WHAT OUR WORDS MEAN: TOWARDS THE VINDICATION OF MEDZ YEGHERN
By Vartan Matiossian
August 2, 2013
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
‘Shoah’ or ‘Holocaust’?
A crime against humanity may trigger a catastrophe for the victims, as
exemplified by the obliteration of Jewish life throughout continental
Europe during World War II. The close relationship between evil,
calamity, and crime should be regarded as one of the logical reasons
for the adoption of the word Shoah (Catastrophe) as the name of a
catastrophic crime against humanity.
1×1.trans What Our Words Mean: Towards the Vindication of Medz Yeghern
Raphael Lemkin It is interesting to recall that when the term genocide
had not yet been coined, the Armenian extermination that began
in 1915 was called “administrative holocaust” by Winston Churchill
(1929). According to journalist William Safire (1929-2009), it appears
that Raphael Lemkin’s word “struck many as too clinical a description
of what happened” in Nazi Germany, and therefore gradually yielded
its place to holocaust to name the Jewish genocide.2
In 1981, the abovementioned editorial of The Armenian Weekly
criticized the use of “Armenian Holocaust” as “basically wrong as
far as the Armenian experience is concerned” and claimed that such
use was the consequence of a “bandwagon mentality…fairly common
in North American society.”3 This unfounded criticism may have been
elliptically directed to the title of the bibliography published by
historian Richard Hovannisian the year before, The Armenian Holocaust.
However, as historian Israel Charny noted in 1999, “the regular use
of the word ‘holocaust’ in describing the many outrages committed
against the Armenians” makes evident that the term “was used in the
English language to indicate wholesale and organized destruction of a
civilian population” before Lemkin’s genocide.4 That was, for instance,
the case of books published in 1913 (Z. Ferriman Duckett, The Young
Turks and the Truth About the Holocaust at Adana in Asia Minor, during
April 1909) and in 1923 (Charles Dobson, The Smyrna Holocaust),5
and even afterwards, as historian Bernard Lewis did in 1968 (“the
terrible holocaust of 1915, when one and a half million Armenians
perished”),6 25 years before he dismissed the label “genocide” as the
“Armenian version of this history.” As late as 2007, Italian historian
and journalist Alberto Rosselli published L’Olocausto armeno (The
Armenian Holocaust), which reached its third edition in 2011.
It may come as a surprise to many readers that, contrary to popular
belief, the word Shoah is widely and officially used in several
languages by Jews and non-Jews alike, from presidents to journalists,
from Europe to South America. The Yad Vashem Museum in Jerusalem
“consider[s] it important to use the Hebrew word Shoah with regard to
the murder of and persecution of European Jewry in other languages as
well.”7 One main reason, as Charny has pointed out, is that “…the
generic word ‘holocaust,’ while still reverberating with the meaning
it took on after World War II as the genocide of the Jews, belongs
historically to all peoples who suffer cataclysmic extermination and
annihilation,”8 including the Armenians. French Jewish filmmaker Claude
Lanzmann, the author of the nine-hour groundbreaking documentary
“Shoah,” has claimed that “Holocaust” is “a completely improper
name” to describe what happened: “To reach God 1.5 million Jewish
children have been offered? The name is important, and one doesn’t
say ‘Holocaust’ in Europe. This was a catastrophe, a disaster, and
in Hebrew that is shoah.”9
Shoah has steadily begun to take its place alongside “Holocaust” in
the English-speaking world as well; the best proof is the American
Heritage Dictionary.10 This includes President Barack Obama’s April
8, 2013 statement on Holocaust Remembrance Day: “I join people here
in the United States, in Israel, and around the world in observing
Holocaust Remembrance Day. Today, we honor the memories of the six
million Jewish victims and millions of others who perished in the
darkness of the Shoah. … On my recent trip to Israel, I had the
opportunity to visit Yad Vashem, Israel’s national Holocaust memorial,
and reaffirm our collective responsibility to confront anti-Semitism,
prejudice, and intolerance across the world.”11 Note that the statement
calls the event Shoah, including Jewish and non-Jewish victims, and
that both mentions of Holocaust are titles (Holocaust Remembrance Day,
Holocaust memorial). Neither Holocaust nor Shoah are legal terms, but,
even if for obvious reasons, the presidential statement did not use
the legal term “genocide” at all, nor did it mention premeditation
or systematic extermination.
