Despite strong protests by regional powerhouse Turkey, French lawmakers on Dec. 22 passed the measure to make it a crime in France to deny that the mass killings of Armenians in 1915 amounted to a genocide. The bill has triggered outrage in Turkey as it would include the 1915 mass killing of Armenians in Ottoman Turkey. There was no official vote count in the ballot in France’s lower house of parliament since lawmakers simply voted by raising their hands. The bill will next be put to the Senate, or upper house, for debate in 2012. The measure could put France on a collision course with Turkey, a strategic ally and trading partner that says the conflict nearly 100 years ago should be left to historians.
Turkey says with the measure France will be tampering with freedom of expression by denying people the right to say what they think. Turkish authorities attribute the action to a bid by Sarkozy’s party for short-term political gains ahead of spring presidential and legislative elections. Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan has recalled France’s colonial history in Algeria and a 1945 massacre there, as well as its role in Rwanda, where some have claimed a French role in the 1994 genocide there. “Those who do want to see genocide should turn around and look at their own dirty and bloody history,” Erdogan said last weekend. “Turkey will stand against this intentional, malicious, unjust and illegal attempt through all kinds of diplomatic means.”