By STEVEN ERLANGER and SOPHIE COHEN
PARIS — The French Senate is scheduled to vote on Monday on a law that would penalize those who deny genocide, taking another step along a path that has already damagedFrance’s relations with Turkey.
The draft law, passed in December by the National Assembly, France’s lower house, does not specifically mention the mass killings of Armenians by Ottoman Turks in 1915. But those killings were formally labeled genocide by the French Parliament in 2001, leading to an angry reaction from the Turkish government, which insists that there was no deliberate campaign to massacre the Armenians. About 1.5 million Armenians are estimated to have died from shootings, exposure and starvation.
The Turkish foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, said Friday at a news conference in Ankara, Turkey, that the law, if passed, would “remain as a black stain in France’s intellectual history, and we will always remind them of this black stain.” He asked the senators to reject it.
In a letter last week to Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, President Nicolas Sarkozy of France insisted that the bill was in “no way aimed at any state or people in particular.” Mr. Sarkozy urged “reason and dialogue” with Turkey on the issue.
Still, the only other mass killing legally recognized in France as genocide is the Holocaust, and it is already a crime here to deny the Holocaust.
After the December vote, Turkey’s ambassador to France, Tahsin Burcuoglu, was briefly recalled to Ankara. Turkey also suspended military cooperation and bilateral political and economic contracts with France. Mr. Erdogan accused Mr. Sarkozy of playing politics and fanning Islamophobia.
The law is the initiative of Valérie Boyer, a legislator from Mr. Sarkozy’s governing party. Ms. Boyer, who is from Marseille, a city with a sizable Armenian constituency, denies playing politics. “Genocide is a universal problem,” she said in an interview. “It is something that is over and above politics.”
But her draft law has annoyed the Sarkozy government, especially the Foreign Ministry, at a time when France wants Turkish cooperation on issues including the Arab Spring, Syrian unrest and the Iranian nuclear program. France’s foreign minister, Alain Juppé, said in December that the vote on the genocide law had “without doubt been badly timed.” He said that “it is important, in the current context, that we keep the paths of dialogue and cooperation open.”
The bill may not pass the Senate, which is controlled by the opposition Socialist Party and its allies. On Wednesday, a Senate committee suggested that the bill could be unconstitutional. Ms. Boyer criticized the Socialists, saying there had been a consensus on the bill, “right as well as left.”
The Turkish Foreign Ministry applauded the committee’s suggestion, saying in a statement that the Senate had shown “common sense and respect for the law.”
France’s Armenian population, about 500,000 strong, generally praised the bill. After a Sunday service filled with French Armenians of all ages at the Sainte-Croix-de-Paris Cathedral here, the Rev. Georges Assadourian said he was overjoyed. “My great-grandparents were massacred in 1915,” he said. “The truth cannot be denied.”
Alexis Govciyan, director of the Coordinating Council of Armenian Organizations of France, praised the effort to recognize victims of genocide. “France and Armenia have enjoyed close relations for a thousand years,” he said. “That the French wish to pass this law shows that they understand Armenian history very well, precisely because of this friendship.”
The 400,000 people in France’s Turkish community, by contrast, are angry. Balci Saahip, a costume designer from Izmir, speaking at a Turkish cafe in the 10th Arrondissement in Paris, said he was furious about the “electoral manipulation” of history by Mr. Sarkozy’s party.
“We have had enough of people walking all over us,” said Mr. Saahip, who has lived here for 34 years. While eligible for French citizenship, he never finished his application because, he said, the reception he got from the French authorities was “very hostile.”
At an independent Turkish cultural center she runs nearby, Françoise Onger said that her husband, a Turkish cardiologist, is often mistaken for an Armenian or a Jew. “No one can believe that a Turk can have such a good job,” she said.
Kader Kandemir, 26, is a second-generation Turk in France. Her exposure to Western historiography has led her to question what really happened in 1915. But she said she would be joining other French Turks from all over the country in Paris this weekend to demonstrate against Monday’s Senate vote.
“I’m not saying a genocide didn’t take place,” she said. “I’m saying that I don’t know whether it did or not, and I shouldn’t have to be punished for wanting to find out that answer myself.”