‘Yeghern’ or ‘Aghed’?
The same relationship of evil, calamity, and crime may be discerned in
the Armenian case. According to literary scholar Marc Nichanian, “the
proper word for the Armenian genocide, one that expresses the complete
annihilation of a people, is Aghet or ‘Catastrophe,’ which is the
exact equivalent, semantically and otherwise, of the Hebrew Shoah.”12
The word aghed, the same as yeghern, had been used before 1915 to
name the massacres of 1909.
Bibliographical evidence shows that aghed appeared for the first
time to name the events of 1915 on the cover of Setrag Shahen’s book,
The Suffering Ones (New York, 1917), and in a play with the subtitle
“Images of the exile of the Armenian aghed.”13 The word was used
in the epilogue to the book Hushartzan Abril Dasnemegui (Monument
to April Eleven), which was published on the first commemoration of
the arrests of Armenian intellectuals (1919): “On this occasion, a
group of intellectuals surviving the terrible Aghed felt the duty of
making an statement of respect and mourning for the memory of their
unfortunate brothers.”14 It was also used by surviving writer and
editor Teotig (1873-1929) in articles published in 1920 (“in the days
of the Armenian Aghed” and “on the news of the Aghed”),15 and likely by
other survivors, too. It did not show up again on a book title until
at least 1930,16 but appeared as medz aghed (“great catastrophe”)
in the title of two memoirs by writer and political activist Liparit
Nazariantz (1877-1947) published in 1927 and 1928 in the monthly
“Hairenik” of Boston.17 Incidentally, the word aghed was also used
to name the massacre of Marash in 1920 and the great fire of Smyrna
in 1922 in their own time.
Literary scholar Krikor Beledian’s claim, however, that “the word
aghed has been the most frequently employed to name the catastrophe
of 1915″18 has not taken into account the frequency with which both
words yeghern and aghed were recorded in texts–an enormous task
yet to be fulfilled–and, above all, in book titles during the first
decades after 1915, and, of course, later.
Nevertheless, Hagop Oshagan (1883-1948), a foremost novelist and
critic who survived Turkish persecution between 1915 and early 1918 in
Constantinople, has been credited as having “invented the name Aghed
as the proper name of the event, and announced that his project was
to ‘approach the Catastrophe'” in an interview published in August
1931 in the same monthly.19 In fact, Oshagan aimed to write about the
process (the “Catastrophe”) and the outcome of 1915; he published the
first two volumes of his novel, Mnatsortats (Those Who Remained),
from 1931-33, but never tackled the event itself–in a planned
third volume, The Hell–for the rest of his life. As his son, writer
and literary scholar Vahé Oshagan (1922-2000) explained, the only
reason Oshagan père put off the novel “was his fear that his heart
might not resist the shock of a visit to the site of the massacres,
and that was exactly what happened.”20
At the intersection of history and literature, it should become
clear–even to those historians who tend to see the genocide in
terms of contingency and not continuity21–that 1915, far from being
an isolated event ascribed to a given set of political-military
events having arisen early that year, was an integral part of a
decades-long process that was aimed at gradually erasing, physically
and spiritually, an entire people. The forcible expulsion of Armenians
from their ancient homeland into the twilight zone of history was the
zenith of this genocidal catastrophe. “The modern catastrophe is not
linked to a single event, which would only be the genocide of 1915. It
is rather part of a long process, composed by mini-events that started
after the Congress of Berlin (1878). The massacres of 1894-1896, the
latent repression of following years, the massacres of Cilicia in 1909,
constituted the core of this immense drama,” points out Beledian.22
Therefore, it sounds reasonable to suggest the name Aghed (Catastrophe)
for the entire cycle of Turkish destruction from 1878-1922 (tantamount
to Shoah as the name for the cycle of Nazi destruction from 1933-45)
that encompassed the systematic annihilation of the Medz Yeghern
(Great Evil Crime) of 1915-17 (compare with the “Final Solution” of
March 1942 to April 1945). The explicit legal and implicit existential
content of “crime” and “evil” in the word yeghern might satisfy the
terminological approaches of both historians and literary scholars.
