ANKARA, 11 October 2006 — Ankara launched a scathing attack against Paris yesterday, accusing it of losing its reason over a draft law on the World War I massacres of Armenians and warning that bilateral ties will suffer if the bill is enacted. The draft, scheduled for debate and a vote before the French National Assembly tomorrow, calls for one year in prison and a 45,000 euro ($57,000) fine for anyone who denies that Armenians were the victims of a genocide under the Ottoman Empire, the predecessor of modern Turkey.
“We expect Paris to avoid this blunder, this political accident that will harm Turkish-French relations,” Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan told the parliamentary group of his Justice and Development Party in a speech interrupted by applause.
“The EU must absolutely take a stand against this eclipse of reason in France,” he said, charging that the bill would violate freedom of expression, a basic EU norm that Turkey itself is under pressure to respect.
Drawn up by the Socialist opposition, the bill was first submitted in May, but the debate ran out of time after filibustering from the ruling UMP party bloc. Turkish officials believe it stands a good chance of being voted tomorrow — as a gesture to France’s large Armenian community ahead of legislative elections next year — as many lawmakers opposed to the bill will be away in their constituencies.
Ankara has warned that French firms will be barred from major tenders, including one for the planned construction of the country’s first nuclear power plant, if the bill is accepted. “The French will lose Turkey,” Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul warned on Sunday. The Ankara Chamber of Commerce, which groups some 3,200 businesses, and the Consumers’ Union, a nongovernmental consumer rights group, have threatened to boycott French goods.
Meanwhile, a Turkish court yesterday sentenced a 16-year-old Turk to 18 years and 10 months in jail for the February murder of a Catholic priest in the Black Sea port of Trabzon, the defendant’s lawyer said. The prosecution sought life imprisonment for the suspect, identified only by his initials O.A., for the Feb. 5 shooting death of Father Andrea Santoro, 61, as he prayed at the Santa Maria Catholic Church in Trabzon.
As a juvenile offender, the maximum jail time he would have spent would have been 26 years and eight months for the murder; he also faced charges of possession of an unlicensed weapon and endangering public order. The court found him guilty of all three charges, but reduced his sentence on account of his age, attorney Mahya Usta told AFP by telephone.
The boy was given 16 years and eight months for the murder and one year and one month for each of the two other counts, Usta said.
