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French Bill Harms Understanding of Armenian Massacre, Says Duke Scholar Arrested for His Research on Killings

A bill passed Thursday by the French National Assembly that labels the World War I massacre of Armenians as "genocide" hurts the cause of those trying to educate Turkish citizens about the tragedy, says a Duke University graduate student.

The student, Yektan Turkyilmaz, was detained in an Armenian KGB detention center for several weeks without charges being filed in 2005 while studying the conflict's history. Turkyilmaz was released after several American leaders, including former U.S. Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole and Senator Richard Lugar, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, as well as Duke President Richard Brodhead, urged Armenian officials to intervene in the matter.

"I would like to see the entire world community, including Turkey, recognize what happened to the people in Armenia," said Turkyilmaz, a graduate student in cultural anthropology at Duke. "But decisions like this [by the French parliament] only fuel reactionaries in Turkey, who use this as an example of Western animosity. It doesn't encourage discussion at all."

Turkyilmaz, a Turkish citizen of Kurdish decent, said some Turkish scholars are already seeking to shed light on the Ottoman killing of Armenians, as evidenced by a conference last September on the topic.

""People do this despite this infamous code in Turkey that penalizes ‘insulting Turkishness,'" he said. "We can call what happened to the Armenians ‘genocide,' ‘tragedy' or ‘massacre;' the point is we need to learn what happened and educate people about it."

The French bill "jeopardizes the position of progressive people in Turkey," he said.

"I would totally understand it if it were a principled decision about genocide everywhere, but this is more about disturbing Turkey than learning about the Armenian tragedy," he said.