Vahe H Apelian
April 24, the Armenian Genocide commemoration day, is a few days away. It is high time that we abandon, the trivialized, ambiguous legal term genocide that is structured to legally hold a party responsible for INTENDING to commit just that, genocide. Instead, we should have the world adopt our own term the survivors coined, MEDS YEGHERN, for what happened to the Armenian race in that time frame.
In a few days, on April 24, 2024, president Joe Biden, will issue a proclamation or a statement and that will say, more or less, what he said on April 24, 2021, that, “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 used Armenian Genocide and Meds Yeghern in the same context. He did the same last year, during his 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 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? Did not the Azeris intend to wipe Karabakh Armenians if not in whole but in part? Does not China intent to wipe our Tibetans in part if not in whole?
Let us face it, the term genocide has lost the significance we Armenians attribute to the word. Norms have changed, words have evolved. The term Raphael Lampkin coined has lost its significance we Armenians attribute to the G word. It would not surprise me if he were alive, he would have realized the legal and moral dimension of the legal term he coined has been trivialized. We all know that the suffix -cide -comes from Latin and it means to kill or cut down. The sad thing is that we cannot not accuse someone of infanticide, fratricide, matricide without having committed the act. But we can accuse almost any nation in conflict for committing genocide. Does not Israel intend to wipe the Palestinians in part or in whole?
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.
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 term 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 of humanity. And yes, it was the GREAT DISPOSSESSION of peaceful Armenians of their lives, of their properties, and of their civilization, their culture, and their time-earned way of life.
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