The latest bill for the criminalization of the denial of the "Armenian genocide" in France is just like a French breast implant:
It seems hot at first, then -in chronological order- unnecessary, stupid and dangerous.
It is obvious that French President Nicolas Sarkozy planned to snatch some Armenian-French votes before his upcoming re-election bid. Meanwhile, he surely didn't want to anger Turkey at this crucial time, especially in relation to Ankara's key role in Syrian issues.
"I respect the convictions of our Turkish friends - it’s a grand country, a grand civilization - and they must respect ours," he said today.
As Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu has tweeted consequently, there is a paradox in Sarkozy's backtracking defense. If this bill is passed, France will be jailing people for their convictions. A Turkish -or a Japanese or a Rwandan- historian who would argue that the tragic events of 1915 shouldn't be called as a "genocide" would be fined and jailed in France.
In Turkey, however, there is no law which directly penalizes a person who suggests that these events were simply genocide. It is true that some nationalist prosecutors had used Article 301 of the Penal Code to try to do it in the past, but any far-reaching anti-terrorism law in any Western nation (like in the U.S.) can also be used to curb free speech, if you find a dumb enough prosecutor. (By the way, Article 301 has made it illegal to insult Turkey, the Turkish ethnicity, or Turkish government institutions and it should of course be abolished asap. But guess, who prepared it? Of course, European Union's favorite Turkish administration in history: The AKP government!)
The next time I will visit France, I will tell my French friends, if possible also through television or a newspaper, that we know that the terminology shouldn't be fetishized, but I don't believe that it can be called a genocide; what historically important was the fact that hundreds of thousands of lives were perished because of the failures of the Ottoman administration, whether they were ill-intended or not.
And I will say that we also know that Sarkozy doesn't represent the whole France. We are well aware that he is just after a few hundred thousand votes. We are smart enough to see that he is a defected piece of political silicon --soon or late, he'll be recalled or declared as a carcinogen.
However, we're still deeply offended. Especially, by the fact that the French parliament approved this bill that will curb free speech on a symbolic date for Turks: The day that Yılmaz Colpan, a Turkish diplomat in France, was killed by Armenian terrorists of ASALA in 1979. We didn't forget that France had declared ASALA as a terrorist organization, only after it started to kill French citizens, too.
When the bill has got the final approval, I will have no fear to violate this Middle Ages kind of law in France. After all, I am a journalist living in AKP's Turkey, which makes me a thousand times likelier to end up in jail for defending free speech...
