ERBIL, Kurdistan Region, Iraq — Tens of thousands participated in the 17th Erbil International Book Fair April 9-19. The event took place amid sharpening national struggles, class conflicts and wars across the Middle East and worldwide.
The book fair itself registers advances over recent decades in the Kurdish people’s century-long struggle for a homeland. Those advances include the establishment of an autonomous region in northeastern Iraq, following the brutal 2003 Washington-led invasion and occupation of Iraq.
This year the fair was held under the banner “The World Speaks Kurdish.” Stands featuring books written in or translated into Kurdish were given prominence.
“We’re the largest nation in the world without a state,” Ashty Latif, a worker at the book fair, told the Militant. “We will get independence because it is our right. Every Kurdish family, including my own, has sacrificed for independence.”
Kurds are an oppressed nation of over 30 million living in an area carved up between Turkey, Syria, Iran and Iraq. In Iraq Kurds suffered murderous repression under the Saddam Hussein tyranny, including the genocidal 1988 Anfal campaign in which tens of thousands were killed and others forced from their homes. It culminated with the infamous chemical weapons massacre at Halabja.
Publishers from all four parts of divided Kurdistan were present, along with Arabic-language publishers from across the Middle East and North Africa. A small number of stands presenting books in English were swamped.
An events stage had a nonstop program of book presentations and panel discussions. Topics were wide-ranging — Kurdish history and archaeology; literature, translation and publishing; science and technology; Kurdish-Arab relations and conflicts; women’s rights; and the rights of ethnic and religious minorities in Iraq. Evenings were dedicated to musical performances and poetry recitals.
The London distributor of books published by New York-based Pathfinder Press had a booth for the fifth time, having first participated in 2017. On Ashty Latif’s visit to the stand, she was interested to learn how communist workers in the U.S. and elsewhere explain to co-workers why they and others the world over should support and defend the Kurdish uprising in the wake of the 1990-91 Gulf War.
Doing so was part of a campaign by the Socialist Workers Party in the U.S. to expose Washington’s predatory aims and murderous actions in that imperialist war. That political fight is described in the article “Washington’s Assault on Iraq: Opening Guns of World War III” by Jack Barnes, national secretary of the Socialist Workers Party in the U.S. It’s the cover article in issue no. 7 of New International magazine. Latif decided to buy a copy, and 55 were sold in total, a significant increase from previous years.
Imperialist march to World War III
Those sales were part of a daily discussion on the stakes for working people in confronting the increasingly violent capitalist rivalries and conflicts around the world.
These include the ongoing war to destroy Israel unleashed on Oct. 7, 2023, by the Iranian government, Hamas and their collaborators in Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen and elsewhere. A war launched with the most murderous pogrom since the Holocaust during World War II, a slaughter aimed at annihilating Jews and driving them from the region. And an assault met with resistance by the Israeli people and by the Israeli government’s announced readiness to carry out targeted airstrikes to prevent Tehran from acquiring nuclear weapons threatening the more than 7 million Jews there, as well as some 2 million Palestinians and Arabs.
At the same time, Washington is building up its regional military power to serve the interests of the U.S. capitalist ruling families, deploying two aircraft carrier groups with massive fire power, along with B-2 bombers and F-35 fighter jets. What’s more, since the fall of the Bashar al-Assad dictatorship in Syria last December, defenders of Kurdish national rights in the northeastern part of that country face increasing dangers. And much more.
“There are major wars happening around us,” former Kurdistan Regional Government President Masoud Barzani said at the opening of the book fair. “Most importantly, those now in charge in Baghdad must do everything possible to ensure Iraq does not become entangled in these conflicts.”
But bloody clashes between the U.S. rulers and their imperialist rivals to divide the spoils of world domination, as well as conflicts among smaller capitalist powers, ensure that the march toward a third world war will increase unless the working class and other exploited toilers take power out of the hands of the warmakers.
Overwhelmingly, fairgoers saw the blows suffered by Tehran and the collapse of the Assad tyranny as positive. At the same time, some also expressed hopes that U.S. imperialism could be relied upon to protect Kurds against assaults by the expansionist rulers both in Iran and Turkey. The book fair’s opening session fell on what’s known here as “Baghdad Liberation Day,” a public holiday marking the 2003 overthrow of the Saddam Hussein regime by invading U.S. forces.
