Turkey extends ban on alluding to genocide

Turkey Turkey's new criminal code was supposed to be a crucial part of its efforts to bring itself in line with European norms…

TurkeyTurkey's new criminal code was supposed to be a crucial part of its efforts to bring itself in line with European norms. Instead, it stumbles from one controversy to another.

Last autumn, voices were raised over plans to criminalise adultery. The centre of attention now is an article that looks as if it sets the courts loose on anyone describing the 1915 mass expulsion of Ottoman Armenians as a "genocide".

Article 305's prescription of between three and 10-year prison sentences for individuals acting "against fundamental national interests" originally only affected Turkish citizens. Late on Tuesday, though, hours before a revised draft of the criminal code was due to be presented to Turkey's parliament, three MPs succeeded in extending its remit to include "foreigners in Turkey". "According to the legal changes we have made, those materially benefiting from claims that there was a genocide can be punished," Hasan Kara, one of the MPs tabling the motion, told reporters.

Heavily criticised for its vagueness, the draft article was originally published last autumn with notes explaining its possible uses. These included "making propaganda for the withdrawal of Turkish troops from Cyprus", or arguing "contrary to historical truths, that the Armenians suffered a genocide after the first World War".

READ MORE

The Armenian genocide issue usually drops off Turkey's agenda immediately after April 24th, the date that has come to mark the start of the 1915 massacres. That it is still there this year is largely due to the decision of a Swiss court last week to open an investigation into a Turkish historian accused of denying the Armenian genocide.

The case caused outrage in Turkey, even among the very few who openly describe 1915 as a genocide. Tuesday's last-minute legal changes are widely thought to have been an act of retaliation.

The historian in question, head of the government-funded Turkish Historical Foundation Yusuf Halacoglu, is a staunch defender of Turkey's official position on the events of 1915. Expelling Anatolian Armenians, he has argued, was a necessary response to their co-operation with enemies of the Ottoman Empire. And while most historians of the period estimate between 800,000 and one million people died, he insisted recently the total death toll could not have exceeded 100,000.

Punishing those who oppose the official line is not new in Turkey. The novelist Orhan Pamuk, who told a Swiss newspaper in February that "one million Armenians were killed in Turkey", is currently facing three separate charges under a notorious section of the old criminal code. Article 312 makes "provoking the people to hatred and animosity through the media" a criminal offence. The article was removed from the new code.

It remains to be seen whether Turkey's parliament will cave in now to internal and international pressure as it did over the adultery clause. If not, the perceptible broadening of freedom of speech in Turkey looks set to dwindle.