Edition Mezopotamya

Against censorship and the restriction of diversity of opinion in Germany

On February 12, 2019, the Neuss-based Mezopotamien Verlag was banned by a decree of the Federal Ministry of the Interior. A unique event in the history of the Federal Republic of Germany. An entire publishing house was summarily declared to be part of the PKK, which is banned in Germany, and all of its media was confiscated.

Mezopotamien Verlag published literature on Kurdish history and the Kurdish language in various languages, as well as numerous writings on the idea and practice of democratic confederalism. In addition, novels, children's and young people's books, collections of poems, dictionaries and textbooks were found in his publishing program.

None of these books have been objected to under criminal or civil law or even banned in the past. Even today, the ban on the publishing house is not aimed at the individual media, but tons of them have been confiscated. This is political censorship 'through the back door'. It is obvious that books, brochures and CDs that are not legally objectionable should be taken out of circulation for political reasons with a legal construct and withheld from the critical public. This is an unacceptable encroachment on the constitutionally protected freedom of the press and publication.

Numerous media professionals, publishers and bookstores therefore issued a protest note during the Leipzig Book Fair 2019 calling for the ban to be lifted. As was unfortunately to be expected, there was no reaction from those responsible.

A group of well-known publishers, who are firmly opposed to censorship and the restriction of diversity of opinion, have opposed the censorship of the German Federal Ministry of the Interior with Edition Mezopotamya and have reissued part of the admittedly rather small German-language program from Mezopotamien Verlag. The titles are published in a joint edition by the publishers edition 8, Mandelbaum Verlag and Unrast Verlag, in order to make at least these few titles available again to the book trade and interested German-speaking readers.

We are also co-editors of the current edition

In addition, a few weeks ago Seitenhieb Verlag relaunched the small series of publications by the International Initiative for Freedom Abduallah Öcalan - you can find them here in the category