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 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 min-imising 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 ofsuch 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 arrestedforsuch 'minimisation' on his next official visit to France? (Thebill 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 run-up 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 supportedthe 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 per cent 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. The Gaurdian, London
