ANKARA, 8 October 2006 — Turkey may retaliate to a draft French law making it a jailable offense to deny the Armenians were the victim of genocide under the Ottoman Empire with a similar law on French killings under colonial rule in Algeria, a senior lawmaker said in remarks published yesterday.
Koksal Toptan, head of the Turkish Parliament’s Justice Commission, told the mass-selling Sabah daily he had initially ignored proposals made in May for Turkey to brand killings of Algerians under French colonial rule as genocide and introduce prison terms for those who deny it. “I just swept them under the carpet,” he said.
But following renewed attempts in France to pass a bill calling for five years in jail to anyone who denies Turks committed genocide against Armenians during World War I, Toptan said he had ordered that the proposals be put on the commission’s agenda for Wednesday, a day before the French draft is debated in Paris.
“What is France trying to do? Their attitude is damaging Turkish-French ties and is doing no good to Turkish-Armenian ties either,” Toptan told Sabah. “If the French parliament is acting like that, we must give a response ... in the name of our pride,” he said.
The Justice Commission is the first instance where draft laws are debated before being sent to a vote at the general assembly. France already passed in 2001 a resolution recognizing the 1915-17 killings of Armenians as genocide.
The bill to criminalize genocide denial was first tabled in May but the debate ran out of parliamentary time before a vote could be held. Toptan said Turkish MPs had filed three proposals for retaliative laws. According to parliamentary records, two of them call for the recognition of the killings of Algerians under French colonial rule — from 1830 to 1962 — as genocide and the introduction of jail terms for those who deny it.
The third calls for the imprisonment of those who assert the Armenians were victims of genocide under Ottoman rule. All three proposals were submitted in May — apparently in reaction to the debate in France. Armenians claim up to 1.5 million of their kin were slaughtered in orchestrated killings between 1915 and 1917.
Turkey rejects the genocide label, arguing that 300,000 Armenians and at least as many Turks died in civil strife when Armenians rose for independence in eastern Anatolia and sided with invading Russian troops as the Ottoman Empire was falling apart.
In an unrelated development, Turkish-Cypriot leader Mehmet Ali Talat is to hold talks with top EU officials in Brussels next week amid efforts to resolve a stalemate over Cyprus that is threatening to derail Turkey’s membership bid, officials said yesterday. During his three-day visit starting tomorrow, the head of the breakaway Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC) will meet with European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso, Enlargement Commissioner Olli Rehn, foreign policy chief Javier Solana and European Parliament President Josep Borrell.
Talat’s trip to Brussels comes amid increasing diplomatic efforts to resolve a dispute over Turkey’s refusal to open its seaports and airports to Greek-Cypriot use under a customs union accord with the European Union.
The issue has gained urgency due to a looming report on Turkey’s progress toward membership by the European Commission on Nov. 8. Ankara says Greek-Cypriot vessels will remain barred from its ports unless the EU delivers on promises to ease trade restrictions on the TRNC, made in April 2004 after the Turkish-Cypriots voted in favor of an EU-backed UN plan to reunify long-divided Cyprus. The plan was killed off by a resounding “no” on the Greek-Cypriot side in the south, which joined the EU a month later.
