As the announcement of measures Turkey pledged to bring against France following the anticipated approval of a denial bill in the French Senate continues to be delayed, experts and those in business circles breathe a collective sigh of relief that Turkey may this time be acting more carefully, first assessing the potential damage.
Turkish officials, however, say they are waiting for the last signature to come in, in hope the bill will go down the drain once enough lawmakers brave a possible backlash and appeal it at the French constitutional court.
The denial bill, which seeks to outlaw the denial of “Armenian genocide” in France, has dominated the Turkish foreign policy scene for two months while alarming business circles, which fear the fallout from the bill crisis could shake Turkish-French trade ties, and international policy experts who believe the last thing Turkey needs is to have another alliance go sour.
After the French Senate approved the bill last week, the immediate reaction was silence from Turkish senior officials, who prior to the approval raged that France would pay dearly if the bill was passed into law, in belief the bill created grounds for arresting and punishing ethnic Turks in France for smearing the tragedy of Armenians by saying the deaths were not systematic. Early Tuesday morning, hours after the French Senate’s approval of the bill, the Turkish Foreign Ministry slammed the decision but left a window open, urging French President Nicolas Sarkozy not to sign the approved bill.
Sarkozy’s signature, however, is largely considered a formality, and a refusal from Sarkozy to sign the bill into effect could only come at gunpoint, since he was the driving force behind the bill in the first place, observers state. The French president’s signature needs to come within a 15-day period after the bill’s passage in the Senate, and French political circles believe Turkey is buying time to reassess the situation by stating they will wait until the last moment to strike with their “new and permanent” measures.
Firms fear fallout from denial bill rift
In December, when the lower house of the French Parliament approved the bill and forwarded it to the higher political body, the Senate, Turkey briefly withdrew its ambassador for consultations and froze all military and economic ties with France, suspending bilateral meetings to take place between the countries, and stopped short of asking the French ambassador to leave Turkey, narrowly escaping a crisis by not making the final move that could not have been undone once gotten under way.
“We cannot deny that relations have entered a troublesome phase, but it is not over yet,” said Zeynep Necipoğlu, the president of the Turkish-French Chamber of Commerce, founded in 1885 to improve trade ties between the countries, which have maintained strong relations spanning centuries. Although Necipoğlu agreed the developments were worrisome for business circles, she said she was still hopeful the bill would be thrown out at some point. “The number of French politicians gathering to take the bill to the constitutional court increases every day,” Necipoğlu told Sunday’s Zaman on Thursday, adding that the number of opponents to the bill then stood in the ’30s, but they could reach the required 60 soon.
In France, even if a bill has approval from the Senate, it can still be appealed to the constitutional court if a large number of parliamentarians file for it. The decision still lies with the court to decide whether the bill is compatible with French law, but Turkey believes the chances for the striking down of the bill in the constitutional court are high. A French Senate Commission of Laws has already announced its opinion that the bill violates freedom of expression, one of the building blocks of the French constitution, but its non-binding advice was disregarded by the French Senate at the vote.
“There is this great possibility that, at some point, the bill will die out, as groups in French politics already believe it runs contrary to the French constitution,” Necipoğlu added, in words that showed she was hopeful things could go back to normal, and the anxiety over relations built through decades of work could subside. When asked whether she was expecting Turkey to put into force economic measures which could be in violation of international deals that are binding on both countries, Necipoğlu replied, “Laws do not mean much when a nation simply refuses to purchase the products of another nation; you just cannot force anyone.” Necipoğlu’s words reflected the concern of French businesses operating in Turkey that Turkey could seriously hurt business. With no written measures or government-backed policies against France, it will be entirely up to the Turkish nation to choose to support the economy of France, as most Turks believe France seeks to damage their national honor through the denial bill.
