Trying to warn about Hitler’s plans for the Jews, Raphael Lemkin, linguist and jurist, invented the word genocide in 1943 describing the annihilation of the Armenians in 1915,“a systematic destruction of a population segment, or race, by a ruling government.”
were taught them by their
ancestors, Genghis Khan
and Tamerlane.
In 1895 the word
Holocaust was used by missionary
Corwin Shattuck to label the 1895
burning of Armenians in the Urfa cathedral.
These fires leveling
churches with Armenians locked
inside, spread to schools and barns.
Then to neighbors.
Assyrians named it Seifo.
The Greeks, the burning of Smyrna.
The Arabs, Nakba for catastrophe, calamity, disaster.
The Kurds used the words The Anfal.
Africans, apartheid, gypsies, annihilation,
the Syrians, intrafada.
The Jews named the crime by the Nazis, Shoah.
Then the Balkans called it ethnic cleansing.
But the present day Turkish label
for two and a half million lost
Armenians: unavoidable wartime casualties.
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