I Was a Little Child

The first time I heard the word, I asked my mother, “What does dying mean?” I had heard it while my father was watching the news on television. A little child had died, and the lady who said it looked sad. As a child the word was strange to me, but the way it was said was enough to frighten me. And the child who died had been ill for a long time…

After trying to change the subject with evasive answers, my mother bent down, kissed me on the eyes and said, “God willing, you will live a long and beautiful life.” A short while before I died… They did not let me live… Neither me nor thousands like me…

I was a little child, in my mother’s arms. Our house had collapsed, but we had no serious wounds. I was caught in a struggle for life between the growing cold and the shrinking hope. The hopes my mother gave me convinced me less with every hour. My shivering slowly began to fade, and I no longer felt the pain in my fingertips and ears. My mother, who watched my soft little body grow stiff, could no longer hold back her tears. The last thing I remember is falling into a deep sleep. I was a little child who felt for days in the freezing cold the shudder you will feel when you find my lifeless body… I was an innocent child whose hope of rescue died before my body did, whose gravestone bears a number instead of a name…

Yes, I was a little child. When my thin body was crushed between concrete blocks, and when my body, never pulled from the rubble, became “debris”, I was a child. The hands, feet or pieces of a torso you will see among the heaps of broken stone may be what is left of me. I was a child who was begrudged even a shroud and a grave… Where I arrived, Berkin, Ahmet, Abdülkadir, Münir, Aylan and many other children welcomed me. So many children and babies have arrived here new like me. And after me they keep coming… Though we do not want it, our number here grows every day…

I was a little child who had gone out to buy bread. I was biting off a piece of the bread I had bought and playing my way home. How could I have known these would be my last steps? The last thing I remember was a noise and an unbearable pain. Before I could swallow the bite I had torn off, you tore me from life. Yet I was a little child; even when you mercilessly booed me and my weeping mother, I was a child under the earth.  

I was a little child, writhing in the grip of a serious illness, weak and frail. Yes, I was ill, but my hopes of getting better were locked behind iron bars along with my father. For months I waited to see whether they would let my father be with me… They did not… I needed to go abroad for treatment. This time they wanted to separate me from my mother. Every day I waited for my father in pain and longing. I was a child killed while longing for my father, not even allowed to see him one last time.

My brother and I were tiny children. We were the children of a family scattered by a capsized boat, slowly drowning with every breath we took. Even as our lifeless bodies drifted in the cold waters of the Aegean and the Evros, in seasons when you were afraid to swim, you showed no mercy. We were the children you said should die “rather than become terrorists like their mother and father”, for whom imams would not perform the funeral prayer, who were refused a place in the cemetery… We left this world with a debt still owed to us, for the place where you will arrive bearing the burden of so many lives…

…

I am a little child… A child still living, still breathing, with a broken heart… Yes, my body is still a little child’s. But in my soul, in my heart, there seems to be an old man. You made me old before I even turned fifteen. What you put me through… I have come to doubt not only that you are mothers and fathers but even that you are human. In the documentaries I watched, I saw that even some wild animals are more merciful than you. When those documentaries talked about many animals, there was always the phrase: “Only a small number survive to adulthood.” Sadly, our world is no longer any different from theirs…

Leave me alone now, please… Let me live my life. I have no hope of a good life and wide opportunities anyway. However long my life may be, let me at least live that. How many more times must I die so that your children can be richer?

My thin body, my fragile heart can no longer bear what you do. I cannot keep up with your evils, I cannot resist them. What more must I suffer as a child before you are satisfied…

Our house collapsed on our heads, our home and belongings were scattered. Some of us died under the ruins, some of us were rescued wounded.  Instead of caring for those of us who were left, you left us out in the cold, in the snow and the winter. While you, in your huge cars and expensive clothes, fled these places without getting mud on you, we waited shivering for a piece of bread in thin clothes and bare feet.

In the dormitories of religious orders and foundations and in child protection institutions, those who should have protected us committed every kind of evil without mercy, above all violence and abuse. You saved, by the hand of the state, people who should never see the light of day. Ignoring our hearts closed to evil, you said of the ugliness done to us, “there was consent”. You saved those monsters together, and then shamelessly celebrated it…

While I was waiting for a school smock, you forced a wedding dress on me. At an age when I needed a mother’s and father’s tenderness, you gave me to a man as old as my father. You laid the blame for every perversion you committed on a religion you do not live by.

You put thousands of babies and children in prison together with their mothers.  Are you not afraid of the curse of children who have to stay with relatives because both their mother and father are in prison? Like Ahmet, whom you sent into the earth longing for his father, you are condemning me to longing for my mother. Do you think no one hears the moans you stop your ears against?

How much longer will you destroy us for the ambitions of men who have less life left than the brief life I left behind… Children, babies are the future of a country and a nation. You speak of us as your future, but are you aware how badly you have built our country’s future, just like the rotten houses you built?

As mothers and fathers who fret that not a hair on your own children’s heads should be harmed, how could you think we deserved such cruelty? Tell me, when did you become so evil?