Paris plans to ban a Turkish ultra-nationalist group known as the Gray Wolves, French Minister of the Interior Gerald Darmanin said on Monday, in a move that risks further straining already tense relations with Ankara.
The dissolution was announced after a memorial center to mass killings of Armenians during World War I was at the weekend defaced with graffiti, including the name of the Gray Wolves.
The move to ban the Gray Wolves — seen as a wing of a party allied to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan — would be put to the French Cabinet today, Darmanin told a parliamentary committee.
“To put it mildly, we are talking about a particularly aggressive group,” Darmanin said.
“It deserves to be dissolved,” he said, adding that the move meant that actions or meetings by the group could be punished by fines or imprisonment.
His announcement came after a memorial center outside Lyon to the mass killings of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, regarded as genocide by Armenia, was defaced with pro-Turkish slogans including “Gray Wolves” and “RTE,” in reference to Erdogan.
The incident in the town of Decines-Charpieu came against a backdrop of sharp tension in France between its Armenian and Turkish communities over the conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh.
Turkey has strongly backed its ally Azerbaijan in the conflict over the region that is part of Azerbaijan, but has been controlled by Armenian separatists since a 1990s war when the Soviet Union broke up.
Four people were wounded outside Lyon on Wednesday last week in clashes between suspected Turkish nationalists and Armenians protesting against Azerbaijani military offensive.
Armenians have long campaigned for the mass killings of their ancestors in the Ottoman Empire from 1915 to be recognized as genocide.
In an apparent new act of vandalism, the Armenian consulate in Lyon on Monday was daubed in yellow paint with “1915” and a heart-shaped emoji followed by “RTE.”
The Committee of the Defence of the Armenian Cause (CDCA) welcomed the ban.
“French citizens of Armenian origin were waiting for this decision because they’re scared,” CDCA president Jules Boyadijan said. “They didn’t think they’d be living in fear in France.”
The move by Darmanin risks further stoking tensions with Ankara.
In Turkey, the Gray Wolves are closely linked to the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) of Devlet Bahceli, which has a political alliance with Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party.
Analysts see the MHP as critical to Erdogan’s continued domination of Turkey, with the support of Bahceli a key factor behind his victory in a presidential election in 2018.
The Gray Wolves are regarded as the militant wing of the MHP and caused havoc on the streets in Turkey during the 1970s and 1980s, when its members frequently clashed with left-wing activists.
Those affiliated to the Gray Wolves and the MHP traditionally show their loyalty with a hand gesture in which the little and index fingers are raised.
“It is excellent news,” said French lawmaker Yael Braun-Pivet, who chairs the parliamentary committee.
“These violent groups have no place in our country,” she wrote on Twitter.
There have been weeks of tensions between France and Turkey, which reached a peak last month after the beheading of a French schoolteacher who showed his pupils cartoons mocking Islam’s Prophet Mohammed.
In the wake of the killing, French President Emmanuel Macron delivered a passionate defense of free speech, including the right to mock religion, prompting Erdogan to question his mental health.
France responded by recalling its ambassador to Ankara.
In an interview with al-Jazeera on Saturday, Macron accused Turkey of adopting a “bellicose” stance toward its NATO allies, saying tensions could ease if Erdogan showed respect and did not tell lies.
Following a spate of Islamist attacks, France has also been taking steps to ban radical Islamist groups and to cut off their foreign funds.
In Compiegne, a town in northern France, two wild boar heads were found on Monday on the building site of new offices for a French-Turkish cultural exchange association, which said it had filed charges for trespass and “an Islamophobic act.”
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