As some of you may recall, I wrote a piece called Tears in the sand to memorialize the Armenian Genocide on April 24th, the day Armenians all over the world commemorate the deaths of the estimated 900,000 to 1.5 million Armenians planned and ordered at the highest levels of the Turkish government and carried out by direct executions, enslavement and kidnapping, forced relocations into the desert and deliberate starvation.
This was the first modern attempt at genocide, and while for sheer high tech efficiency the Ottoman Turks couldn't match the Nazis, they were an example for them to follow. Adolf Hitler, when one of his aides questioned whether the West would allow the Holocaust he had planned against Europe's Jews responded: "Who remembers the Armenians nowadays?"
The Turks, however, went the Germans one better when it came to acknowledging genocide. The Germans had the courage to admit what happened and take responsibility. To this day, the Turkish government denies that any of this happened, and there has been no real punishment or reparations for the crimes against the Armenian people.
Today, the lower house of the French parliament, by a narrow margin voted to outlaw denials of Armenian Genocide, on a par with its laws outlawing denial of the Holocaust.
Ironically, this coincides with the awarding of the Nobel prize in literature to Turkish author Orhan Pamuk, a Turkish author who was tried by his government for "insulting Turkishness" because he told a Swiss newspaper, "thirty-thousand Kurds and one million Armenians were killed in these lands, and nobody but me dares to talk about it." and wrote that Turkey should acknowledge its part in the Armenian genocide.
The Turkish government, predictably, went beserk over the French ruling. The government warned that bilateral ties will suffer `a serious blow' and French companies will be barred from economic projects if the bill is adopted.And in Ankara, protesters hurled eggs, rocks and slogans at the French embassy.
Turkey's chief EU negotiator Ali Babacan warned the vote would inevitably have consequences and the Turkish press called for cutting relations with France and boycotting French goods.
It's uncertain whether the French bill will go forward. It still has to be approved by the French upper house and signed into law by President Chirac. In view of the threats by the Turks, it might not happen.
And the Armenian Genocide? The truth comes out, sooner or later, no matter how determined the effort to hide it.
2 comments:
And Turkey wants to be in the EU? For their own sake, I hope the europeans have enough sense to not allow that.
I am amazed that this legislation has passed and in France of all countries. Don't you know muslims cant be accussed of genocide only infidels. This is a small victory for Christendom over the Umma as Armenia maybe more than Rome itself is a symbol of Christendom. Armenia was the first country in the world to embrace Christianity and has spend most of its live fighting against the Jihadi's as it continues to do so today and probably will indefinately unfortunately if it wants to remain viable.
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