MESSAGE OF SOLIDARITY AND SUPPORT FOR MLPD LEADERS BEING OPPRESSED

By Prof. Jose Maria Sison, Chairperson Emeritus

International League of Peoples’ Struggle

February 20, 2022

As a political scientist and public intellectual, I wish to express resolute and vigorous solidarity with and support for Gabi Fechtner, the party chairwoman of the MLPD, Stefan Engel, head of the theoretical organ of the MLPD, Revolutionärer Weg (Revolutionary Way), and Monika Gärtner-Engel, responsible person for internationalism of the MLPD and Main Coordinator of ICOR1, against the acts of oppression, persecution and vilification conducted against  them by the German domestic intelligence service, the Office for the Protection of the Constitution and by the Criminal Police Office BKA within Germany and Europe.

Since 3 December 2019,  all three MLPD leaders have been maliciously and arbitrarily put on the wanted list in the entire Schengen area in order to have the pretext of surveilling them, harassing them, disrespecting their legal conduct,  intruding into their privacy and casting slander on them by all kinds of state services, police, border guards and other agencies,  whose acts are anti-democratic and unlawful, violate the  separation rule of secret services and police apparatus and remind us of Hitlerite fascism.

I condemn the outrageous policy and practice of the German state and its intelligence services in defaming, spying upon and criminalizing the three MLPD leaders Fechtner, Engel and Gärtner-Engel,  who are highly respected and act legally in their political activities.  In fact and effect, the aforesaid German authorities likewise attack and violate the integrity, democratic rights and fundamental freedoms of the MLPD as an an authorized and constitutionally protected democratic party.

I am aware that since 2018, those in power, at that time with the CDU/CSU/SPD government and Interior Minister Seehofer in charge, had initiated an abusive and partisan kind of tactics against the MLPD in obvious reaction to its new role in society. In its 2018 report, the  Office for the Protection of the Constitution made an explicit “reassessment” of the MLPD and warned of its “dangerous” potential.

I commend the MLPD for having taken the offensive against the scandalous anti-democratic, anti-communist and fascistic practice of the German authorities in making baseless accusations and speculations to vilify and criminalize people. And MLPD  has won in court in all cases so far.  For instance, the administrative court Meiningen declared on 3 August 2021 that the treatment of Stefan Engel as a dangerous person was illegal.

Democratic expressions of international solidarity for oppressed and exploited peoples, like the Kurdish, Turkish, Palestinian and Filipino peoples against tyrannical and fascist governments is not terrorism but a noble duty to defend human rights and fundamental freedoms.###