Je nie

This summer, I talked to a waiter from Yozgat, a part of Turkey known largely for a massacre of Armenians during the First World War. What was interesting, though, was the waiter's account of how the massacre started. His grandfather was a young child at the time and regularly played with the Armenian children. One of his Armenian friends told him that he had heard the grown-ups talking about how they were going to kill all the Turks. He related this to his parents, who told everybody else, who then attacked the Armenians.

This story does not, as far as I know, appear in the official versions of the Yozgat massacres, which in any case consisted of several events, mostly to do with the forcible movement of the Armenian population. Probably this man was describing an incident in one village. Nevertheless, it raises some important points. Firstly, it illustrates how when humans commit atrocities, they nearly always think that they are doing it in self-defence. The second point is that the massacres were not all on one side. While the Armenians in the story may not have been planning to kill anyone (we only have the testimony of a small boy, who may well have misinterpreted what he heard, or the whole story could have been made up) but it is certainly true that Armenian militia had been attacking Turkish and Kurdish civilians in Anatolian villages for a long time. (A favoured tactic was to ambush people coming out of Friday prayers.) The other point is that what I have just written could, in some countries, come close to breaking the law, because it could be interpreted as denying the Armenian genocide.

Yesterday France took a further step to joining the list of countries where it is illegal to deny that the Armenian genocide took place. The bill still has to pass through the Senate, where it may fail because Turkey is kicking up a huge fuss about it, withdrawing its ambassador and threatening trade sanctions, and Turkey is an important trading partner. But let's assume that it passes. This would make it a crime to express an opinion about a historical event about which there are different opinions. Unlike Holocaust denial, where pretty much all the deniers are whack-jobs, there are a number of serious historians who deny, not that Armenians were killed, but that it constituted genocide, among them Bernard Lewis, Guenther Lewy, Jeremy Salt, Norman Stone and the late Stanford Shaw. It has been pointed out that most of the deniers have connections to Turkey (three of those mentioned working in the same university as me, which I suppose means I am tarred with the same brush), but this is an ad hominem argument; one could equally well argue that their Turkish connections gave them a better insight into the facts. Remember that the argument is not about whether Turks (or Kurds) killed Armenians. The argument is about the definition of genocide and whether the actions of the Ottoman government fully met the criteria of this definition, or in other words:
(a) Does there need to be a government policy to exterminate an entire ethnic group for an action to qualify as genocide?
(b) Was there such a policy in the Ottoman Empire in 1915?
The first is a question for lawyers and linguists, the second, for historians. Neither is a question for parliaments. Of course, everyone is entitled to an opinion, but no one is entitled to dictate what opinions others should express. Even historians can't tell other historians what to think about history, so how is it right that governments should?

Of course denying genocide can be a dangerous thing, as we have seen recently with Iranian politicians' denial of the holocaust. But preventing denial is arguably more dangerous for two reasons. First, the deniers may be right, in which case there is no genocide to deny. Second, even if the deniers are wrong, preventing free speech usually has worse consequences than those it was intended to avoid. As an analogy, take global warming. The scientific consensus is that climate change is occurring, that its causes are at least partially human, and that if unchecked, the consequences could be disastrous. Those scientists who deny the consensus have not only been accused of bad science, but of having dubious links to energy companies. Should we therefore make it illegal to deny climate change? No one would suggest this, even though millions of lives are at stake, because we know that if governments prevent scientists from publishing their findings and opinions, eventually the whole of science goes down the tubes.

From a legal point of view, making the denial of a crime a crime sets a worrying precedent. If someone accused of murder says in their defence that the victim died accidentally, it would be absurd to find them guilty of murder denial, but the logic is similar.

To end, as I began, with a personal note, I have to confess that my position - or lack of a position - is influenced by my situation. My wife is Turkish, and her paternal grandparents came to Turkey fleeing persecution in Kosovo, joining the ranks of muhajirs - Muslim refugees from the Balkans. While the fate of the Armenians is widely publicised, no one seems to remember or care about the plight of Balkan Muslims in the first half of the twentieth century. If what the Ottomans did was genocide, why do we not say the same of the Serbs? On the other hand, her maternal grandfather was a Turkish orphan who was brought up by - you guessed - Armenians.

So am I denying the genocide, as the title suggests? I'm damned if I do and damned if I don't, since here in Turkey it's as risky to proclaim genocide as it is to deny it in France or Switzerland. Fortunately, I do not have to take a stand on historical matters, nor should I do so, because I am not a historian. And neither are you, M. Sarkozy.