MY APOLOGY FROM ALL THE PEOPLES OF ANATOLIA SUBJECTED TO GENOCIDE

[Yervant1]

MY APOLOGY FROM ALL THE PEOPLES OF ANATOLIA SUBJECTED TO GENOCIDE

BY STAFF
- POSTED ON MAY 7, 2014

FROM

ZEYNEP TOZDUMAN - IZMIR,TURKEY

April 24, 2013

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 veryexistence of the original
peoples of these lands after subjecting them to economic, cultural
and political genocide.

I apologize for confiscating your places of worship (monastery,
church, synagogue, Jem house, etc.) and converting them to mosques,

museums, community centres or stables.

I apologize from the survivors of the

genocide for even forbidding them from dreaming 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 Anatolian garden 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 namedAgop, Kiriakos, Samuel, Ani,
Maria or Sarkis in my city Smyrna as well as the rest of the country,
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 fascism would 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 the Armenians, Assyrians, Pontic Greeks, Yezidis

and Alevis.

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

http://www.armenianlife.com/2014/05/07/my-apology-from-all-the-peoples-of-anatolia-subjected-to-genocide/