January 23 is being called a moment of truth in France, a day when the Senate of this country will discuss and vote on the issue of criminalizing the denial of genocide, including the 1915 genocide of Armenians in Ottoman Turkey.
On Saturday, thousands of Turks gathered in Paris to protest against the passage of the law. Earlier, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and French President Nicolas Sarkozy exchanged letters from which it follows that France finds inappropriate Turkey’s threats in connection with the adoption of the law.
French MP Valerie Boyer, the author of the bill, published an article on the website of the Paris-based French-Armenian publication Nouvelles d’Arménie, in which it is said that “the bill is by no means a memorial law that may interfere with the work of historians.”
“The reactions that followed the vote in the French National Assembly excellently illustrate how widely the genocide denial is spread in France. Turkish authorities do not respect anything, even the sovereignty of France. The matter concerns a very serious interference in the internal affairs of our country – about threats to sever diplomatic relations or, even worse, retaliation with economic measures against our businesses,” she said.
Turkey is a member of the World Trade Organization and is associated with the European Union with a customs union agreement. These two legal obligations include non-discriminatory treatment to EU companies under the threat of sanctions.
Experts in various countries regard the bill as an instrument of pressure on the Turkish government. One sees in it the goal of involving Turkey in the anti-Iranian coalition, another says that pressure is directed against the Erdogan government, which actively promotes the policy of neo-Ottomanism that runs counter to the plans of the Western community.
Either way, this pressure is evident. It has doubled after the January 17 court ruling in the case of Hrant Dink, the Turkish-Armenian journalist who was assassinated in Turkey five years ago. The punishment only for the immediate perpetrators leaving out purported masterminds caused angry reaction around the world. Representatives of almost all influential international organizations - the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the European Commission, the United States Department of State – said that the mastermind(s) must be revealed. And since even the Turkish media say that the Turkish authorities acted as the mastermind of the crime, it becomes obvious that the case of Hrant Dink is becoming another occasion for pressure on Erdogan.
If the French Senate rejects the bill, it will probably mean that Turkey has accepted the conditions that had been set to it.
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