Each year the Frankfurt Book Fair elects a country as Guest of Honour. Through an agreement signed on the 26th of September 2006 between the organisation behind the Book Fair and the Ministry of Culture of the Turkish Republic, Turkey was elected Guest of Honour of the 2008 Fair. Subsequently the Ministry of Culture budgeted 7 million euros to this great event which takes place the 15th – 19th of October. In close cooperation with Turkish publishers, the Ministry of Culture intends to implement a program aiming to promote Turkey in the Frankfurt Book Fair.
We wish to emphasize the fact that we harbour no negative sentiments what so ever towards the Frankfurt Book Fair itself. Occurrences like this play an immensely important role in promoting national and universal cultures and literature as well as in the interaction and mutual influencing of each other. It is only natural for every country wanting to participate in international events to promote their culture, literature, folklore and themselves as a whole. ¬In this frame of general principles it is a quite natural and legitimate wish for Turkey to want to participate in international events in order to promote her own culture.
However, the matter is not all that innocent. Is Turkey going to spend 7 million euros on promoting its culture and values, or does Turkey intend to make chauvinistic and nationalistic propaganda in accordance with its racist state traditions? It has by now become quite clear that Turkey’s prepared program aims solely on displaying “the grandeur of the Turkish state”. First and foremost, keeping its current state and government policies in mind Turkey should never have been elected Guest of Honour to such a platform of culture and literature in that Turkey does not deserve such a status.
There is no doubt in our minds that the management of the Frankfurt Book Fair has made a mistake on this matter. This kind of recognition from an international culture platform should not have been given to a country which oppresses national, ethnic and religious communities within its own borders, conducts assimilation and genocide and shows an enormous lack of tolerance towards different cultures and finally designs policies aimed at wiping out the very same cultures.
Turkey today seeks to attain the total annihilation of the linguistic and cultural existence of the country’s own ethnic and religious minorities with the Kurdish people being the prime target. Why is a country, which tries to drive whole cultures to extinction and conducts cultural holocaust, being rewarded with honorary titles at an international platform of culture? How is it possible for the publisher community of a leading nation in the EU, which is founded on democratic norms, values and traditions, to make such a mistake? Turkey’s policies show a mentality of sheer cultural imperialism both domestically, regionally and internationally. In Turkey there is an unadulterated massacre going on aiming directly at the Kurdish language, culture and folklore.
The Turkish State has for decades now been trying to assimilate the Kurds linguistically and culturally, and in recent years these efforts have reached genocidal proportions. It must be one of the greatest paradoxes in the German intellectual world that a huge and esteemed cultural event like the Frankfurt Book Fair offers such a status to a Turkish State which in return conducts a war of annihilation in Kurdistan on religious, cultural and literary levels.
The Turkish State which finds it appropriate to limit and prevent the publishing of Kurdish books, should have been invited not as Guest of Honour, but in stead as a subject of criticism and persecution due to Turkey’s oppression of ethnic and religious communities. We as Kurds are openly and bluntly criticising the management of the Frankfurt Book Fair.
We as Kurds are also protesting the chauvinistic and racist policies of the Turkish Republic towards the whole of the Kurdish people and its language, culture, folklore and literature, and we accuse Turkey of acting flat out dishonourable and of being a foe of books and culture.
The Language and Education Commission of the Kurdish National Congress The Kurdish Institute of BrusselsThe Kurdish Institute of GermanyThe Kurdish Institute of StockholmKon-KurdYek-KomKurdish Teachers Association The Kurdish Alewite FederationThe Federation of Yezidi Societies The Islamic Community of Kurdistan
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