacres to the same level as the Holocaust by punishing denial of genocide.

France formally recognised the killings as genocide in 2001, but provided no penalty for anyone denying that. The bill sets a punishment of up to one year in prison and a fine of €45,000 for those who deny or “outrageously minimise” the killings by Ottoman Turks, putting such action on a par with denial of the Holocaust.

“Our ancestors can finally rest in peace,” said 75-year-old Maurice Delighazarian, who added that his grandparents on both sides were among the victims of the 1915 massacre.

Lawmakers denounced what they called Turkey’s propaganda effort in a bid to sway them.

“Laws voted in this chamber cannot be dictated by Ankara,” said Jean-Christophe Lagarde, a deputy from the New Centre party, as Turks demonstrated outside the National Assembly ahead of the vote.

The bill’s author said she was “shocked” at the attempt to interfere with the parliament’s work.

“My bill doesn’t aim at any particular country,” said Valerie Boyer, a deputy from the ruling conservative UMP party. “It is inspired by European law, which says that the people who deny the existence of the genocides must be sanctioned.”

An initial bid to punish denial of the Armenian genocide failed earlier this year, killed by the senate five years after it was passed by the lower house.

French authorities have stressed the importance of bilateral ties with Turkey and the key role it plays in sensitive strategic issues as a member of NATO, in Syria, Afghanistan and elsewhere.

However, Sarkozy has long opposed the entry into the EU of mostly Muslim Turkey.

Turkish authorities have weighed in with caustic remarks about France’s past. Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan has recalled France’s colonial history in Algeria and a 1945 massacre there, as well as its role in Rwanda, where some have claimed a French role in the 1994 genocide.