France committed several massacres in the countries it occupied. Its slogans of freedom, fraternity and equality, the slogans of the French Revolution, were nothing but a smokescreen which concealed the systematic looting of wealth in its former colonies. In these areas, it did not hesitate to slaughter the innocents without discrimination on the ground of race, gender, religion and sect. During its 132-year occupation of Algeria, it killed more than six million Algerians, including one and a half million during the Algerian Liberation Revolution. Here, its massacres began with the killing of 4,000 worshippers in the Ketchaoua Mosque, which the French ruler, the Duke de Rovigo, wanted to convert into a church, so he demolished it on the protesters inside, without showing any sympathy, towards the worshippers or the unarmed civilians.
France was also the sponsor of the largest massacre in the history of Africa in Rwanda. This was recognised by the United Nations as genocide, as it resulted in the killing of 800,000 Rwandans. Certainly, when the French parliamentarians spoke about the term “genocide,” recently, a thorny term defined by the United Nations as “the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group,” they ignored their past. But for the sake of their electoral interests they turned to the history of the Ottoman Empire, for satisfying the far right and riding the wave of Islamophobia.
As the former Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said: “France is the last country which can give Turkey a lesson in genocide and history.” Going back in history, the Ottoman Caliphate was a rival to France at that time, as Paris considered itself the protector of Christian minorities in the East, while there is evidence which refutes the French narrative, as religious minorities still live in Turkey and other countries in the East.
In fact, the number of Assyrians and Chaldeans in Turkey is still higher than their number in France. Nearly fifty thousand of them chose to live in Turkey, just as they chose to remain in their historical regions in Iraq, Syria, Iran and elsewhere. Therefore, courting these religious minorities, including Jews, has become a major objective for French politicians who aspire to win seats in parliament.
The Armenian minority in France was able to obtain a law criminalising the “Armenian genocide” with a prison sentence and a fine of 45,000 euros, similar to the laws on anti-Semitism and rejection of the Holocaust.
All of them are historical events which should be researched by historians. Turkey has also called for the establishment of a committee to investigate these events, instead of them turning into opportunistic electoral bidding for minorities in France. The current French position on the massacres in Gaza at the hands of the Israeli occupation proves the France sees with one eye its interests and the interests of the entities associated with it and its history, while ignoring the massacres which are clearly visible, such as the killing of children and women, forced displacement, and war crimes such as the destruction of hospitals and targeting of medical personnel.
French Foreign Minister Stephane Sejourne said that “accusing Israel of committing genocide is crossing the moral threshold,” as if France is the one who determines what the moral threshold is, and as if killing women and children, even if it does not amount to genocide, is permissible for the French and it has the right to support and defend it. These French positions and those of other Western countries prove beyond doubt that there is a moral crisis in global leadership and among the “leaders of the free world.”
[by Mohammad Suleiman Al-Zawawi in TRT Arabi]
Compiled and translated by Faizul Haque