Because it was MEDZ YEGHERN and not a mere GENOCIDE

Vahe H. Apelian

" The victim (the Armenian) is compelled to deny his own words (Medz Yeghern), like Peter denying Jesus three times. " Vartan Matiossian.

Although President Trump, this year as well, did not use the word genocide, even after the senate resolution but let us face it, the use of the word genocide has proliferated because one can accuse a party for having committed genocide on the pretext that the intent of the killing was to wipe out the subject. The U.N. Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, defines genocide as INTENT “to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, religious group”. The body count has no legal relevance for having committed genocide.

 I was brought up in Armenian schools commemorating the Medz Yeghern (Մեծ Եղեռն), The Big Crime that befell on the Armenians in 1915. The word Yeghern has an inherent sadness embedded in it and it’s not meant to imply crime in the ordinary sense for which we have the word vojir. In spite of the fact that the word genocide was well coined by then, the descriptive term Metz Yeghern was more commonly used. I remember attending an exhibition of the Medz Yeghern in the American University of Beirut in 1965, at the fiftieth-anniversary commemoration

It was President George W. Bush who used the term Medz Yeghern for the very first time. I was aghast to read in an Armenian newspaper an article in response to his use of the term, headlined along the line, “It was Genocide Mr. President, not Medz Yeghern”. I was aghast because we seemed to negate the very term our own survivors of the genocide had coined.

We lost a golden opportunity during the Obama’s administration. For the eight years he was in office he used the term Medz Yeghern. Instead of fighting tooth and nail his use of our very own term, we should have capitalized on his use of the term and help bring the term in mainstream lexicon. If Tsunami, Karaoke, Kwanza, Hanukah, Shoah, and Nakba have successfully made inroads in the English language lexicon and are very well understood what they mean, there is no reason we could not have introduced Medz Yeghern as another term to mean what it exactly means: the genocide of the Armenians, usurpation of its historic lands and the banishment of its survivors.

There is another argument in favor of using the term Medz Yeghern because what happened to Armenians in 1915 cannot possibly be conveyed merely with the generic word genocide. Raffi K. Hovannisian, the American born and raised Armenia's first minister of foreign affairs, sums it best. I quote him: "Worse than genocide, as incredible as that sounds, is the premeditated deprivation of a people of its ancestral heartland.  And that's precisely what happened.  In what amounted to the Great Armenian Dispossession, a nation living for more than three millennia upon its historic patrimony-- at times amid its own sovereign Kingdoms and more frequently as a subject of occupying empires-- was in a matter of months brutally, literally, and completely eradicated from its land.  Unprecedented in human history, this expropriation of homes and lands, churches and monasteries, schools and colleges, libraries and hospitals, properties and infrastructures constitutes to this day a murder, not only of a people but also of a civilization, a culture, a time-earned way of life. This is where the debate about calling it genocide or not becomes absurd, trivial, and tertiary".

Indeed calling the Armenian existential experience merely with the generic and much-abused word nowadays, genocide, is indeed “absurd, trivial and tertiary”. It was more than that, much more. Our unfortunate experience was unique. It was MEDZ YEGHERN and has to go down in history not as another genocide but uniquely as Medz Yeghern.

It was Shavarsh Missaking, the eminent editor of the famed Armenian daily "Haratch" (Forward), who first introduced to the Armenian public the newly minted word GENOCIDE, in his editorial dated December 9, 1945, almost right after Raphael Lampkin coined the term.

Armenian compound words with the root word tsegh were abundant as early as 1905, as the Armenian dictionaries listed in Nayiri indicate. It is not that the survivors lacked the linguistic skills, they simply felt no reason  to coin the compound word tseghasbanoutiun (Ցեղասպանութիւն)  when they had their very own term for the great crime they experienced that threatened their very own existence. Even after Shavarsh Missakian introduced the word tseghasbanoutiun (Ցեղասպանութիւն) for genocide, it never replaced and can possibly embody the sentiments the term Medz Yeghern has come to convey in our literature.

Yes, our unique experience was a MEDZ YEGHERN and not a mere genocide.

Note: Updated on April 24, 2020