French MPs mentally unbalanced: Turkey
World Desk
25 December 2011 17:01
As the next presidential elections in France draws near, the French politicians are making efforts to win the votes of [French] Armenians by passing the genocide bill, Babacan said.
The French National Assembly on Thursday voted to pass a bill that criminalizes the denial of alleged Armenian genocide by the soldiers of the Ottoman Empire during World War I that is now represented as the State of Turkey.
The bill passed in France's lower house of parliament, demands a penalty of up to one year in jail and a fine of USD 58,870 for those that deny or "outrageously minimize" sufferings of Armenians due to the “genocide.”
Later on Thursday, Ankara recalled its ambassador from Paris and announced suspension of military ties with France.
Ankara has also threatened broader diplomatic and trade sanctions against Paris in the coming days.
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has charged that the ruling party in France is “using Turkophobia and Islamophobia” to win the support of 500,000 Armenians living in France ahead of next year's presidential election.
Ethnic Armenian residents in France allege that up to “1.5 million” of their ancestors were killed during World War I “by the forces of Turkey's former Ottoman Empire.” Ankara, however, has vehemently and repeatedly denied such an allegation, citing historical facts. It has also dismissed the occasional repetition of the claim in mostly Western countries, as a calculated publicity campaign against the Muslim Turkish nation
In 2001, France officially gave recognition to the widely disputed claim, merely singling out the killing of Armenians and ignoring other victims of mass killings.
Recently, the Turkish premier strongly criticized France over the bill, saying, “Those who want to see genocide should turn around and look at their own dirty, bloody history.”
Erdogan branded as “genocide” the killing of thousands of Algerians at the hands of French forces between 1945 and 1962.
“In Algeria from 1945, an estimated 15 percent of the population was massacred by the French. This is genocide. The Algerians were burned en masse in ovens. They were martyred mercilessly,” Erdogan said.
France is among the major Western European countries and that engaged for many decades in colonizing numerous African, Asian and Latin American countries, enslaving, killing and displacing millions of local people and plundering their national wealth.