Today the French Parliament passed a bill making it a crime for anyone to deny that the tragic events of 1915 (which resulted in the death of many Ottoman Citizen, Turks and Armenians, in Eastern Anatolia) as a genocide against the Armenian people. The Turkish people (descendants of the Ottoman Empire) adamantly deny such false accusations and refer maters of unfounded allegations with differing views to historians and call for open debate and discussions.
This bill would impose a one-year prison term and 45,000 Euro (59,040 U.S. dollars) fine to anyone (including American, French and Turkish citizens) whom would deny such a genocide claim or offer proofs to the contrary.
We believe that this is neither the sole decision of the French parliament nor in the benefit of the French people. It is remarkable that only 50 out of 557 members of the French National Assembly showed up in the assembly to vote on bill. Clearly there is lack of interest and the legitimacy of this "Armenian bill" is highly questionable.
We, the Turkic American Associations strongly condemn the French Parliamentarians for promoting Turkophobia and passing such a bias, discriminatory and anti-Turkish bill which is clearly based on political motives and not on historical facts. This bill undermines not just our core American values of fairness and equality, but universal human rights and values. This ill-conceived bill sends a clear message to the peoples of the world that the French government holds political gains above and before human rights and values and would jeopardizes world peace and order (with Turkey and France being NATO members).
Influential French philosophers and statesman valued freedom of speech and expression as natural human rights during the Enlightenment in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and stressed the importance of the "individual" with each person having the right to think and speak freely leading to France's declaration of the Rights of Man in 1789. The French Parliamentarians have now taken a step back to the dark ages and violated the historic French declaration upon which the Republic was formed, that "the free communication of ideas and opinions is one of the most precious of the rights of man....[and that every man] may, accordingly, speak, write, and print with freedom...."
The French Parliament is clearly not the authority or the venue to define historical truth, especially about events that did not occur on French sole. Even members of the French Parliament have spoken against such an undertaking. Michel Dienfenbacher, a member of the French Parliament stated “A parliamentarian’s role is not to write history and this resolution...” Another parliamentarian, Francois Bayrou also spoke against the introduction of this bill in the French Parliament and stated, “I think we’re entering into a dangerous road”
We the Council of Turkic American Associations strongly condemn the French Parliament for passing the "Armenian genocide bill" and invite the French government to retract this unfounded, unjustified, biased, and bigoted bill and return France to the enlightened era.
