Rest assured, it is not a law that favours genocide. France has decided once again to poke its nose in other people's business, and those people, the Turks, are not happy about it. According to the new law, it will become a crime, punishable by a year in prsion and a heavy fine, for anybody on French soil to deny the Armenian genocide under the Ottoman Empire in 1915.
BBC News : French in Armenia 'genocide' row
I agree with the French government (so not the parliament) that this law is unnecessary (what has France to gain from this ?) and untimely (it will be criticised as a way to prevent Turkey from joining the EU). If they are going to start with such laws, why not add other famous genocides, like the one in Rwanda and Burundi 15 years ago, or the Japanese massacres of about 15-30 million Chinese and other Asian people during WWII ?
Turkey has a point about the Algerian war. Not all mass killings are necessarily genocides. Stalin and Mao both killed millions of their own people, but that cannot be seen as a genocide as they belonged to the victimised ethnic group.
In fact the very term 'genocide' is controversial as it presupposes a clear distinction between ethnicities. From a genetic point of view I do not think that Armenians and some Turks are so different. Turkish people are so of the most ethnically mixed people in the world, with ancestry combining Celtic, Germanic, Latin, Greek, Turkic, Mongol, Arabic, Kurdish, Armenian and other ethnic groups.
BBC News : French in Armenia 'genocide' row
BBC said:The French parliament has adopted a bill making it a crime to deny that Armenians suffered "genocide" at the hands of the Turks, infuriating Turkey.
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It passed by 106 votes to 19, despite the French government signalling its opposition.
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But the French foreign ministry described the bill as "unnecessary and untimely".
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Under the bill, anyone denying genocide could be punished with a one-year prison term and 45,000-euro (??30,000) fine - the same punishment that is imposed for denying the Nazi Holocaust.
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The official Turkish position states that many Christian Armenians and Muslim Turks died in fighting during World War I - but that there was no genocide.
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France's President Chirac and Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy have both said Turkey will have to recognise the Armenian deaths as genocide before it joins the EU - though this is not the official EU position.
The European Commission has said that the bill, if passed into law, will "prohibit dialogue which is necessary for reconciliation" between Turkey and Armenia on the issue.
Wednesday saw Turkish politicians consider a law that would make it a crime to deny that French killings in Algeria in 1945 were genocide.
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France has about 500,000 people of Armenian descent - thought to be the largest Armenian immigrant community in Western Europe.
I agree with the French government (so not the parliament) that this law is unnecessary (what has France to gain from this ?) and untimely (it will be criticised as a way to prevent Turkey from joining the EU). If they are going to start with such laws, why not add other famous genocides, like the one in Rwanda and Burundi 15 years ago, or the Japanese massacres of about 15-30 million Chinese and other Asian people during WWII ?
Turkey has a point about the Algerian war. Not all mass killings are necessarily genocides. Stalin and Mao both killed millions of their own people, but that cannot be seen as a genocide as they belonged to the victimised ethnic group.
In fact the very term 'genocide' is controversial as it presupposes a clear distinction between ethnicities. From a genetic point of view I do not think that Armenians and some Turks are so different. Turkish people are so of the most ethnically mixed people in the world, with ancestry combining Celtic, Germanic, Latin, Greek, Turkic, Mongol, Arabic, Kurdish, Armenian and other ethnic groups.