19 December: Turkey has slammed France for what it calls attempts to judge Turkish history before coming to terms with its own “dirty, bloody past” and repeated warnings of consequences in response to a bill the French legislature is readying to vote on t

“Today, nobody talks about the 45,000 Algerian deaths in 1945, or the role of France in the massacre of 800,000 people in Rwanda in 1994,” Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said of France on Saturday with a bitter criticism as he urged the country to face its own history before judging the history of others with strictly political motives. Erdoğan's strong reaction came in response to a vote by the French Senate to criminalize denial in France of the events of 1915 and make it punishable by a maximum one-year prison sentence and a 45,000 euro fine -- a punishment that would bring denial of the massacres up to par with denial of the Holocaust.

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