The Associated Press website reports that Recep Tayyip Erdogan -- prime minister of Turkey -- today (December 17, 2011) strongly criticized France for supporting a bill that would make it a crime to deny the World War I-era mass killings of Armenians by Turks was genocide.
Saying France should investigate its own "dirty and bloody history" in Algeria and Rwanda, Erdogan insisted that Turkey would retaliate against France "through all kinds of diplomatic means."
Historians estimate that some 1.5 million Armenians were killed by Ottoman Turks as the Ottoman Empire was collapsing -- an event many international experts regard as genocide, and that France recognized as such in 2001. Turkish leaders reject the term genocide, and claim that the Armenians killed were victims of a civil war.
On December 22, the French Parliament will debate a proposal that would make denying the Armenian massacre was genocide punishable by up to a year in prison and 45,000 euros ($58,500) in fines, putting it on par with the Holocaust denial.
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