Turkey Mulls Sanctioning France over Armenian Genocide Bill

Turkey will announce sanctions against Paris if French lawmakers adopt a bill Thursday criminalizing the denial of the Armenian genocide, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan warned late on Wednesday.

Turkey's potential reaction has the capacity to hurt companies such as Airbus SAS and Electricite de France SA, Bloomberg reckons.

However, France's European Affairs Minister Jean Leonetti has commented on Thursday that Turkey is unlikely to impose economic sanctions against French companies, according to Dow Jones.

Several thousand French Turks gathered to protest in downtown Paris Thursday ahead of the parliamentary vote on a bill that would make it a crime to deny the 1915 mass killing of Armenians by Ottoman Turks was genocide.

In what is widely acknowledged to have been one of the first modern genocides, Turkish authorities killed between 1 million and 1.5 million Armenians during and just after World War I.

France formally recognized the killings as genocide in 2001, but offered no consequences for deniers.

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