!á½p="justify">The BBC World service yesterday reported the French Parliament's decision to adopt a bill making denying Armenian genocide claims a crime punishable with jail sentences as its top news story, referring to the decision as controversial. The second major story of the BBC World, reported on Turkey's Orhan Pamuk being awarded the 2006 Nobel Prize for literature. The BBC referred to Pamuk's Nobel as a strange coincidence relating its timing to the voting in France, recalling that Pamuk had in an interview stated that one million Armenians had been killed during World War I. According to the British news agency which still possesses the capacity of having a global outlook on world developments, these two events are more significant than tension between the United Nations and N. Korea because of nuclear ambitions of the latter, for that was the third top story featured by the agency.

  Around the same hours when news that Orhan Pamuk had been awarded the Nobel were coming in, protestors had begun flocking to the French Embassy building on Paris Street in Ankara. Around the same time, the Turkish Foreign Ministry in a long and harsh statement with rare precedence, had expressed that the French Parliament's decision had dealt a serious blow to Turkish-French relations. The blow indeed was heavy, for the ruling Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) had not blocked the bill sponsored by opposition Socialist Party from being voted in Parliament, although it had the power and the opportunity to do so. Now it is in the French government's hands to submit the law to the Senate or not. If the law is approved by UMP leader and French Interior Minister Nicholas Sarkozy and sent to the Senate, it will still have to go to President Jacques Chirac for approval.

  The Turkish Foreign Ministry gave a reminder that all was not yet over as it vowed to continue efforts on every level to stop this initiative to which it referred to as a black page for France, the country that introduced free thought in the history of humankind.  However, Sarkozy has set eyes on Chirac's seat in France's presidential elections scheduled for May 2007. It is a curiosity whether efforts of the Turkish government, the opposition and the business world would be enough to stop France, which has risked severing relations with Turkey, developed over the centuries, only for garnering the votes of 380,000 members of the electorate of Armenian decent, residing mostly in Marseilles and Lyon.

  Let's go on with another question. Was it only competition over voters of Armenian descent that played a role in the French Parliament's decision yesterday?  Or could it be that cultural discrimination which has increasingly built up in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks is making itself felt this way? Could the Muslim Turks be the new Jewish population that will be subject to discrimination and violence? Are the French trying to daunt Turkey by punching below-the-belt instead of generating sound objections to Turkish accession to the European Union?

  If the law is enacted, is France not able to reckon that thousands of Turkish citizens -- including Turkey's Armenians such as Hrant Dink -- would just for the sake of getting a sentence declare that The Armenian genocide never occurred and turn themselves over to the police and prosecutors and form long lines before France's jailhouses? Can they not figure out that these cases would be taken to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), which in turn would turn into major trouble for France?

  On the other side of the medallion, how much of a victory is this really for anti-Turkish Armenian groups?

  Yes, it has been somewhat painful but recently, with involvement of Orhan Pamuk, the Armenian problem, with its every dimension -- and yes with a criminal trial side to it -- has been opened to public debate. For now, don't pay heed to those who are infuriated with the blow dealt by France and those who are angry with Orhan Pamuk's prize on the grounds that he took up the Armenian issue, that's why they gave him the award. Time passes, skies remain. When this controversy dies down, the only remaining record will be that a Turkish author won the Nobel Prize for literature. I don't think Orhan Pamuk needed a Nobel to prove that he is a great writer. For, politicization of the Nobel Prize is not a new phenomenon. Pamuk was just a great writer without the Nobel, read by the entire world. Now, he has entered into consciousness of literary history.

  Yesterday, Pamuk comforted our hearts upset by France.