Pope Francis led a Holy Mass for the faithful of the Armenian Rite at the Vatican on April 12. The pontiff also made a homily, in which he declared: "In the past century our human family has lived through three massive and unprecedented tragedies. The first, which is widely considered the first genocide of the 20th century, struck your own Armenian people."

For the centenary of the 1915 events, this is the first really important political message given by an international figure. The declaration has caused very strong feelings of enthusiasm and eagerness among the Armenian diaspora and Armenian authorities. On the other hand, Turkish official reactions were not surprising: The Apostolic nuncio has been summoned to the Foreign Ministry in Ankara, and Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu reacted by tweeting: "Religious positions are not places where unfounded claims are made and hatred is stirred."

As a matter of fact, this is not the first time that the Vatican has qualified the massacres of Armenians in 1915 as genocide. Already, Pope John Paul II, in a letter sent to Karekin II, the Supreme Patriarch and Catholicos of All Armenians, accepted the fact, stipulating that the deaths were considered "the first genocide of the 20th century." In fact, Pope Francis reiterated the Vatican's stance, but in a highly symbolic and unequivocal manner.

Will this help the Armenian cause being better heard at the international level? The problem does not reside there, as there is wide recognition in the international arena that the massacres of Armenians in 1915 and the following years were genocide. The term that was coined by Raphael Lemkin in the aftermath of the Holocaust was accepted by the U.N. in 1948, and is not used retroactively. Lemkin first used the word in print in Europe while it was occupied by the Third Reich in the "Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress" from 1944, and defined it as "the destruction of a nation or an ethnic group."

As a matter of fact, there are unfortunately many cases that took place before 1948, for which the word genocide applies perfectly. Not only the massacres of Armenians, but starting from the Boer war, an enormous amount of ethnic cleansing took place all around the world at the beginning of the 20th century. Very much like the American use of the word "minority," which denotes any group not the "majority," the word genocide could be implemented for any major ethnic cleansing. The Armenian tragedy has a more peculiar place in the sense that it happened in a modern state and amongst mostly urban and highly civilized population, whereas prior ethnic cleansings essentially targeted local, relatively backward, colonized populations.

Pope Francis described the "immense and senseless slaughter" of Armenians. The trouble is that the slaughter did not encompass only the Armenians of the Ottoman Empire. True, a great, multi-millennial culture has totally vanished from its cradle. The Greek civilizations of Anatolia, including the Aegean and Pontic cultures have also totally been wiped out, as well as the hundreds of years of Turkish presence in the Middle East and the Balkans, together with their respective populations. Still today, as seen during the slaughter in Yugoslavia in 1991, Muslim minorities in the Balkans are referred to as "Turks," and were exterminated when conditions were ripe. This is not referred to as genocide, because except the Armenian population, every slaughtered or "cleansed" population could find refuge in a modern nation-state. However, I live in a family that emigrated from Prizren, Kosovo, where the story of my great uncle, Mustafa Asım bey, committing suicide after Serbian militia killed his beloved Serbian wife and their baby back in 1911, is told. Never have I heard my grandfather referring to Serbians as infidels or killers.

The problem today is to know how to reconcile Armenia and Turkey, Turkish-Armenians and Turks, to face a terrible truth together, to try to mend what can be mended. The restitution of foundation belongings to Armenians has been an important step taken in the right direction. So was last year's message from Recep Tayyip Erdoğan deeply regretting the lives lost. I personally have no problem in calling the massacres "genocide," however I do not wish it, because it will incite me to name the killers of my great uncle's wife and child the same way, and this is not a solution.