Epress.am News from Armenia
Turkey will withdraw its ambassador in Paris if French Parliament passes a bill that criminalizes denial of the Armenian Genocide in Ottoman Turkey.
Turkish Ambassador Tahsin Burcuoğlu will be recalled to Ankara for consultations for an indefinite period of time, Engin Solakoğlu, undersecretary of the Turkish Embassy in Paris, told semi-official Anatolia news agency. “Passage of the measure will lead to irreparable damage in Turkish-French ties,” Solakoğlu also said, Today’s Zaman reports.
The French parliament readies to vote next week a legislation that could make denying the 1915 events that took place in Turkey as genocide punishable by up to one year in prison and a fine of 45,000 euros. The voting is not the first time France has mulled over criminalizing the denial of the events as genocide, as the French National Assembly adopted a bill in 2006, proposing that anyone who denied the Armenian Genocide would be punished, but the bill was dropped the same year before coming to the senate.
Since France officially recognized the genocide in 2001, stirring up heated but short-lived tension between France and Turkey, French governments have attempted to introduce penalties for denying the Armenian Genocide several times, all of which were turned down before gaining full force.
The debate was most recently revived in October, when French President Nicholas Sarkozy urged Turkey during a visit to Armenia to recognize the killing of Armenians at the onset of World War I as genocide and threatened to pass legislation that would criminalize its denial if the country failed to do so. The president’s remarks, which drew instant and sharp criticism from top Turkish officials, were claimed to have been “misunderstood,” as his aide, Jean David Levitte, told the Turkish Embassy in Paris a few days after the incident.