Below is a public statement from
the Chairperson of Izmir
Council of Peace
Zeynep
Tozduman, made on April, 2013
Frome ZEYNEP TOZDUMAN -
Izmir,Turkey
April 24, 2013
MY APOLOGY
FROM ALL THE PEOPLES OF
ANATOLIA SUBJECTED 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
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.