But many were open to an internationalist, working-class perspective. “Millions would die in another world war,” Nihad Hadi Younis, a 22-year-old student at Soran University, said, expressing special concern about the growing conflict between Washington and Beijing. “I want to know what we can do to prevent that.”
Younis decided to buy The Low Point of Labor Resistance Is Behind Us — The Socialist Workers Party Looks Forward by SWP leaders Jack Barnes, Mary-Alice Waters and Steve Clark. The authors present a working-class political course in face of the “deepening cracks in the world order established by the victors of the inter-imperialist slaughter known in the United States as World War II,” Waters wrote in the preface.
“I want to learn about people in the world who are fighting for freedom and a better life,” Younis said. “We need to unite to overcome the difficulties we face.”
Thirty-six copies were sold of that title. Other big sellers addressing related questions included Malcolm X, Black Liberation, and the Road to Workers Power (31 copies); “Capitalism’s Long Hot Winter Has Begun,” an article featured in New International no. 12 (15); and The Turn to Industry — Forging a Proletarian Party (10), all by SWP leader Jack Barnes.
Pathfinder’s total sales were 1,338 books. The most popular were Are They Rich Because They’re Smart? Class, Privilege, and Learning Under Capitalism (95) by Barnes; Labor, Nature, and the Evolution of Humanity — The Long View of History (84) by Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, George Novack and Waters; and Cosmetics, Fashion, and the Exploitation of Women (94) by Evelyn Reed, Joseph Hansen and Waters (see accompanying article). Other titles on the fight for women’s emancipation were in high demand, as were the speeches of Malcolm X.
Rebuilding after Islamic State
Another feature of the fair was the recovery from the invasion and reign of terror by Islamic State, which brutally occupied and terrorized parts of northern Iraq and Syria from 2014 to 2017, made worse by the destruction inflicted by U.S. bombardment in the course of IS’s defeat. The Kurdistan region became a refuge for hundreds of thousands fleeing Mosul and the surrounding Islamic State-seized areas, especially Christians facing murderous repression and Yazidis escaping the reactionary thug outfit’s attempt to exterminate them.
One program discussed the achievement of rebuilding the renowned Mosul Central University Library, which was destroyed by Islamic State. Volunteers helping to expand a mobile library in Mosul went around the fair collecting book donations. Pathfinder made a donation this year, as it had done to Mosul libraries in 2018 just months after the city’s liberation.
Two young Yazidi women came by the Pathfinder stand on the first day. One of them said she would be presenting “Daughters of the Sun,” a film about women enslaved by Islamic State, at the April 25-May 3 London Kurdish Film Festival. Her friend bought Is Biology Woman’s Destiny? in Arabic. Several more Yazidis came by to talk and buy books.
A good number of participants in the fair knew Pathfinder from previous years. Among them was medical student Rose Hatam, who first got to know volunteers at the stand as a high school student in 2018. “Every year, I find myself returning to the same place,” she said in an email the day after visiting the fair. “Pathfinder isn’t just about selling books — it’s about providing people with facts and encouraging them to think for themselves.”
An expanding range of Pathfinder titles was available in Arabic — published by Damascus-based Takwen and Nousous of Baghdad — and in Kurdish, published by the Idea Foundation. This includes Are They Rich Because They’re Smart? and Labor, Nature, and the Evolution of Humanity in both languages. Pathfinder is working with regional publishers on further translations.
Aso Haydari, owner of a newly opened bookshop here in Erbil, visited the Pathfinder booth several times and bought 120 books. Consisting of six titles in Arabic and their English counterparts, they included Capitalism’s Long Hot Winter Has Begun and Malcolm X, Black Liberation, and the Road to Workers Power by Barnes, as well as Is Biology Woman’s Destiny? by Evelyn Reed and The First and Second Declarations of Havana, adopted by million-strong assemblies of the Cuban people amid their victorious socialist revolution at the opening of the 1960s.
“The duty of every revolutionist is to make the revolution,” the Second Declaration of Havana insists — a political conviction running throughout these books and others from Pathfinder.