We are welcoming the Newroz which is the symbol of freedom, life, and struggle in a difficult period. Soon, people will go to the polls in order to elect the local administrations. The campaigns and arguments carried out by the parties demonstrate the challenges that we have been going through.
In a period of time where the hopes about the solution of political and economic problems decrease, our despair is deepened by a couple of worrying international developments.
Lastly, the deep pain caused the massacre of 50 Muslims in 2 mosques in Christchurch, New Zeland put the wind on everybody who considers themselves as human beings. This massacre proved how discriminatory nationalist and racist politics and discourses which demonize, marginalize the different can black the whole humanity out. In these days, we all have been going through the shame and pain of this fact.
The are people who stage a hunger strike in many prisons in our country at the moment. Last week one of the hunger strikers, Zülküf Gezen, put an end to his life. It is as if we are all waiting for the new deaths in a big silence. It has been a long time since the holiness of the right to live has been forgotten. We are in a “darkness where everyone has been burnt” by this shame.
There is no difficulty that we cannot overcome through turning our face to humanity, opening our heart to peace, justice, goodness, and novelty and joining our hands. The way out from here is to revive the idea of peace and to claim humanity despite everything.
Let’s remember the wind of peace in the country created by the new start in Newroz in 2013. As we have learned from the lessons of the past, we can prevent our country to be harmed by others only by reviving the peace and stopping excluding the other. We can stop the deaths. We can open the door for peace.
Happy Newroz! Newroz piroz be!
Board of Directors of the Peace Foundation
20th of March, 2019
Peace is the most essential value that human being reached so far. The nature and the human being have to be together in order to survive. Peace is the essence of life. The history of humanity arrived today through peaces, not wars.