Mixed feelings of pride and anger in Turkey, when on the same day that acclaimed but controversial Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk won the Nobel prize for literature, France passed legislation making it a crime to deny the Armeniangenocide. Between 1915 and 1920 the waning Ottoman empire executed a campaign of deportation against the Armenian people, which resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands to over one million Armenians. Official Turkish sources have always claimed that the deaths among the Armenians were not a result of a state-sponsored plan of mass extermination, but of inter-ethnic strife, disease and famine during the turmoil of World War I.
Apparently, even Pamuk thinks that the French went a bit too far with their legislation criminalizing denying the Armenian genocide i.e. the French law is as reprehensible as the Turkish law he was charged with violating.
This IHT op-ed also basically says the same.. France in denial.
Legislating to make denying the Armenians suffered genocide at the hands of the Turks illegal deserves the scorn of France's greatest exponent of French speech - Voltaire (real name: François-Marie Arouet!!) must be turning in his grave!
Note: Actually, France is one of the few countries where thanks to the Gayssot Act (Loi Gayssot), voted for on July 13, 1990, it is an offense in France to question the existence of the category of crimes against humanity as defined in the London Charter of 1945, on the basis of which Nazi leaders were convicted by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg in 1945-46
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Speaking of IHT, while seeing the 1959 French movie Á bout de souffle or Breathless - considered by many to be the first movie in the French New Wave - by Jean-Luc Godard, the heroine was selling the New York Herald Tribune along the Champs-Élysées ... so, I looked NYHT up on wiki and read that
Following the collapse of the World Journal Tribune, The New York Times and the Washington Post became joint owners with Whitney of the Herald Tribune's European dition, the International Herald Tribune, which is still published.
Aah... now I understand why NYT articles appear in IHT everyday..often the title is changed but the article is the same.
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