Turkey toughens stance, tells France to face own "bloody history"

Turkey has slammed France for what it calls attempts to judge Turkish history before coming to terms with its own "dirty, bloody past" and repeated warnings of consequences in response to a bill the French legislature is readying to vote on that would criminalize denial that the Ottoman-era killings of Armenians in 1915 was genocide. "Today, nobody talks about the 45,000 Algerian deaths in 1945, or the role of France in the massacre of 800,000 people in Rwanda in 1994," Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said of France on Saturday with a bitter criticism as he urged the country to face its own history before judging the history of others with strictly political motives. Erdogan's strong reaction came in response to a vote by the French Senate to criminalize denial in France of the so-called Armenian genocide of 1915 and make it punishable by a maximum one-year prison sentence and a 45,000 euro fine -- a punishment that would bring denial of the alleged genocide up to par with denial of the Holocaust, the Associated Press news agency reported on Sunday. "Those who do not wish to see genocide should take another peek at their own dirty and bloody histories," Erdogan said during a joint press conference with Mustafa Abdul-Jalil, chairman of the Libyan National Transitional Council (NTC). Accusing France of insincerity due to its "attack against Turkish history based on unfounded allegations," the Turkish prime minister repeated Turkey's official stance regarding the Armenian deaths of 1915 as an historical matter that calls for the judgment of historians and academics rather than as a matter of politics to be voted on in parliaments. "The bill is completely against common sense. The toll [in the case the bill passes into law] will be on French firms conducting business in Turkey," Turkey's EU Affairs Minister Egemen Bagis said on Saturday. "The bill is mainly the problem of French businesses that are trying to work in this region through bases in Turkey," Bagis said, warning that the bill is sure to have financial effects that might reach beyond Turkey.