In recent years, intellectuals and journalists have been taken to court under paragraph 301 of the Turkish civil penal code for having publicly labelled the Armenian massacres of 1915 as ‘genocide’. Simultaneously, the Armenian diaspora and its supporters continue to lobby for international recognition of the event as ‘genocide’, both through national parliaments and international bodies (with some success), as well as through laws that directly criminalise the denial of 1915 as ‘genocide’. One such law was passed in France in 2006. But deniers have also been prosecuted under anti-racism or hate speech laws, as happened in the case of a Turkish right-wing politician in Switzerland in March 2007.
I propose to investigate this legal battle field in Turkey and in European national and supra-national contexts, surrounding the question of the Armenian ‘genocide’, to think differently about and through memory, history and accountability. Against the background of Turkish-EU accession talks, I will explore how the law functions here as an arena in which the struggle to hold Turkey accountable for its past is fought out. Within Turkey, political discussions around the history and memory of 1915 is being curtailed by legal means. In some sense, international efforts for legal recognition thus appear as a displacement of the debate, yet at the same time mirroring a practice which discourages discussion. Laws criminalising Armenian genocide denial provide an indirect means to exert pressure on the Turkish state to accept historical responsibility, yet sidestepping direct diplomatic communication. Following from this, I further propose to look at the particular modalities and effects of criminalising the public voicing of certain interpretations of history, especially when compared to other settings, such as truth and reconciliation commissions. I want to shed light on the assumptions underlying such laws regarding the nature of the performance of speech acts and of the speaker-audience relation. Lastly, I am interested in the connections between such legal codifications of history and specific state ideologies.