Sarkozy Should Not Attempt to Legislate Turkey’s History: View

The president of France is getting ready to sign a bill making it a crime in his country to deny that a century ago, the Ottoman Empire committed genocide against Armenians. As President Nicolas Sarkozy’s own party proposed the legislation, we suspect that he will sign it. But it’s never too late to drop a bad idea.

Let’s start with the genocide -- it happened. Beginning in 1915, as many as 1.5 million ethnic Armenians living in what today is modern Turkey were killed or deported. The Ottoman Empire was falling apart, or more accurately was being dismembered by Britain, France and Russia. The authorities in Istanbul saw Christian Armenians as a potential fifth column and drove them out through executions and deportations. Greeks and Christian Assyrians soon followed.