A courageous woman! - ZEYNEP TOZDUMAN

 Below is a public statement from the Chairperson ofIzmir Council of Piece Zeynep Tozduman

--

 I hope someone has  to make a poster out of  this.

FROM

ZEYNEP TOZDUMAN - IZMIR,TURKEY

April 24, 2013

 MY APOLOGY

FROM ALL THE PEOPLES OF ANATOLIASUBJECTED TO GENOCIDE.

I apologize for every single day that we have remained silent since the days of genocide.

I apologize for our grandfathers who

cooperated with the murderers carrying out the brutal massacre of 1.5 million people in Anatolia.

I apologize from your young girls for

permanently burying their hopes into their dowry chests.

I apologize from all your people left dead without a proper burial, shroud or cemeteries.

I apologize for causing you to add the word'converted - Donme' to your vocabulary.

I apologize from all your girls and women abused and raped, forcefully converted to Kurd, Turk, Alevi or Islam.

I apologize for forcing you to become the Diaspora and scatter like pomegranate seeds to all corners of the world.

I apologize for forcing you to long for your homeland with broken hearts from the faraway deportation points.

I apologize for preventing you from giving your children proper names and education in your mother tongue, a basic human right.

I apologize for confiscating your houses,properties, lands, farms, orchards, and shops to create our national economy, based on a

disease of racism in this country.

I apologize for denying even the very existence of the original peoples of these lands after subjecting them to economic, cultural and political genocide.

I apologize for confiscating your places ofworship (monastery, church, synagogue, Jemhouse, etc.) and converting them to mosques,

museums, community centres or stables.

I apologize from the survivors of the

genocide for even forbidding them fromdreaming in their own language.

I apologize for forcing racism on you by making you repeat every morning 'So happy to be a Turk'.

I apologize for presenting your properties as gifts to your own murderers.

I apologize for transforming the Anatoliangarden of different peoples to a cemetery of different peoples.

I apologize for realizing too late that the sorrow expressed in the song 'Sari Gelin' was in reality the sorrow of the genocide.

I apologize for wiping out the various original peoples of Anatolia, living on these lands long before the arrival of the Turks, and for trying

to create a single nation state.

I apologize for creating a hell of murders in this country, instead of a heaven of humanity.

I apologize for burying all the  named Agop, Kiriakos, Samuel, Ani, Maria or Sarkis in my city Smyrna as well as the rest of thecountry, burying our humanity in the process.

I apologize for committing crimes against humanity for one thousand and four hundred years in these lands.

I apologize for not realizing that fascismwould eventually arrive and start killing us as well in these lands.

I apologize for not being able to put a stop to the denial and assimilation policies for one hundred years.

I apologize especially for our inhumane behaviour during the genocides of theArmenians, Assyrians, Pontic Greeks, Yezidis

and Alevis.

And I apologize once again on this April 24genocide commemoration day, for our inability to protect you and preserve our humanity.

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