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European commissioner says writing history not EU’s duty
Stefan Füle said on Wednesday at the European Parliament that the duty of the 27-member club is not to “write history, but to ensure compromise.”
The lower house of the French Parliament will debate Thursday whether to criminalize the denial that the killings by Ottoman Turks more than 90 years ago amounted to genocide with a punishment of one year in prison and a 45,000 euro ($59,000) fine. That would bring legislation in line with how France treats denial of the Holocaust.
Turkey vehemently rejects the term genocide. It insists the deaths occurred during civil unrest as the Ottoman Empire collapsed and that there were losses on both sides. It has threatened to withdraw its ambassador to France if the bill is passed and warned of "grave consequences" to economic and political ties.
The genocide bill threatens to further strain Turkish-French relations already tense over French President Nicolas Sarkozy's opposition to Turkey's bid to join the European Union.
Füle said in his speech that the EU is a project aiming at peace, democracy, stability and prosperity in the continent.
The commissioner also called called on both Turkey and Armenia to ratify protocols they signed in 2009 without any new preconditions, and said normalization of Turkish-Armenian relations would contribute to security, stability and cooperation in South Caucasus. He added that there is a need for vision, courage and dialogue to heal wounds of the past.
President Abdullah Gül also called on France to backtrack on passing the bill in a written statement on Tuesday, stating that the bill is unacceptable. “It is inconsiderate to distort history for political purposes,” he said.
The bill would make it a crime to deny any genocide, war crime or crime against humanity recognized as such by French laws, and put Armenian genocide denial on a par with Holocaust denial, which was banned in the country in 1990.
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