Turkey recalls envoy from France over 'genocide' bill

[dipsydoodle]

The Turkish ambassador to France has been recalled in protest at a bill making it illegal to deny the mass killing of Armenians was genocide.

The National Assembly in Paris voted by a show of hands to back the bill by a large majority, and it will go before the Senate next year.

Turkey rejects the term "genocide" to describe the killing of Armenians under the Ottoman Empire.

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Under the bill, those publicly denying genocide would face a year in jail and a fine of 45,000 euros (£29,000: $58,000).

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-16297414

Armenia thanks France for genocide bill approval.

Moscow (dpa) - Armenia has officially thanked France for approving a bill that makes it a crime to deny that Armenians suffered genocide at the hands of Ottoman Turks during World War I.

France had proved that human rights were the most important of all, said Armenian Foreign Minister Edward Nalbandian on Thursday, according to media in Yerevan.

France had reiterated that there is no statute of limitation on crimes against humanity and their denial is subject to condemnation, he said, according to a statement quoted by Armenian media. dpa mau tm ar hl Author: Ulf Mauder

http://en.europeonline-magazine.eu/extra-armenia-thanks-france-for-genocide-bill-approval_177285.html

[JustAnotherGen]

1. What terminology should be used then?

If not genocide?

[JustABozoOnThisBus]

4. An inexplicable population implosion. With consequences.

Most unfortunate.

However, there may be a silver lining. I know a lot more people of Armenian heritage than Turkish. I think the Armenian Genocide was a direct cause of an Armenian Diaspora which resulted in the widespread Armenian communities around the US and probably other countries.

[ChangoLoa]

9. Maybe we should let historians do their job.. not politicians. nt

[booley]

2. I am kind of torn on this

Turkey did commit genocide. And eventually they are going to have to deal with that. All this denial is only making it harder to do that.

And part of human rights is the right to say stuff that a society as a whole may not like and even find offensive. So making iy illegal to state a certain view (no matter how wrong it is) doesn't exactly put France in a good light either.

Yeah it's not as bad as genocide. But it hardly helps the situation that I can see.

[still_one]

3. Turkey has been quite vocal on the atrocities of other countries. As with most countries, no one is

innocent

[vminfla]

5. The word "genocide" did not enter the lexicon until after Turkey's ethnic cleansing genocide

What other word should we use to define the ethnic cleansing genocide that Turkey committed against the Armenians? We will then begin applying that same term to every other act of genocide perpetrated since Turkey.

[Adsos Letter]

13. Raphael Lemkin coined the term, partly as a response to what happened in Armenia.

[Boston_Chemist]

6. Wasn't the Armenian genocide largely the work of Ataturk? n.t.

[Igel]

8. Sure.

It had a variety of causes. It started under the Ottomans, pre-Ataturk. It dribbled off after the Ottoman Empire ended, but "excesses were committed".

The parallel Greek genocide had a similar kind of set of causes. Nobody cares about that. They're Greeks and the "diaspora" was a return of Greeks to Greece. That it wiped out communities that had been in place for almost 2000 years--a good thousand years longer than Turks had been in Turkey--is pretty meaningless. Moreover, it can be understood (and thus excused) as a desire for Turks to retain "their" territory by killing and expelling Greeks. Internally, they were afraid that the Greek populations would rise up and join the invaders, should Turkey be invaded by those in league with France, Britain, and the US; externally it's assumed that Greek-majority areas would have been annexed to Greece, so ethnic cleansing was a way of maintaining the just and proper territorial integrity of Turkey. (This latter is partly contemporaneous, but much more revisionist--somehow areas that had been Greek-speaking since before Alexander the Great's day were judged to have always been Turkish.)

Part of the genocide/massacre/ethnic-cleansing was nationalism. Part was religious fervor. Part was paranoia about what the "other"--in this case, resident Xians--would do when the Muslim/Turkish empire was threatened by Xian powers. Defeats of Muslims had triggered pogroms against Xian groups under the Ottomans in the previous hundred years, so this was nothing new (except in extent). Many of the pogroms received official condemnation, if only because the Brits were watching and wanted religious minorities treated better (at least Xians). For example, Aleppo saw some really bad anti-Xian riots when the Russians inflicted defeats on the Ottomans. Tens of thousands of Xians killed and wounded, many more displaced because their ghettoes were invaded and destroyed by the "zealous."

[ChangoLoa]

12. You mean a war of colonisation started by the UK, France, Italy and Greece

There's a myth which considers that once you change your religion and cut the thread of your previous culture, you automatically lose your legitimacy for occupying your own land.

Turkish muslims are not horsemen from the Altai. Those were only the Ottoman lords, which represented a very small fraction of the population. Anatolians, from Van to the Mediterranean massively converted to Islam even before the Seljuqs or the Ottomans invaded Anatolia.

Greeks don't have any more legitimacy than today's Turks in that region.

[ChangoLoa]

10. Not at all. And the Ottoman courts ended up condamnig the Young-Turks to death in 1919

for "the extermination of a whole people constituting a distinct comunity".

The Young-Turks leaders Cemal, Talat and Enver escaped but were later killed by Armenian militants and an Armenian batallion of the Red Army (Enver, in Tajikistan).

[ProgressiveProfessor]

7. Oh those funny Turks...

Commit genocide and you don't want anyone to even acknowledge what happened.

[uppityperson]

11. Unlocking as this is new info. Please go here for previous

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10147245

Will talk with other LBN mods as this is a good question, a new thread or add to old one, updating or new.