Obama and Turkish President Abdullah Gul, 2010. (Official White House photo)

Introduced to the French Senate late January, the genocide bill, if signed into law by the Council, would penalise the denial of genocidal events with up to one year in prison and a fine of 45,000 Euros. France officially recognized the 1915 massacres as genocide in 1998, eliciting much ire from the Turkish government. 

This new bill makes no mention of the Armenian Genocide in specific, but France recognizes only one other genocide—the Holocaust—making deniers of the Armenian genocide primary targets of the new law.

Turkish authorities are already up in arms about the new “genocide bill," denouncing the law and threatening France with economic sanctions. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan railed against the bill, calling it “racist” and a threat to free speech.

“This is clearly a massacre of freedom of expression,” Erdogan said in a speech to reporters in the Turkish capital of Ankara. 

Egemen Bağış, the Turkish Minister of European Affairs, told Al Jazeera English the law was “null and void” in Turkey and Turkey’s ambassador to France hinted at his possible “permanent departure” from Paris after the bill was approved in the French Senate.

In the midst of the democratic uprisings raging across the Middle East, Turkey proudly trumpeted the praises of international experts and diplomats who promote it as an example of a democratic Islamic state to future Arab leaderships. 

The U.S. in particular has strengthened relations with the Turkish government in recent years. Just last week, President Obama named Turkey among his top five international “friends.” Like most U.S. presidents, Obama made plenty of promises to officially recognize the genocide once in office to Armenian-American voters. But he has since pandered to Turkish interests by avoiding the genocide label at all, enabling a horrific tradition of genocide denial.

Perpetuating genocide

In 1996, the founder and president of Genocide Watch, an international advocacy organization based in the U.S., Gregory Stanton famously outlined the genocidal process in eight stages.

The last stage, contended Stanton in what became a seminal resource of genocide studies and research, was denial. 

“The black hole of forgetting is the negative force that results in future genocides,” he wrote in a briefing paper he presented to the U.S. Department of State, “...Impunity—literally getting away with murder—is the weakest link in the chains that restrain genocide.”

This is a large part of the rhetoric that motivates efforts for international recognition of the Armenian Genocide. Richard Hrair Dekmejian, a USC professor and expert of genocide studies, says that genocide denial is a mitigation of the perpetrators’ guilt. 

“The standing position is that when you don't recognize genocide, by continuing to deny it, you're still legally and morally a killer,” said Dekmejian.

Turkey's denial

While Turkey has begrudgingly acknowledged the deaths of 500,000 Armenians in 1915, it stubbornly refuses to call them a genocide. With thousands of eyewitness accounts, photographic documentation, and the testimony of the U.S. Ambassador to Turkey himself as proof, there are few historians who would deny that the events of 1915 were a systematic attempt to exterminate the Armenian population. 

And most scholars number the deaths at 1.5 million—not, as the Turkish government would have you believe, half a million. 

The Turkish government has not refused to acknowledge these deaths, it has banned all others from doing so. An article in the Turkish penal code criminalizes any insult or public denigration of “Turkishness” or the government of Turkey. 

Any acknowledgment of the Armenian genocide—even mention of the word itself—may be penalized with imprisonment. This article has been used to prosecute journalists like the late Hrant Dink and even Turkish scholars like Orhan Pamuk, a Nobel Peace Prize-winning author. 

“They don't want to pay restitution, especially in terms of land,” said Dekmejian, “Part of eastern Turkey today used to be populated by Armenians and that was supposed to be part of the Armenian republic.”

American complcity

“The facts are undeniable,” wrote Obama to Armenian voters during the 2008 presidential elections. “An official policy that calls on diplomats to distort the historical facts is an untenable policy. As a senator, I strongly support passage of the Armenian Genocide Resolution, and as President I will recognize the Armenian Genocide."

Since election, however, Obama has fallen back on what is a long-held tradition of U.S. presidents. Instead of recognizing the genocide, he has abandoned the term altogether.

“American presidents use the terms 'atrocities', 'tragedy'.” said Dekmejian, “Sometimes they mention Turkey, sometimes they don't.”

Turkey engages in a form of international bullying, threatening to cut diplomatic ties or install economic sanctions, to dissuade nations of recognizing the genocide. France has been at the recieving end of these threats and the U.S. has heeded the warnings. 

“We have been told by very very expensive lobbying groups that the United States needs Turkey much more than Turkey needs the United States,” said Dekmejian.

Trade statistics reveal that Turkey’s threats are mostly benign. In fact, in the past few years, Turkey has expanded trade with governments that have recognized the genocide -- Belgium, Lebanon, and Canada among them. In 2011, Turkey’s fifth largest market for exports—at a volume of $6.9 billion—was France.

Recognition: Why it's important

The histories of most modern nations are stained with the blood of the subjugated -- but no longer is it acceptable for most modern nations to deny the crimes of their pasts. Denial robs the victimized of justice; and sanitizing history does not make it go away, but perpetuates cycles of oppression. 

The U.S. government understands this in a very negligible fashion, having paid reparations to former slaves, the Japanese-Americans who suffered the indignity of internment camps, and even the Native Americans from whom American soil was stolen. 

The Armenian Genocide was a man-made crime—and it wasn't an evil particularr to its time. In January, Genocide Watch named 18 countries at risk of genocide, politicide or mass atrocities; seven of those countries are currently experiencing massacres on a horrific scale. 

Money, land, and memorials do very little to ease the heartache history has left behind, but recognition does much in the way of honoring the memory of those who have passed, and preventing the recurrence of such atrocities.