‘Yeghern’ = ‘Aghed’?
The subtitle “genocide” appears to have worked as a magic wand
for Armenian Americans during the many U.S. screenings of German
filmmaker Eric Friedler’s documentary “Aghét: a Genocide” (“Aghét:
ein Völkermord”) from Capitol Hill to California in 2010. After being
exposed to a relentless repetition of “Great Calamity” over the years,
its sponsors and watchers probably saw the word aghed as another
fancy word for literate Armenians and a “synonym” of Medz Yeghern. If
such were the case, any translator of Medz Yeghern as “catastrophe,”
“calamity,” or “disaster” from the United States to Turkey would be at
pains to explain how it had come to “replace” Aghed as a “synonym,”
and how the memory and use of Aghed had been almost completely lost
to present-day Armenians. Anyone proficient in the Armenian language
may subscribe to literary scholar Taline Voskeritchian’s comment,
“I am not certain how many people in the U.S.-Armenian community
use the term aghét when they talk about the genocide, but they are
perhaps two handfuls at the most,”23 and make it extensive over the
rest of the Armenian world, where aghed (Õ¡Õ²Õ§Õ¿) is commonly used
for natural catastrophes. For instance, 25 years after the terrible
earthquake of 1988, Gyumri, the second city of Armenia, is still
called aghedi kodi (Õ¡Õ²Õ§Õ¿Õ” Õ£O…Õ¿Õ”, “disaster zone”).24
Italian historian Aldo Ferrari categorically pointed out the semantic
difference between yeghern and aghed in the article “La Turchia e il
genocidio del popolo armeno: un problema historiografico?” (“Turkey and
the Genocide of the Armenian People: A Historiographical Problem?”),
first published in 2002: “On April 24, 1915 it started what Armenians
call ‘the great catastrophe’ (mec aÅ~Bet [aghed]) or ‘the great
crime’ (mec eÅ~Bern [yeghern]).”25 Turkish journalist Yavuz Baydar
probably does not read Italian; otherwise, in 2010 he would have
refrained from writing that April 24, 1915 is “now commemorated as
the symbolic beginning of what Armenians call ‘Meds Yeghern’–or
‘Aghet’–(Catastrophe), which most of them regard as ‘genocide.'”26
‘Tseghasbanutiun’ in 1933
It is noteworthy that British historian Arnold Toynbee gave his 1916
book Atrocities in Armenia the subtitle, The Murder of a Nation.
Former U.S. Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire (1913-1916) Henry
Morgenthau likely borrowed the subtitle for chapter 24 of his memoirs,
first published in 1918, when former U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt
almost literally used “great crime” when advocating for an American
declaration of war to Turkey: “We should go to war…because the
Armenian massacre was the greatest crime of the war, and failure
to act against Turkey is to condone it.”27 Lemkin, who had first
proposed qualifying “the destruction of racial, religious, or social
collectivities a crime under the law of nations” in 1933,28 combined
the latent concepts of “greatest crime” and “murder of a nation”
to create the word genocide in 1943.
