Turkey raised its stakes against France Friday, with its prime minister warning President Nicholas Sarkozy of "terrible" consequences if the French parliament passes a bill which would punish anyone denying that the mass killing of Armenians in 1915-18 constituted "genocide."
Armenians claim that up to 1.5 million Armenians citizens of the Ottoman Empire were either killed or died of neglect on deportation marches to the Syrian desert in 1915-18. Turkey admits that some 300,000 Armenians died, but points out it was because of unrest during the First World War when Russian forces invaded eastern Turkey, where the bulk of the Armenians lived.
Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's warning, conveyed in a letter, came two days after Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu rebuked French legislators, saying their desire to ban free debate on the Armenian killings harked back to the Middle Ages.
"If this bill is passed, France will lead the return of a medieval mentality to Europe," Davutoglu told Turkish legislators. However, the bill is widely supported in France's National Assembly and is expected to pass when it goes to the vote on December 22. France has half a million citizens of Armenian origin, and is holding legislative and presidential elections in next year.
A delegation of five members of Turkey's parliament is flying to Paris on Sunday to lobby their French counterparts against the bill. An immediate consequence of the bill's approval will be the recall of Turkey's ambassador and the freezing of Turkish-French relations, a spokesman for the Turkish Embassy in Paris, Engin Solakoglu, told the Hrriyet Daily News.
Erdogan wrote to Sarkozy that if the bill is passed, "the result will be terrible for the multi-faceted relations between Turkey and France - on the political, economic, cultural levels and, in fact, on every level," the semi-official Anatolian Agency reported. Turkey and France have an annual bilateral trade of 10.5 billion dollars, and there are 1,000 French companies operating in Turkey.
Erdogan reminded Sarkozy, who came to Ankara in February, that the French leader had once said he had no intention of allowing a bill on the Armenian issue to become law. Turkish-French relations should not be held hostage by the demands of third parties, the prime minister said in his letter, referring to France's Armenian community.
Advocates of the French bill argue it is hate speech to deny that the 1915-18 killings constitute "genocide", and that hate speech is beyond freedom of expression. Turkey points out that an equal number of Muslim Turks died in the fighting.
Turkey denies the Armenian killings were a case of genocide, saying there was no systematic policy to kill Armenians. But Armenians claim that the killings and deportation marches were ordered by the government, and that the sheer number of deaths amounts to genocide.
In 2009, Turkey and Armenia signed an agreement known as the Zurich Protocols under which they promised to normalise their relations, open their common border, and set up an independent historical commission to investigate whether the events of 1915-18 constituted genocide or not.
But the protocols have never been ratified as they fell foul of the dispute between the two countries over Armenia's support for the separatists in Nagorno-Karabakh, an Armenian enclave in Azerbaijan - a close ally of Turkey. In a press conference for French journalists on Thursday, delegation leader Volkan Bozkir, a former Turkish ambassador and chairman of the parliament's foreign affairs committee, said it was regrettable that the Armenian issue always emerged when France was on the verge of elections.