French Genocide Vote Infuriates Turkey

A thin turnout of French lawmakers approved a bill Thursday that would make it a crime to deny that mass killings of Armenians in Turkey in the World War I era amounted to genocide, a move that infuriated Turkey.

Ankara quickly said the vote will harm bilateral relations, but the bill could face an impossible struggle to become law — or even make it to the upper house for further discussion.

The majority of the 557 lawmakers who sit in France's lower house did not take part in the vote. The bill passed 106-19.

The French government expressed reservations about the vote. Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin told the daily Le Monde that the vote "creates a difficult situation, which is to legislate on matters that involve history and memory."

Turkey lashed out at the French for passing the bill, with Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan calling the legislation a "great shame and black stain for freedom of expression."

"A historical mistake has been committed," Erdogan said in a written statement that also cautioned against over-reaction.

Turkey's Foreign Ministry said ties with France "have been dealt a heavy blow."

French Trade Minister Christine Lagarde also said the issue could jeopardize ties, telling Dow Jones Newswires that bill's approval "puts at stake what is an important economic relationship for us."

President Jacques Chirac's government opposed the bill, although it did not use its majority in the lower house to vote it down. Instead, most ruling party lawmakers did not vote on the text that was brought by the opposition Socialist Party.

But Chirac's government is thought unlikely to forward the bill for passage by the Senate.

Chirac did not comment on the vote Thursday, although he previously has said that the bill "is more of a polemic than legal reality."

His former spokeswoman Catherine Colonna, now France's minister for European affairs, told parliament Thursday that the government did not look favorably on the bill.

"It is not for the law to write history," she said shortly before the vote.

The Armenia genocide issue has become intertwined with ongoing debate in France and across Europe about whether to admit mostly Muslim Turkey into the European Union. France is home to hundreds of thousands of people whose families came from Armenia.

Chirac says he favors Turkey's EU accession bid. But on a visit to Armenia last month, he also urged Turkey to recognize "the genocide of Armenians" in order to join the EU.

"Each country grows by acknowledging its dramas and errors of the past," Chirac said.

In Brussels, the EU's executive Commission said Thursday that the, bill, if ever it became law, would hamper reconciliation between Turkey and Armenia.

Turkey vowed to use "all of our efforts and actions at every level" to prevent the bill from becoming law.

France has already recognized the killings of up to 1.5 million Armenians from 1915 to 1919 as genocide; under Thursday's bill, those who contest it was genocide would risk up to a year in prison and fines of up to $56,000.

A 1990 French law makes it a crime to deny the Holocaust.

Armenia accuses Turkey of massacring Armenians during World War I, when Armenia was under the Ottoman Empire. Turkey says Armenians were killed in civil unrest during the collapse of the empire.

A near totality of historians agree that more than a million Armenians died between 1915 and 1917 during forced deportations and genocidal massacres organized by the Turkish government, which was an ally of Germany, reported the French daily Liberation.

Turkey supporters abruptly left the French parliament building after the vote without speaking to reporters. Outside, a few dozen protesters of Armenian descent celebrated, intoning the French national anthem, the Marseillaise," when the bill passed.

"The memory of the victims is finally totally respected," said Alexis Govciyan, head of a group of Armenian organizations in France. "The dignity of all their descendants and all of our compatriots will now be taken into account in a republican way, with the rules and values that govern our country."

Armenians elsewhere also cheered the bill.

"They have recognized it," said Caroline Jansezian, owner of an Armenian gift shop in the Old City of Jerusalem. "It's come the time that somebody cares about it."

In Turkey, the French vote dominated front pages of most newspapers, with some reporting that thousands of Turks have promised to go to France and deny genocide in hopes of getting arrested. Two TV networks in Turkey broadcast the parliamentary floor debate live.

Turkey's chief negotiator in European Union membership talks said Thursday that the French bill flew in the face of freedom of expression.

"This is violating one of the core principles of the European Union, which is freedom of expression," chief negotiator Ali Babacan told a think tank session in Brussels. "Leave history to historians."