A notable journalist and political figure, Shavarsh Missakian
(1884-1957), first used tseghasbanutiun with its contemporary meaning
in December 1945.29 Its oldest known recording in a dictionary is
from 1968.30
However, the oft-repeated statement that Missakian’s use was first31
should be taken with a grain of salt. French historian Yves Ternon more
than 20 years ago underscored that tseghasbanutiun predated Lemkin’s
invention of the concept and noted that it had been used in Mardiros
Sarian’s little known booklet “Fait accompli,” but stated that it
“was hardly used to qualify the massacres of 1915.”32 The latter
claim is inaccurate, since Sarian transcribed the conversation he had
reportedly overheard in February 1916–a translation of the actual
dialogue in Turkish–between an Ottoman military officer, Husni Bey
(later revealed to be of Albanian origin), and Young Turk official
Nejib Bey, where Husni Bey labeled the annihilation with the Turkish
equivalent of tseghasbanutiun: “What was our government’s purpose
in annihilating this race this way–in its entirety and with such
antihuman tortures? To tell you the truth, I have never been able
to understand what led to that decision. What harm could this race
have done us in that life and death struggle, since we had taken
soldiers between the age of 20 and 45 from the Armenians on the eve
of the war during the general conscription? How could the old men,
children, women, and young girls of the Armenians have hurt us? And
furthermore, in what century, in what country, in what legend has a
tseghasbanutiun like that one carried out with such bestial methods,
ever been seen before?”33
Indeed, it would be ahistorical to translate tseghasbanutiun
as “genocide” here. Sarian published his small book in 1933,
coincidentally the same year that Lemkin made his proposal to define
a crime that still would not have a name for a decade. It remains
an open question whether the booklet could have inspired Missakian,
a keen student of language who may have coined the Armenian word
independently and who, nevertheless, should maintain the credit for
linking tseghasbanutiun with “genocide.”
We may surmise that Sarian created a compound word, tsegh-a-sbanutiun
(“race murder”), to translate the likely Turkish original, bir ırkın
katli, instead of using the expression, tseghi me sbanutiun (“murder
of a race”); the Turkish ırk (“race”) was also used with the meaning
of “nation” in the early 20th century,34 the same as the word tsegh
(“race”) in Armenian. There is nothing odd in this: Other languages
such as German, French, Greek, and Polish had even older terms to
designate the concept of race extermination.35 Morgenthau similarly
employed “race extermination” instead of “extermination of a race” in
his telegram of July 16, 1915: “Deportation of and excesses against
peaceful Armenians is increasing, and from harrowing reports of
eye-witnesses it appears that a campaign of race extermination is
in progress.”36
The Meaningful Term ‘Medz Yeghern’
“They have in the collective memory of Europe the memory of the
Holocaust, Gulag, Porrajmos (murder of the European Roma in the Third
Reich), Holodomor (Soviet famine catastrophe in the Ukraine), Aghet or
Yeghern (genocide of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire), and other
genocides, sociocides, ethnocides, and other social crimes, and above
all the gigantic forceful demographic shifts in Central and Eastern
Europe triggered by the two war decades of 1912-1922 and 1939-1949.”37
This excerpt comes from a 2009 article by Stefan Troebst, a professor
at the University of Leipzig, in a collection about Poland and its
neighbors over the past two centuries. Such use of yeghern in a study
completely unrelated to the Armenians is just one example of how this
word is slowly becoming recognizable in academic scholarship, while
many Armenian Americans have boisterously protested and condemned
the use of Medz Yeghern, claiming to have never heard the word.
Medz Yeghern has also begun to permeate genocide studies, as
exemplified by the extensive article “Genocide” of the New Catholic
Encyclopedia by Professor Siobhan F. Nash-Marshall from Manhattanville
College. Despite her adoption of the mistranslation “Metz Yeghern
= Great Calamity,” probably due to misleading information in her
sources, she has accurately established the relation between Medz
Yeghern and genocide on the same level of the usage of Shoah and
genocide, namely, as proper name and qualifier. For instance, here
is the beginning of her critique of Lemkin’s definition of genocide:
“The shortcomings of Lemkin’s definition, which is historically based,
concern those significant features of the crimes against the Armenians
and Jews that Lemkin himself viewed as paradigm instances of genocide
(the Metz Yeghern and Shoah, respectively) and that Lemkin did not
adequately include in his definition of genocide.”38
The establishment of its credentials should help Medz Yeghern,
the Great Evil Crime, to recover its status as distinctive proper
name–above the pedestrian use of the common name “Armenian Genocide”
as proper name–and assert the unique identity of what historian
Hilmar Kaiser has labeled “the first administratively organized
genocide of history.”39 It would also help debunk the mistaken
assumption that Medz Yeghern, the proper name of the systematic and
premeditated annihilation of the Armenians by the Turkish state, is
“a meaningless term to all those who do not speak Armenian,” in the
words of Armenian-American commentator Harut Sassounian.40 We have
brought enough proof that it is a meaningful way to name the event,
as it is the case with Shoah, Porrajmos, Holodomor, or Sayfo for the
Jewish, Roma, Ukrainian, or Assyrian genocides.
