Armenian genocide: A political football
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In Turkey, it is a crime to write about the Armenian genocide. Now, the French legislature has approved a bill that would make it a crime to deny that same genocide.
The Turkish law has been on the books for quite some time; the French law was passed in an attempt to block Turkey’s entry into the EU. President Chirac is not expected to sign it into law.
The Turkish law is an outrage and/but the French legislation is simply assinine. Simply put, the genocide occured and people should just deal with it by talking about it openly and freely.
Speaking strictly for myself, I’m not interested in “debating” it with anyone, nor watching any such debate. The fact is, both my parents were born in Turkey, had first-hand experience with the genocide and so I know all I need to know. I don’t have any need (nor desire) to engage the deniers in any way; that would simply dignify them and their message. But that doesn’t mean the deniers shouldn’t have a voice.
That said, I was intrigued to hear that the Turkish government has officially congratulated Orhan Pamuk, Turkey’s best-known novelist, on his being awarded the 2006 Nobel Prize for Literature. This is the same writer who had previously been put on trial by the Turkish government for “insulting Turkishness.” Translation: “writing about the genocide.”
[Note: Pamuk was one of the first Muslims to openly denounce the fatwah against Salmon Rushdie.]
Eventually the charges against Pamuk were dropped, but other writers in Turkey have not been so fortunate.
