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What Our Words Mean: Towards the Vindication of ‘Medz Yeghern’
People do not bother to look for attitudes and
terminology which will assert their unique identities,
but rather opt for popular and widely current formulas.
–The Armenian Weekly, editorial (1981)1
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President Obama knows full well how he is using cynical word games to manipulate the Armenian American community, downplay the full legal, moral, and material meaning of the Armenian Genocide, and – ultimately – undermine the Armenian Cause.
His senior staff make no secret of this, and – in fact – frequently note privately how painful and profoundly disappointing it must be for U.S. citizens of Armenian heritage to have been so brazenly betrayed by our President.
Aram Hamparian, ANCA
When our president uses the term “Medz Yeghern,” he is speaking to the Armenians (and is saying, “Hey, ain’t I great, I know two Armenian words”), but if he used the words “Armenian Genocide,” he would be speaking to the world–and, to the Turks (which is why he doesn’t use it.
The Jews use “Shoah” to mark their experience as unique (to them).
Robert Fisk always admonishes me to use the word “Holocaust,” because he thinks the word stronger, and his editors always allow him to use the word with a capital”H,” (after an internal debate!) As I tell Robert, “When the world gets around to using ‘Genocide’ for the Armenian experience, I will then start using ‘Holocaust’ to elevate the crime.”
For what it is worth, my father (who knew a thing or two about the Armenian language) always referred to the event as “chart” (slaughter) which is much better than Medz Yeghern, which could also mean the results of a devastating earthquake, or tornado, or flood. “Genocide” implies a man-made act or deed, whereas Medz Yeghern could also apply to a natural disaster.
When the Armenians use “Medz Yeghern,” they are acknowledging the hypocrisy of this country’s president.
Avedis Kevorkian
Philadelphia, PA
So-called “alternatives” like Medz Yeghern, Aghed, Deghanoutune will not do. The correct word is Tseghasbanoutune. We didn’t use “Tseghasbanoutune” until a few decades ago because that precise and accurate word (genocide) wasn’t coined until the ’40s.
Tseghasbanoutune is the correct word. It also has international judicial consequences. The others are meaningless in judicial context. Even Turkey uses “deportation” because Ankara knows it has no meaning.
Obama, through his cunning advisers, know this. That’s why he used the meaningless Medz Yeghern.
Thank you Vartan Matiossian for your exhaustive researches.
For record, it is not President Obama who first used the term Medz Yeghern, it was his predecessor, President George W. Bush.
I do not feel betrayed by President Obama for using the term Medz Yeghern but by those who pretend not to understand what the President has said.
What about the book Armenian Golgotha by Grigoris Balakian? It is described as a memoir of the Armenian Genocide. In order for their to be dialogue I would hope we non-Armenians can have a word we can respectfully use to describe the crime. I would switch to Medz Yeghern, from The Armenian Genocide, but some of your suggestions I would not be able to pronounce. For those of us non-Armenians who want to help the world recognize the immense crime, we need the words!
Hello Karen,
Re your understandable difficulty with the five-syllable “Tseghasbanoutune”, I don’t think Armenians expects someone who doesn’t speak Armenian to say that long word. Since Tseghasbanoutune is the Armenian word for genocide, Armenians would be happy to hear the use of “genocide” by English speakers and its equivalents in other languages.
Re the mention of “chart” by Mr. Avedissian, since it means massacre in Armenian, it’s not descriptive of what Turks did. Besides, these days the media describes the death of a half-dozen people as massacre. Inflation or deflation?
Vartan Matiossian is beginning to sound like a broken record.
If Meds Yeghern and Tseghasbanoutyoun were one and the same, as Mr. Matiossian repeatedly and inanely claims, please explain why is Pres. Obama so adamantly refusing to say Tseghasbanoutyoun once, but is more than happy to call it Meds Yeghern over and over again?
Could it be that Pres. Obama knows something that Mr. Matiossian is clueless about?
Mr. Matiossian may be quite knowledgeable about the Armenian language, but I am sorry to say, he seems to know very little about politics and verbal gymnastics!
It should be brought to Mr. Sassounian’s attention–a suggestion along similar lines was already made in this same newspaper back in 2010–that Pres. Obama has used “Meds Yeghern” for the five years of his presidency because the experts in politics and verbal gymnastics have failed to let him know that a) he is using the name of the genocide, e.g. “Medz Yeghern, the Armenian genocide,” which the Prime Minister of Canada used in 2006 and 2011 to recognize 1915, and b) the word is synonymous with “crime.” Even more: they labeled it “denialist terminology” and “blasphemy”! If they had told him once, he would have probably stopped using it: a law professor can be expected to recognize a word like “crime” when he sees it. If they had told him once, the Turkish press would have stopped too, and the international press would have taken notice. We just allowed ourselves to be fooled not once, but twice.
Pres. Obama uses “Meds Yeghern” and not “tseghasbanutiun” because he may have been told that the latter means “genocide,” but nobody has told him that “yeghern” does too, except for our old “friend” Sukru Elekdag. However, why should the President, who has said five times that his views haven’t changed, believe an outstanding Turkish denier?
He knows something much better than I do: U. S. foreign policy dating from March 12, 1947 doesn’t allow him, the same as it didn’t allow his predecessors, to go further than he has and put the words “Armenian” and “genocide” together. (Please spare me another reminder of Ronald Reagan’s phrase, which is next on the line.) Did Sen. Obama know that much about U.S. policy? It is likely he did. As my previous article showed—perhaps brazenly, but that’s the risk of trying to think a little outside the box—he may have tried a quite unorthodox maneuver in 2009 to somehow accommodate his electoral promise, since politics is the art of the possible whether we like it or not. His message presented a real opening, but our experts were blind to it. As a result, they failed to follow an alternative course of action: for instance, if you can’t win it, spin it (Turkish and Azeri spin doctors do that every day). Unfortunately, we tend to forget that all roads lead to Rome, as a matter of fact, not just one.
If I were Mr. Sassounian, I would have avoided putting labels on the statements of anyone who “may be quite knowledgeable about the Armenian language.” After that broken record of “Great Calamity” has been crushed for good, except in the mind of those who still repeat–after nine articles proving exactly the opposite– that Medz Yeghern could also “apply to a natural disaster,” the facts of language may have more little surprises in store for the experts in politics and verbal gymnastics.
To avoid any confusion, I should clarify that the person signing the reply above is Vartan Matiossian, the author of the article, and not any other Vartan.
Cynical word games were originally played by the Turkish “apology” movement and Armenian American figures willing to blindly echo its line that Medz Yeghern meant only Great Calamity. If this had been nipped in the bud and the correct meaning of Great Crime been insisted upon by those privy to the inner thoughts of senior WH staff, the president would never have been able to use the term to avoid the G-word in the first place. Therefore, the blame for his doing so should not be placed on a scholar who has attempted in good faith to set the linguistic record straight, defend the integrity of the language and correct a mistake that should never have been allowed to persist while those tasked with safeguarding the Armenian cause were asleep at the wheel.
I disagree with this writer he is totally clueless about politics and what the word genocide legally stands for.
Sireli Harut; once again, you are right on. The word is Genocide.
Karen Roberts; The International Association of Genocide Scholars agrees with Lemkin. The word is Genocide. No one expects you to understand Armenian in speaking about what was done to us. You are always absolutely correct when you call it the Armenian Genocide. Thank you for your desire to use correct language.
When it comes to Medz Yeghern, Raffi Hovanissian poignantly verbalizes what I have always felt about the term. I have quoted him before I quote him once more.
“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 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”.
It was not a mere genocide, if you will. It was indeed a Medz Yeghern.