PARIS — Infuriating Turkey, a thin turnout of French legislators approved a bill Thursday that would make it a crime to deny that mass killings of Armenians in Turkey during the First World War era amounted to genocide.
In Ankara, angry Turks threw eggs at the French Embassy amid growing calls to boycott French goods, although the bill could face an impossible struggle to become law — or even make it to the upper house for further discussion.
“No one should harbour the conviction that Turkey will take this lightly,” said Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul.
The bill passed 106-19, but the majority of the 557 legislators in France's lower house did not take part in the vote.
President Jacques Chirac's government opposed the bill, although it did not use its majority in the lower house to vote it down. Instead, most ruling party legislators did not vote on the text that was brought by the opposition Socialist Party.
Mr. Chirac's government is thought to be unlikely to forward the bill for passage by the Senate.
The French president did not comment on the vote Thursday, although he previously has said that the bill “is more of a polemic than legal reality.”
His former spokeswoman, Catherine Colonna, now France's minister for European affairs, told parliament Thursday that the government did not look favourably on the bill.
“It is not for the law to write history,” she said shortly before the vote.
The Armenia genocide issue has become intertwined with ongoing debate in France and across Europe about whether to admit mostly Muslim Turkey into the European Union. France is home to hundreds of thousands of people whose families came from Armenia.
On Thursday, Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk won the Nobel literature prize for his works dealing with the symbols of clashing cultures.
Mr. Pamuk was charged last year for telling a Swiss newspaper in February 2005 that Turkey was unwilling to deal with two of the most painful episodes in recent Turkish history: the massacre of Armenians and recent guerrilla fighting in Turkey's overwhelmingly Kurdish southeast. The charge was later dropped.
Mr. Chirac says he favours Turkey's membership in the EU. But on a visit to Armenia last month, he also urged Turkey to recognize “the genocide of Armenians” in order to join the European body.
“Each country grows by acknowledging its dramas and errors of the past,” Mr. Chirac said.
Gul, the Turkish foreign minister, said the bill dealt a serious blow to Turkish-French relations and damaged the credibility of France as an EU member, which defends freedom of expression.
“From now on, France will never describe itself as the homeland of freedoms,” Mr. Gul said.
France has already recognized the killings of up to 1.5 million Armenians from 1915 to 1919 as genocide; under Thursday's bill, those who contest it was genocide would risk up to a year in prison and fines of up to $63,600.
A law passed in 1990 makes it a crime to deny the Holocaust.
Armenia accuses Turkey of massacring Armenians during the First World War, when Armenia was under the Ottoman Empire. Turkey says Armenians were killed in civil unrest during the collapse of the empire.
Outside the French parliament building, a few dozen protesters of Armenian descent celebrated.
“The memory of the victims is finally totally respected,” said Alexis Govciyan, head of a group of Armenian organizations in France.
The vote on the bill in Paris dominated front pages of most Turkish newspapers, with some reporting that thousands of Turks have promised to go to France and deny genocide in hopes of getting arrested if the bill passes. Two TV networks in Turkey broadcast the parliamentary floor debate live.
