French bill complicates Turkey's EU bid

"If this bill is passed, Turkey will not lose anything but France will lose Turkey," Mr. Gul had warned before the vote. "[France] will turn into a country that jails people who express their views."

The vote has become a political issue in France, where a majority is against Turkey's membership in the EU, where 400,000 ethnic Armenians live, and presidential elections are to be held in seven months. French exports to Turkey in 2005 totaled $5 billion.

During a visit to Armenia last week, Mr. Chirac stated that Turkey should not be allowed to join the EU unless it officially accepts that the death of more than 1 million Armenians, which took place in the last years of the Ottoman Empire, constitute a "genocide."

Though the French government said Thursday it opposed the legislation as "unnecessary and untimely," Chirac says Turkey must recognize the genocide before it joins the EU.

But while EU officials have been at pains to note that no such genocide criterion applies to Turkey, the sentiment matches widening unease in Europe over Turkey's EU application. Such fears in France are believed to be one reason the French last year rejected the proposed EU constitution.

"France has done its best to hamper Turkey's relations with the EU" and has been seeking "a kind of vengeance" against Turkey since the EU constitution failure, says Seyfi Tashan, director of the Turkish Foreign Policy Institute in Ankara, Turkey's capital. "So politically, the more damage they do to Turkey, the better."

Armenians say that 1.5 million died in 1915 in the first systematic genocide of the 20th century, though historians often count 1 million. Turkey officially argues that some 300,000 Armenians died in a partisan conflict that took just as many Turkish lives, when Armenians sided with invading Russian armies during World War I.

While Turkey has declared that it would open its files to historians, a host of Turkish writers and academics who have challenged official versions of events, sometimes using the word "genocide," have been charged with insulting the state by hard-line prosecutors.

Treading that line has been Mr. Pamuk, whose novels have dug into Turkey's imperial past to explore the contradictions and dilemmas of modern Turkey. The Nobel citation praised the work: "In the quest for the melancholic soul of his native city, [Pamuk] has discovered new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures." In February 2005, Pamuk told a Swiss newspaper that "30,000 Kurds and a million Armenians were killed in these lands and nobody but me dares to talk about it."

"What I said is not an insult, it is the truth," Pamuk said during his trial. "But what if it is wrong? Right or wrong, do people not have the right express their ideas peacefully?"

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