A true genocide

Vahe H. Apelian

 

The term genocide we commonly use is a misnomer.

Most of us know what genocide means and how the term came about. I quote: “the word “genocide was first coined by Polish lawyer Raphäel Lemkin in 1944 in his book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. It consists of the Greek prefix genos, meaning race or tribe, and the Latin suffix -cide, meaning killing.”

Genocide is a crime, I quote, “was first recognized as a crime under international law in 1946 by the United Nations General Assembly (A/RES/96-I). It was codified as an independent crime in the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (the Genocide Convention). The Convention has been ratified by 149 States (as of January 2018).”

But the term however legal, is not a sum of the true meaning of its two components, that is to say having killed a race or a tribe. In its narrow legal definition, it is meant to reflect the intention for killing a race or a tribe. The atrocities perpetrated against a race or a tribe, help reveal the intent but by itself do not necessarily constitute genocide. The rest of the words that use the Latin suffix -cide, such as fratricide, homicide, pesticide, herbicide etc. outright describe the finality of the act that is the killing or the annihilation 

In case of fratricide, a brother is killed. In case of homicide, a person is killed and so forth. A family member then can resort to law to exact justice.  But should the tribe or the race be annihilated there can be no more legal recourse. After all, I doubt that a self-appointed person or a race or a tribe has the legal rights to seek justice on behalf the race or the tribe whose members have been wiped out. 

Stepan Partamian coined the term genolive to counter genocide. He even got a trademark for the term. On September 12, 2017, Asbarez reported that “Professor Israel W. Charny, one of the world’s foremost scholars in Holocaust has expressed praise for the term “Genolive”and in a letter to Stepan Partamian noted that “it seems so simple and clear and indeed an antidote to rotten genocide.” But the fact of the matter is that, without "genolive", genocide will be just forgotten simply because it’s the "genolive" who will pursue the famed 3 Rs; recognition, reparation and restitution from the perpetrator. Without the members of the race or the tribe who were not killed and could pursue justice,  genocide has no legal recourse. Is that not contradictory? That is why I think the term genocide is a misnomer.

Has there been a genocide that has lived up to the true meaning of the word? That is to say the annihilation of the race or the tribe. Yes, there has been, and the last person of such tribe passed away recently and with him, his tribe. An interested reader may read about him or watch a documentary about the man. He and another member of his tribe were found in the Amazon Forest. But no one understood their language and could communicate with them. After a few years his companion died and for the next “26 years, nearly 9,500 days and nights, the man with no known name had neither spoken to nor touched a single human.” He died on August 24, 2022. 

He was indeed last victim of a true genocide. What happened to his tribe had no recourse and will have no recourse simply because there is no one left alive from his tribe. Although his tribe was subjected to genocide, but all the trappings of that term are now meaningless because the tribe lived up to the true meaning of the term. It was annihiliated. That's why I find the term genocide, we commonly use, contradictory and hence a misnomer.

As to the genocide of the Armenians, the survivors amply called it Medz Yeghern, the great crime. After all, the race had survived and was not annihilated. Raffi Hovanissian, Armenia’s first foreign minister, called it the Great Armenian Dispossession and explained that 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".