France: The French National Assembly yesterday ignored warnings from President Jacques Chirac, the European Commission and Ankara to approve a law making negation of the Turkish Holocaust against 1.5 million Armenians in 1915 a crime punishable by up to one year in prison and a fine of €45,000.
Only a fifth of France's 577 deputies participated in the vote, reflecting disarray across party lines over the text, which was presented by the socialists. Though the draft law was passed by 106 votes to 19, it may never come into force, since the government is unlikely to schedule a vote in the senate. The law would have to return to the assembly for a second reading and be signed into law by the president.
Deputies who argued in favour of the measure in a stormy debate yesterday said it was a necessary complement to the January 2001 law by which France recognised the Armenian genocide.
French lawmakers made frequent comparisons to Hitler's genocide against the Jews. The 1990 Gayssot law made negation of the Jewish Holocaust a crime.
"Without denying the particular characteristics of the mass murder perpetrated by the Nazis against the Jewish people, I maintain that the Armenian question deserves equivalent treatment," said the UMP deputy Philippe Pemezec. "Should a genocide carried out during the first World War have less value than a genocide during the second? Of course not." Two deputies said they would prefer that France punish denial of any and all genocides, including those in Rwanda and Yugoslavia.
The EU established criteria for Turkish accession to the EU in Copenhagen in 1993. Recognition of the Armenian genocide was never an EU requirement, but France seems to be making it one unilaterally.
In the Armenian capital, Yerevan, on September 30th, President Chirac was asked whether Turkey had to recognise the genocide before it could enter the EU. "Honestly, I believe so," he replied. Yet Mr Chirac opposed the draft law passed yesterday, saying it was "more of a polemic than a legal reality".
Ségolène Royal and Nicolas Sarkozy, the leading candidates to replace Mr Chirac, both support the law.
In a letter to the Co-ordination Council of Armenian Organisations in France last summer, Mr Sarkozy said it was the duty of the French parliament "to set moral bearings, to draw the line between what is acceptable and what is unacceptable".
Parliament could "decide that the negation of a genocide is an act that crosses this line . . . " he continued. "Freedom of expression is not freedom to manipulate history, nor to deny historical facts."
Yet the socialist group leader, Jean-Marc Ayrault, who is tipped to become Ms Royal's prime minister if she is elected, expressed reticence over the law, saying earlier this week: "There are thousands of jobs disappearing in industry and we're talking about the 1915 genocide!"
Likewise, Bernard Accoyer, the leader of Mr Sarkozy's UMP majority in the assembly, opposed the law, quoting Mr Chirac's dictum that "it's not up to the law to write history". The handful of deputies who turned up to argue against the law yesterday accused their pro-legislation colleagues of "electioneering". The 500,000-strong Armenian minority in France is a powerful political and financial lobby.
Before the French vote, Olli Rehn, the EU commissioner in charge of accession negotiations with Turkey, warned: "Such a law would have serious consequences for relations between the EU and Turkey. It would endanger the efforts of all those in Turkey who want to open a serious, honest debate on this question."
Ankara called yesterday's vote "a severe blow" to Franco-Turkish relations. The EU commission said it "regretted" the assembly's decision and predicted it would "make reconciliation between Turkey and Armenia more difficult".
A spokesman for the Turkish ministry of foreign affairs said earlier this week that French companies would not be able to bid for Turkish contracts if the law was passed. Turkish media reported that €14 billion in contracts were at stake, of which €4 billion were for the military.
The National Assembly vote sparked talk of a boycott of French products, or even of a Turkish law punishing denial of "the French genocide against the Algerians".
Prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan excluded the latter, saying: "You don't wipe away dirt with dirt."