Notes
1 The Armenian Weekly, April 11, 1981.
2 William Safire, Safire’s Political Dictionary, New York: Oxford
University Press, 2008, p. 319. For a groundbreaking etymological
study of the use of the word before and after 1948, see Jon Petrie,
“The Secular Word HOLOCAUST: Scholarly Myth, History, and 20th Century
Meanings,” Journal of Genocide Research, 1, 2000, pp. 31-63.
3 The Armenian Weekly, April 11, 1981.
4 Israel W. Charny (ed.), Encyclopedia of Genocide, vol. 1, Santa
Barbara (Ca.): ABC-CLIO, 1999, p. 42.
5 Petrie, “The Secular Word HOLOCAUST,” p. 33. Charny has wrongly
ascribed the authorship to Dr. N[azaret] Daghavarian and Khosrov
(penname of Armen Ardontz) and dated the book in 1911 (Charny,
Encyclopedia, p. 42).
6 Bernard Lewis, The Emergence of Modern Turkey, second edition,
New York: Oxford University Press, 1968, p. 356 (the first edition,
in 1961, wrote “holocaust of 1916”).
7 See
www1.yadvashem.org/yv/en/holocaust/resource_center/the_holocaust.asp.
8 Charny (ed.), Encyclopedia, p. 43 (emphasis in original).
9 The New York Times, Dec. 6, 2010.
10 See
11 See
12 Marc Nichanian, “Sarafian and the Conquest of Exile,” in
Nigoghos Sarafian, The Bois de Vincennes, translated by Christopher
Atamian, Dearborn (MI): The Armenian Research Center, University of
Michigan-Dearborn, 2011, p. 9
13 S. Shahen, Tanjvatznere (Patkerner hay agheti taragrutenen), New
York: Haig, 1917. The title of sociologist Bakhshi Ishkhanian’s book,
Agheti yev tarapanki ashkharhits (ayts tiurkahay pakhstakannerin)
(From the Land of Catastrophe and Suffering: Visit to the Turkish
Armenian Refugees) (Tiflis: Press of the Viceroy of the Caucasus,
1915), does not specifically name the event.
14 Hushardzan April Tasnemeki (Monument to April Eleven),
Constantinople: O. Arzuman, 1919, p. 128.
15 Teotig, “Hay verki ‘banase’ner” (Panaceas of Armenian Wounds),
in idem, Amenun taretsuytse (Everyone’s Almanach), vol. X-XIV,
Constantinople, 1916-1920, p. 170; idem, “Migamatzner hay horizonen”
(Nebulae of the Armenian Horizon), in idem, p. 181.
16 See the catalogue of Armenian books for the years 1915-30 in the
Hagop Meghapart Project ().
17 R. Lernian [Liparit Nazariantz], “Metz agheti nakhorein”
(On the Eve of the Great Catastrophe), Hairenik Amsakir, March,
April and June 1927; idem, “Metz agheti orerun” (In the Days of the
Great Catastrophe), Hairenik Amsakir, December 1927, March 1928,
and June 1928.
18 Krikor Beledian, “L’expérience de la catastrophe dans la
littérature arménienne,” Revue d’histoire arménienne contemporaine,
1, 1995, p. 131.
19 Marc Nichanian, The Historiographical Perversion, translated by
Gil Anidjar, New York: Columbia University Press, 2009, p. 15.
20 Vahé Oshagan, “The Theme of the Genocide in Diaspora Prose,”
Armenian Review, Spring 1985, p. 57.
21 See the discussion in Taner Akcam, The Young Turks Crime against
Humanity: The Armenian Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing in the Ottoman
Empire, Princeton and London: Princeton University Press, 2012, pp.
126-129.
22 Beledian, “L’expérience de la catastrophe,” p. 135.
23 Taline Voskeritchian, “Between Massacre and Genocide: On Eric
Friedler’s ‘Aghét: Nation Murder,'” Jadaliyya, May 16, 2011
().
