Erdogan says Turkey would retaliate if French bill passed

ISTANBUL (A.A) - Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has said Turkey would retaliate by all diplomatic means if the French senate approved a bill making denial of the Ottoman-era incidents of 1915 punishable in France with a prison term of one year and a fine of 45 thousand euros. "I would like to reaffirm that we will resort to all diplomatic means to stand against such unjust, biased, populist and unlawful attempts," Erdogan told reporters in a joint press conference with Mustafa Abdel Jalil, head of Libya's National Transitional Council.     The bill is set to be debated in the French senate floor next week on Thursday. Erdogan sent earlier this week a letter to the French president, warning Sarkozy about possible fallout from approval of the bill on bilateral relations.  "I have made very clear to Mr. Sarkozy that the bill would cause irreparable damages to our relations. There is no good for anyone in this," Erdogan said.    A similar bill -- proposed by the Socialist Party -- was approved in 2006 by the lower house of the French assembly but the Senate rejected to debate the bill last May.  "No historian, no politician could claim that a genocide had occurred in our history. Those who seek a genocide should turn and look at their own dirty history," Erdogan said.   Diplomatic sources close to the matter told the Anadolu Agency that the bill had the backing of French President Nicolas Sarkozy who had recently expressed support during a visit to Yerevan last October ahead of the presidential elections next year.       Turkish Foreign Ministry has rejected the attempt as a pre-election campaign move. "I hope that the French parliament would avoid making a terrible mistake by distorting and twisting the history and by punishing those who deny historical lies," Erdogan said.   "If the French parliament is that interested in history, then it could bother itself with shedding a light on what happened in Africa, in Rwanda, and in Algeria. It could investigate how many people French soldiers massacred in Algeria and their involvement in the killing of 800 thousand people in Rwanda," Erdogan said.