It is not uncommon in Turkish society for citizens to mobilize through the use of emails or social networks and have their say in politics through the use of their only means of intervention, which is disrupting business. Turkish public sentiment is also easy to abuse, since immediately after any rift between Turkey and another country, chain mails circulate and falsely accuse companies and products of serving anti-Turkish aims, looking to land a blow on competitors. “Economic measures would eventually return as damage to Turkey,” Necipoğlu warned as she elaborated that the French firms operating in Turkey employ around 100,000 Turks, who would be the recipients of any severe blow to French firms.
When the French Senate passed into law in 2001 the recognition of the incidents of 1915 as genocide, trade relations with France hit bottom, and French exports saw almost a 40 percent decline, which only lasted until the first wave of shock subsided. Now, Turkey says this time the effects would be permanent, and the country is serious about responding to Sarkozy, who is treated by Turkish officials as an irritant on Turkey’s path to the EU.
Bill part of larger wave of extreme right-wing reaction, experts fear
“This bill is part of a larger wave of rising extreme-right opinion in Europe, including in France, against non-Europeans, including Turkey,” Çınar Özen, an academic at Ankara University, told Sunday’s Zaman last week, as he pointed toward the big picture, that the bill may not be about Armenians at all. “It is apparent the motivation behind the bill is the upcoming French election, but Sarkozy’s target is not half a million Armenians, it is the complete group of right-wing voters, who seem to be growing every day,” Özen said, analyzing the situation, while he expressed his belief Turkey should carry on with the legal procedures “as far as it goes.”
France in the past took up similar bills on its parliamentary agenda, but either due to Turkey’s efforts against the bills or because domestic politics weighed heavier on maintaining ties with Turkey, none of them came as close to taking effect as the current initiative. The French government defends the bill that seeks punishment for people who suggest the mass killings of Armenians in 1915 by Ottoman Turks did not constitute genocide by saying it is aimed at fighting racist and xenophobic remarks, in memory of those Armenians who lost their lives in the tragedy. Turkey says it is an example of the Turkophobia of the French government.
However, in an interview with Sunday’s Zaman, Theo van Lint, a professor of Armenian studies at Oxford University, says that while the bill may offer survivors and their descendants protection against vilification and public denigration of their ordeal and its consequences, it would not be evenhanded to penalize the denial of the “Armenian genocide” and leave denials of other genocides unpunished. He argues it is unacceptable for France to take such a step when it itself has questions to answer about its colonial past. “France should of course face its own colonial past, as should all countries that have issues to solve regarding their past.”
Observing a change of mood in French politics, Özen also added his support to “the Turkish government’s decision to not rush in taking measures against France.” “Although both the ruling party and its main opposition backed the bill, the result was still somewhere in between; we have heard so many different voices speaking against the bill,” Özen said, and he stressed Turkey should set the dam before similar moves from a rising conservative bloc in Europe flood all bridges between Turkey and Europe. How Turkey gets out of the rising current is a matter of taking rational and long-term steps and avoiding abrupt behavior, an analysis written by Umut Deniz Öncel for the Wise Men Center for Strategic Studies (BILGESAM) suggested earlier in January. “Turkey’s ‘big steps’ in recent years have been bothering big powers like France,” Öncel wrote, claiming the bill is a deliberate act to use any excuse push Turkey down. “What Turkey can do is take rational steps, that is, first of all, create grounds for dialogue with Turkey’s Armenians and win their hearts,” Öncel stated, pointing to the fact that once Turkey is free of its internal prejudices and has made peace within itself, it will then be able to fend off such accusations and move on.
“Today the world is smaller, and Armenia is much closer to Europe. Consequently, its history matters more to the European states,” said Igor Dorfmann-Lazarev, a senior teaching fellow in Armenian history and culture in the School of Oriental and Africa Studies at the University of London. However, he stated the growing contact between Armenians and Turks from all over the globe is an encouraging sign: “It is most important that both peoples get to know each other better and that trust between them has a chance to flourish.” He hoped that once the ordeal is over, “the two communities, which are enrooted in a common Anatolian civilization and, consequently, possess numerous affinities, can finally meet and share their cultures in peace.
| < Prev | Next > |
|---|
