Emmanuel Macron should save his virtual sympathy and clean up his own act first

Last week, French President Emmanuel Macron announced that his country is making 24 April a National Day for the commemoration of the Armenian genocide which, it is alleged by Europe, the US and Israel, was committed by the Ottoman Empire during World War One. Such virtual sympathy for a nation is acceptable, it seems, although little has really changed.

Macron, remember, lives in the Élysée Palace, where the decision to take part in the Russian and British efforts to tear down the Ottoman Empire as part of the war aims was made. Britain and its allies won the war and hence dictated what the official narrative of the conflict should be. In doing so, they demonised their enemies in order to justify their own brutality.

“France,” Macron told the Armenian community at a dinner in Paris,” is, first and foremost, the country that knows how to look history in the face; which was among the first to denounce the killing of the Armenian people; which in 1915 named genocide for what it was; which is in 2001 after a long struggle recognised it in law.” Genocide as a term was first coined in 1944, so it is unlikely that France “named genocide for what it was” in 1915 as the French leader claimed.

How credible is the genocide claim, though? And are the French going to offer commemorative days to the victims of its own genocides in years gone by?

According to France 24, the dinner attended by Macron was organised by the Coordinating Council of Armenian Organisations of France. The news website said that Macron honoured a campaign promise made in 2017, which suggests that the National Day was an incentive for Armenian voters to back him. Pragmatic politics at play.

Documents in the Ottoman archives say that after the Armenians had attacked Muslim villages in Anatolia [Turkey] in 1915, the government arrested 600 men and “adopted a resolution on the resettlement of Armenians to Syria.” Azeri TV reported a historian saying this last year, adding that the Ottomans ordered the resettlement of 700,000 people with “measures taken on security, food and medical care.”

Furthermore, the claim that 1.5 million Armenians were affected by genocide is disputed. Research by Marmara University puts the number of Armenians during the Ottoman period at 1,245,902; that was the census figure released in 1914. It is worth noting that Jews, Armenians and Americans were among the Ottoman staff who conducted the census. “Thus,” claims a document on the website of the Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, “allegations that more than 1.5 million Armenians from eastern Anatolia died must be false.”

The testimony of the US High Commissioner and first US Ambassador to the Republic of Turkey between 1920 and 1926, Rear Admiral Mark L Bristol, is telling. In a letter dated 28 March 1921 and sent to Dr James L Barton of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, he wrote: “I see that reports are being freely circulated in the United States that the Turks massacred thousands of Armenians in the Caucasus. Such reports are repeated so many times it makes my blood boil. The Near East Relief have the reports from Yarrow and our own American people which show absolutely that such Armenian reports are absolutely false. The circulation of such false reports in the United States, without refutation, is an outrage and is certainly doing the Armenians more harm than good… In addition to the reports from our own American Relief workers that were in Kars and Alexandrople, and reports from such men as Yarrow, I have reports from my own Intelligence Officer and know that the Armenian reports are not true.”

The letter is lengthy, and Bristol refutes the claims that there were massacres of Armenians. On the resettlement of the Armenians, he wrote that they took up arms against their own government. Their violent political aims, not their race, ethnicity or religion, he insisted, rendered them subject to relocation.

We should also remind President Macron that France committed several massacres of its own during its colonial occupation of Syria and Lebanon, as well as the undisputed genocide of Algerians during the century-long French occupation of the North African country. The first French Governor-General of Algeria, Marshal Thomas Robert Bugeaud, was famous for his scorched earth policy. Historian Olivier Le Cour Grandmaison says that this included massacres, mass rapes and other atrocities.

In his book Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur, Ben Kiernan wrote, “In Algeria, colonisation and genocidal massacres proceeded in tandem. From 1830 to 1847, its European settler population quadrupled to 104,000. Of the native Algerian population of approximately 3 million in 1830, about 500,000 to 1 million perished in the first three decades of French conquest.” Do not ask how many thousand perished in the other seven decades, during which the French rulers adopted discriminatory policies against the Algerian Arabs, Berbers and Jews.

ON THIS DAY: Remembering the massacre of 45,000 Algerians

In 1961, the French police killed 200 Algerians in a single day in Paris, the capital of the land of liberté, égalité, fraternité. “Some 10,000 more were rounded up inside the city sports stadiums and attacked; torture methods included victims being forced to drink bleach,” wrote Nabila Ramdani in the Guardian. “It did not stop there. Masses of disaffected Algerians had been imported to rebuild post-second-world-war France on low wages, and the influx continued after the Algerian war. Most were stuck in rundown out-of-town housing estates where, today, their children and grandchildren continue to face anti-Muslim discrimination on the margins of the republic.”

ON THIS DAY: Remembering the massacre of Algerians in Paris

If the French president wanted to highlight anyone’s murky past, perhaps he should have started with that of his own country, based on fact, not propaganda fuelled by political and military hostility. Moreover, if Emmanuel Macron is genuine in his desire to sympathise with oppressed people, where do the Palestinians stand in his estimation? They have been subjected to “slow genocide” since 1948 and yet France is a key ally of the occupation state of Israel. And what about the Syrians, the Rohingyas or the Central Africans? Or the Malians and the people of Niger who are still suffering from French exploitation? Save your pragmatic sympathy, Mr Macron, and start to clean up your own act first.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.