A resolution passed by the French parliament’s lower house, the National Assembly, on Monday recognized the mass killings of Assyrian and Chaldean communities in the final days of the Ottoman Empire during World War I as “genocide,” in a development that has angered Turkey, according to the Assyrian International News Agency.
The vote was 300 in favor and two against.
The resolution says the Assyro-Chaldean population living in the Ottoman Empire totaled more than 500,000 people at the beginning of the 20th century and that before World War I, the Assyro-Chaldean people were victims of serious and recurrent persecution and of several massacres.
It accuses the Ottoman Empire of organizing the mass murder of the Assyro-Chaldean population, their exodus from the borders of the empire and their forced conversion to Islam between 1915 and 1918.
Once a sizeable ethnic minority during the Ottoman era, the Assyrians suffered a mass slaughter in 1915 that some refer to as a genocide. Subsequently, they faced pogroms in the early days of the Republic of Turkey, after which some fled to neighboring Syria.
Their number in Turkey is currently estimated at 25,000. Most of them live in İstanbul, having fled their hometowns in the southeast of the country due to the Kurdish conflict.
The resolution states that “the combined and concerted extermination of more than 250,000 Assyro-Chaldeans, more than half of the population at the time, had as its goals the negation of Assyrian identity and its disappearance from Ottoman space, regarding the massive and systematic executions, the spoliation of their lands and their property as well as the systematic destruction of their cultural expression property.”
Despite being a predominantly Christian minority, the Assyrians were not granted minority status under the Treaty of Lausanne, a provision from which other non-Muslim groups benefit, namely Armenians, Jews and Greeks.
The resolution also recalled France’s recognition of the mass killings of Armenians during the final days of the Ottoman Empire as “genocide” in 2001 as it called on the French government to officially recognize the mass extermination, deportation and suppression of the cultural heritage of more than 250,000 Assyro-Chaldeans by the Ottoman authorities between 1915 and 1918 as “genocide.”
The Turkish Foreign Ministry, meanwhile, released a statement on Monday, condemning the resolution, which it described as “null and void.”
The ministry said the passage of the resolution is “an example of efforts to distort historical events for the sake of political interests” while recalling that a similar resolution was rejected by the French government last year.
“The fact that the same unfounded accusations have been put on the agenda of the National Assembly this time by members of the ruling party is an example of efforts to distort historical events for the sake of political interests,” it said, referring to the French Renaissance group, which brought forward the resolution.
The ministry also noted that parliaments have no authority to interpret or render judgments on historical events.
France is one of the dozens of countries in the world that recognize the mass killings of the Armenians at the hands of the Ottoman Empire as genocide.
The Armenians — supported by historians and scholars — say 1.5 million of their people died in a genocide committed under the Ottoman Empire during World War I.
Ankara accepts that both Armenians and Turks died in huge numbers as Ottoman forces fought czarist Russia.
But Turkey vehemently denies a deliberate policy of genocide and notes that the term had not been legally defined at the time.