The Great Armenian Dispossession

Vahe H. Apelian

Depiction courtesy Garo Konyalian

April 24, the Armenian Remembrance Day, is three weeks away.  On that day the president, Joe Biden will issue a proclamation or a statement as he did since he took office. We all know that in on April 24, 2021, president Joe Biden proclaimed the following: “Each year on this day, we remember the lives of all those who died in the Ottoman-era ARMENIAN GENOCIDE and recommit ourselves to preventing such an atrocity from ever again occurring. Beginning on April 24, 1915, with the arrest of Armenian intellectuals and community leaders in Constantinople by Ottoman authorities, one and a half million Armenians were deported, massacred, or marched to their deaths in a campaign of extermination. We honor the victims of the MEDS YEGHERN so that the horrors of what happened are never lost to history. And we remember so that we remain ever-vigilant against the corrosive influence of hate in all its forms.” (Capitalization is mine)

Joe Biden is not the first president to use the G word. President Reagan had used the word genocide before. But president Joe Biden’s use of the G word had altogether different contextual meaning. He also was not the first to use our term, Meds Yeghern. It was president George W. Bush who used it first. President Joe Biden was the first president who referenced to Armenian Genocide and Meds Yeghern in the same context. He did the same last year, during his April 24, 2022 statement. He will most likely do the same on upcoming April 24, 2023, Armenian Remembrance Day.

Raffi K. Hovannisian, the American born and raised Armenia's first foreign minister, summed what happened in that period as follows: “ (It was) 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 constitute to this day a murder, not only of a people but also of a civilization, a culture, and a time-earned way of life." This is where the debate about calling it genocide or not becomes absurd, trivial, and tertiary".

It is high time that we uniquely term our GREAT ARMENIAN DISPOSSESSION of lives, property, culture. It is time we disassociated the Armenian experience from the narrow definition of genocide, which is defined as “a crime committed with the INTENT TO DESTROY a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, IN WHOLE OR IN PART.”  Tell me, which warring party can be absolved from not intending to destroy the national, racial, or religious group, it is fighting, if not in whole, but in part? Do not Russians INTEND to wipe out of Ukrainians, if not in whole but in part? 

Let us face it, the term genocide has lost the significance we Armenians attribute to the word. Wikipedia has a long list of genocides. Nowadays we also condemn Azeris atrocities and their intention for ethnically cleansing Artsakh of its native Armenians as intending to commit 2^nd Armenian genocide. An Armenian genocide scholar claimed that, in fact it is the 3^rd Armenian genocide. Did not Sultan Abdul Hamid intend to destroy, if not in whole but in part, the Armenians? Wikipedia lists what we called as Hamidian massacres, in its list of genocides.

Let me repeat. The term genocide has lost the significance we Armenians attribute to the G word. 

It is time that we introduce the term MEDS YEGHERN (tHE GREAt Crime) in the English lexicon to uniquely define and term the Armenian experience, as Jews have succeeded in doing the same with the word Holocaust in capital letter. It will be impossible for us to capitalize on a synonym for holocaust, such as Carnage, Catastrophe, Devastation, Extermination, Mass-Murder etc. and  even the capitalized THE GREAT CRIME to uniquely define and conceptualize our tragic experience.

The U.S. presidents have already familiarized the term Meds Yeghern to the world. Inadvertently they have paved the road for us. All we have to do is introduce the term in the language and with time educate the world and also change our mindset.  American English is a very inclusive language. It has accepted Kwanzaa among many others, as bona fide American term. Any American who claims does not know what Kwanzaa means, parlays ignorance or insensately if not outright racial indifference if not bias.

I firmly believe that what happened to us in the 1915-time frame cannot be defined by U.N.’s narrow definition of genocide any longer. Genocide perception has radically changed. The word has been gutted. It has been disemboweled.

What happened to us was indeed the GREAT ARMENIAN DISPOSSESSION, of lives, property, honor, and “time-earned way of life”. 

What happened to us was a crime that is unprecedented in scope and magnitude and has no parallel. 

What happened to us was MEDS YEGHERN, the GREAT CRIME. And yes, it was the GREAT ARMENIAN DISPOSSESSION of lives, of property, and of "a civilization, a culture, and a time-earned way of life."

Edited on April 21, 2023