24 See
25 Aldo Ferrari, L’Ararat e la gru: Studi sulla storia e la cultura
degli armeni, Milan: Mimesis, 2003, p. 233.
26 Today’s Zaman, April 26, 2010.
27 Theodore Roosevelt, Letters and Speeches, New York: Library of
America, 2004, p. 736 (emphasis added).
28 Raphael Lemkin, “Genocide as a Crime under International Law,”
American Journal of International Law, 1, 1947, p. 146.
29 Haraj-50, Paris: Haratch, 1975, pp. 185-186.
30 Ardashes Der Khachadurian, Hrant Kankruni, and Paramaz G.
Doniguian, Hayots lezvi nor bararan (New Dictionary of the Armenian
Language), Beirut: G. Doniguian and Sons, 1968, p. 855.
31 See Beledian, “L’expérience de la catastrophe,” p. 131; Khatchig
Mouradian, “From Yeghern to Genocide: Armenian Newspapers, Raphael
Lemkin, and the Road to the UN Genocide Convention,” Haigazian
Armenological Review, vol. 29, 2009, p. 128.
32 Yves Ternon, Enquête sur la négation d’un génocide, Rocquevaire:
Parenthèses, 1989, p. 218. See also Kurt Jonassohn with Karin Solveig
Björnson, Genocide and Gross Human Rights Violations in Comparative
Perspective, New Brunswick (NJ): Transaction, 1998, p. 151.
33 Mardiros Sarian, Fe d’agombli yev Astutzo dem paterazm. Polis Nuri
Osmaniyei mej Ittihatakanneru gaghtni voroshumnere. hayots bnajnjman
sharzharitneru masin (Fait Accompli and War against God. The Secret
Decisions of the Ittihadists in Nuri Osmaniyeh, in Constantinople:
On the Motives for the Extermination of the Armenians), Paris: n.p.,
1933, p. 4.
34 See Stephan Astourian, “Modern Turkish Identity and the Armenian
Genocide,” in Richard Hovannisian (ed.), Richard Hovannisian (ed.),
Remembrance and Denial: The Case of the Armenian Genocide, Detroit:
Wayne State University Press, 1999, pp. 45-46.
35 Jonassohn and Björnson, Genocide and Gross Human Rights Violations,
p. 151.
36 Quoted in Ara Sarafian (ed.), British Parliamentary Debates on
the Armenian Genocide, 1915-1918, Reading: Taderon Press, 2003, p. 64.
Morgenthau’s memoirs or telegrams do not seem to contain the expression
“race murder” ascribed to him (Samantha Power, “A Problem from Hell”:
America and the Age of Genocide, New York: Perennial, 2002, p. 1:
title of the chapter, “Race Murder,” p. 6: “What he called ‘race
murder’ was under way”).
37 Stefan Troebst, “Europäisierung der Vertreibungserinnerung? Eine
deutsch-polnische Chronique scandaleuse 2002-2008,” in Martin
Aust, Krzysztof Ruchnewicz and Stefan Troebst (eds.), Verflochtene
Erinnerungen: Polen und seine Nachbarn im 19. und 20. Jahrundert,
Cologne, Weimar, and Vienna: Böhlau, 2009, p. 245.
38 Siobhan F. Nash-Marshall, “Genocide,” in Robert L. Fastiggi (ed.),
New Catholic Encyclopedia, supplement 2009, Detroit: Gale/Cengage
Learning, 2010, pp. 352-353.
39 Hilmar Kaiser, Luther Eskijian, and Nancy Eskijian, At the
Crossroads of Der Zor: Death, Survival, and Humanitarian Resistance,
London: Gomidas Institute, 2001, p. XI.
40 The Armenian Weekly, February 12, 2013.
http://www.armenianweekly.com/2013/08/02/what-our-words-mean-towards-the-vindication-of-medz-yeghern/
http://americanheritage.yourdictionary.com/shoah.
www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/DCPD-201300229/…/DCPD-201300229.htm.
www.nla.am/arm/meghapart
www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/1591/between-massacre-and-genocide_on-eric-friedlers-ag
www.armtimes.com/tag/4539.