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A bill making it a crime to deny the 1915 killings of Armenians was a genocide has passed both houses of France's parliament.
The Senate's vote Monday came despite Turkey's threats to impose new sanctions on France. It already suspended military, economic and political ties when the lower house of French parliament passed the bill last month.
The measure now needs to be signed by President Nicolas Sarkozy, whose party proposed it, to become a law.
While most historians contend that the 1915 killings of Armenians as the Ottoman Empire broke up was the 20th century's first genocide, Turkey vigorously denies that.
Power, at the time a senior foreign policy adviser to the campaign, described the Democratic candidate as “an acknowledger of the history” and assured the Armenian American community in a campaign video that he “can actually be trusted.” She cited Obama’s “very forthright [campaign] statement on the Armenian genocide, his support for the Senate resolution acknowledging the genocide all these years later, his willingness as president to commemorate it, and certainly to call a spade a spade, and to speak truth about it.” Eight years on, President Obama has yet to keep that pledge.
But with just weeks to go before he leaves office, Power – since 2013, his ambassador to the U.N. – has broken with administration policy, referring in public not merely to “genocide” in the context of the Armenian atrocities, but to its “denial.” She did so while delivering a tribute to the late Nobel peace prize laureate Elie Wiesel at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum last week. Power listed “genocide denial against the Armenians” among examples of “injustice” that persisted during Wiesel’s lifetime post-Holocaust. “He lived to see more and more people bear witness to unspeakable atrocities,” Power said of Wiesel, who died in July, “but he also saw indifference remained too widespread.”
Power won a Pulitzer Prize for her 2002 book, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide. Up to 1.5 million orthodox Christian Armenians were killed as the Turkish Ottoman Empire disintegrated during World War I. The issue is highly sensitive in Turkey, a NATO ally whose government disputes elements of the historical record and denies that what it calls the “events of 1915” constituted genocide. In 2007 and 2010, Ankara recalled its ambassador from Washington to protest congressional measures on the Armenian genocide. More recently it reacted angrily when Pope Francis called the mass killings genocide in 2015 and again during a visit to Armenia earlier this year.
Campaigning in 2008, Obama in a statement declared his “firmly held conviction that the Armenian Genocide is not an allegation, a personal opinion, or a point of view, but rather a widely documented fact supported by an overwhelming body of historical evidence.” “As a senator, I strongly support passage of the Armenian Genocide Resolution (H.Res.106 and S.Res.106), and as President I will recognize the Armenian Genocide,” he said. But over the past eight years, as Armenians held commemorations each April 24, Obama chose in his annual statements not use the word “genocide” – to the frustration of Armenian American organizations and many lawmakers.
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