The day you replaced love of serving the people and love of country with dozens of screening tests and examinations of belief, and divided compatriots into insiders and outsiders, you planted the seeds of hypocrisy and dissimulation that have now grown so extensively that even among yourselves you can no longer recognise who was an insider and who an outsider. All the masks you forced onto people’s faces now surround you.

Every lie you permitted and every corruption to which you closed your eyes went nowhere and was not lost with the passage of time. Only your debt to truth remained, waiting for the day it would come due.

You opened the door of this sacred homeland to the foreigner when hundreds of thousands of the children of this soil could find no quiet and welcoming corner in which to remain at home.

If there is no love for one’s compatriot, the word homeland becomes empty of meaning. You did not possess—and were incapable of—the great and encompassing love that can gather a nation into its strong embrace and give it peace.

When you placed your name at the top of the world in taking the lives of compatriots, you defined not only the value you placed upon the lives of your own people but the meaning of life on a soil that was yours as well. Alas, how cheap life was for you, unaware that the price you placed upon life would also become the price of yourselves.

We can sit together in this anxious twilight and weep that the crooked wall you built has collapsed upon both us and you. But when the sun rises again, only this land and these people will move forward into tomorrow. May love, truth and the value of living return to this land.