Turkish Writer “Risking Life and Freedom” To Speak Up on Armenian Genocide
YEREVAN (Armenpress) -Turkish writer, Serkan Engin, considers it an obligation to speak up about the Armenian, Greek and Assyrian genocides in Ottoman Turkey.
“This is an ethical duty for me as an honest and honorable intellectual,” Engin has said in an interview with Armenpress. Engin continues:
This is my debt and obligation to humanity. I want to talk about all these genocides perpetrated by my Turk ancestors, because, in Turkey, you must declare the truth loudly, against the lies of the so-called official history.
I’m the child who shouts ‘The Emperor is naked.’ I’m devoting myself to the truth at the cost of my life and freedom, because I want to create and increase awareness about these atrocities, so that similar crimes against humanity won’t be perpetrated again.
I refuse to be ‘proud of’ my ancestors who raped little girls, burned children alive, enslaved women and brutally slaughtered millions of innocent people,” the Laz-Turkish poet said.
I refuse to shout ‘How happy is he, who says I’m a Turk’ every morning in school playgrounds. I reject the education system which tells our children a racist motto like ‘One Turk is equal to the whole world.’ I don’t want to see any fascist youth in my country, or in any other country.
We have to tell our kids that all people of the world are equal to each other, whatever their ethnicity, language, belief or gender. I want an education system in Turkey which reveals the importance of art, philosophy, and science.
Engin is against all types of “heroic tales” because, he says, politicians, generals and arms industry corporations use heroic tales for their own benefit, so that they can send poor young men to war zones to kill each other.
“I’m an anti-militarist and proud of this. My heart and my pen are my only weapons. I stand behind all the oppressed people in the world, as an internationalist socialist poet and author, and my mission is to be the voice of them. I’m a little child in an adult’s body who wants to love the whole world with childish pureness,” the writer stressed.
On Oct. 23, several Turkish journalists visited Yerevan and made a trip to the Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute (AGMI). They were in Armenia for the “Media Bus Tour” project, organized by the Eurasia Partnership Foundation.
The journalists visited the temporary exhibition hall of the museum and were acquainted with an exhibition dedicated to the centennial of WWI.
After that, they had a meeting and active discussion with Hayk Demoyan, the Director of the Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute and the Secretary of State Commission on coordination of the events dedicated to the 100th Anniversary of the Armenian Genocide.