Radical publishers Pluto Press have put out a statement standing in solidarity with Mesopotamia Publishing House (Mezopotamien Verlag) in Neuss City, Germany, whose offices were raided by the police on March 8. We are amplifying their message and standing with our Kurdish Comrades as well.
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Pluto Press stands in solidarity with our comrades at the Mesopotamia Publishing House (Mezopotamien Verlag) in Neuss City, Germany, whose offices were raided by the police on March 8. According to ANFNews, ‘truckloads of books, CDs, data carriers and business documents’ were confiscated. This act of state repression comes immediately off the back of a visit to Berlin by the Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu.
Mesopotamia Publishing House publishes books on the Kurdish liberation struggle, a message that stands at odds with the Turkish government’s authoritarian policy and ideology. We are angered by the German state’s collusion with Turkey in its repression of the Kurds, as also seen in the German government’s approval of increased arms sales to Turkey in the midst of Erdogan’s ongoing assault on the Kurdish enclave of Afrin in northern Syria.[1] We oppose these attacks on freedom and the right to publish on radical political issues in Germany, a country that purports to have a liberal stance towards human rights.
In April, Pluto will be publishing for the first time in English the autobiography of Sakine Cansiz, which earlier appeared in German in an edition published by Mesopotamia. Cansiz was a female Kurdish revolutionary who, along with Abdullah Ocalan and others, founded the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). She was assassinated in Paris on 9 January 2013 in circumstances that remain officially unresolved.
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[1] http://theregion.org/article/13030-arms-deals-between-turkey-and-germany-are-like-a-well-oiled-machine
