Gwynne Dyer: Conciliating the Armenians

Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.

I go to France quite often, but after this article is published, I may be liable to arrest if I set foot in the country. The French parliament has just passed a bill, proposed by President Nicolas Sarkozy's party, that will make it a crime to question whether the Armenian massacres in eastern Turkey in 1915 qualified as a genocide. Sarkozy will doubtless sign it into law next month, just in time for the presidential elections.

It won't be just a crime to deny that hundreds of thousands of Armenians, perhaps as many as a million, were killed in eastern Anatolia in 1915, and that it was the responsibility of the Turkish state. That is a historical fact, and only fools, knaves and Turkish ultranationalists deny it. It will also be a crime, punishable by one year in prison and a fine of up to 45,000 even to question the use of the word "genocide."

"Genocide" doesn't just mean killing a lot of people, even a lot of civilians. If it did, then the United States would be guilty of genocide because of Hiroshima. Genocide is a deliberate attempt to wipe out much or all of a specific ethnic, linguistic or religious group. Words matter...