Vahe H Apelian
"This is where the debate about calling it genocide or not becomes absurd, trivial, and tertiary". (Raffi K Hovannisian). It's high time we advocate the use of our own term MEDZ YEGHERN.
The 2025 April 24, the Armenian Genocide commemoration day, is over. 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 our surviving forefathers coined, MEDZ YEGHERN, for what happened to the Armenian race in that time frame.
President Donald Trump issued the customary April 24 proclamation denouncing man's inhumanity to man on Armenian remembrance day. We honor the victims of the MEDZ YEGHERN, he proclaimed, as he had done during his first term. I commend the president for using our own term for the genocide perpetrated on our forefathers and remain dismayed at the Armenians who feel compelled to deny our own term.
We tend to associate the president's use of the G word Joe Biden. But he was not the first president to use the G word. President Reagan, had used the word genocide before. President Joe Biden’s use of the G word had a different contextual meaning. But, presumably, much like Joe Biden, we also as Armenians did not ascribe anything substantiative to Joe Biden’s proclamation, other than being a lip service. Most American Armenians apparently did not support him or his party during the last election. Joe Biden also did not enjoy the support across the Diaspora, simply because deep in our hearts and minds we had dismissed his recognition of the Armenian Genocide as a lip service.
Joe Biden also was not the first to use our term, Medz Yeghern. It was president George W. Bush who used it first. President Joe Biden was the first president who used Armenian Genocide and Medz Yeghern in the same context. He did it in 2024 as he did 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".
We are not in a legal court and we are not engaged in legal proceedings. We are dealing with the court of the public opinion and letting the world know what happened to the ancient Armenian race on their native land, in the Ottoman Empire. It is high time that we disassociated the fateful Armenian experience from the narrow - or maybe broad - 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? To lump all these tragedies under one common term genocide, yes, as the first FM of the third Republic of Armenia stated, " is absurd".
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. 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 the person 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 MEDZ 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 Medz 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. 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 a crime that is unprecedented in scope and magnitude and has no parallel.
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 MEDZ YEGHERN and we are or should not be a nation that denies its own term and disparages the officials of a nation for using our own term.
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