Rolf Martens is once again using a solidarity movement to spread libels against our organisation which have been refuted in great part already long since.
This happened on the occasion of the translation of an important programmatic speech by the president of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Laurent-Désiré Kabila of Jan. 21, 1999 which we had published for the first time in German, and of which we also wanted to spread an English translation on our homepage. We asked a Swedish solidarity committee for the permission to take their English translation of this speech, and as a result of this were attacked in a vile way by Rolf Martens who is active in this solidarity committee.
In this way Rolf Martens brings questions into the solidarity movement which belong to the argument between other parties. 
It was not our intention, but having been attacked in a really massive, insulting way in a lengthy paper, we now see ourselves compelled to comment just on these points

On some of the points our contributor W. Gerhard has already commented in a personal statement. Here it is about some very important questions of principle in the international context.
 
 

Rolf Martens is a former member of our organisation who in early 1990 started a sudden attack on our organisation inventing the accusation that we did no longer fight the "Greens" and had changed sides. For this groundless slander he was expelled, and simultaneously declared his withdrawal. 

Rolf Martens later on has translated and, against the will of the copyright-holders, issued publications by our organisation, although the distribution via our organisation was at any time possible, adding simultaneously his own commentaries in which the authors of these writings were inveighed against to the possible maximum.

About the essentials concerning Rolf Martens there are already some interesting documents which everybody can look up at our homepage. Among these is the article "About Rolf Martens" and the article "The Development of Our Organisation's Position Concerning the So-called 'RIM' - Revolutionary Internationalist Movement - (Short Outline)", as well as further statements. So there actually is nothing new with Rolf Martens' methods and one could leave it at that, but he is attempting to include a new public unfamiliar with the previous debates into his slanderings and to tell tales about his previous position. We think it necessary to inform about some basic facts.

From the middle of the nineties Rolf Martens has started a massive campaign in cooperation with certain people who claimed to propagate the policy of the PCP (Communist Party of Peru/ Sendero Luminoso - Shining Path of J. C. Mariátegui) abroad and to support this party.

Already in 1993 Rolf Martens, by working in the so-called International Emergency Committee for the support of Abimael Guzman, got the connection with persons like Adolfo Olaechea and Jay Miles and others. He made use of this position to publicly attack our organisation massively, later on above all in the internet. 

Together with the circles mentioned above he also wanted to create a so-called World Mobilisation Committee which was intended to simultaneously function as the beginning of an alleged 'international Maoist movement', into which he wanted to insert basic elements of our policy, constantly repeating his assertion that our organisation had itself betrayed its own principles. 

For example, Rolf Martens wrote on his "UNITE! Info #8en" of April, 25, 1996 the following: 

"In my opinion, the main dividing line in the present debate among those who state their adherence to the line of Marx, Lenin and Mao Zedong is between supporting the call for a World Wide Mobilisation Committee (WWMC) to support the revolution in Peru and opposing it."

In the face of us Rolf Martens went so far as to the absurdity to make the question of the support for the PCP the decisive yardstick for the parties in other countries. Thus, on July 14, 1996, he wrote to Adolfo Olaechea:

"For instance, the people's war in Peru led by the PCP should abolutely be supported by the Marxists-Leninists in other countries, who by no means should team up with the opponents of that people's war."

"So from that point in time on (at the latest) one may date the bourgeois degeneration of the KPD/ML (NEUE EINHEIT) [note], for it didn't publicly state a single word on the PCP nor on the 'RIM', and to this day (as far as I know) still hasn't done so. Its failure to support the PCP must be condemned." 

Our organisation had its reasons to keep certain reservations with regard to the PCP, especially as it was part of this RIM-coalition. We did appreciate the will to initiate against the current of revisionism such a revolutionary struggle in Peru, and at the same time formed a differentiating opinion, in spite of the distance and the difficulties to analyze certain things from Europe. Above all, however, it was extremely cautious as regards the surrounding of this organisation. The later experiences have shown that there was ample reason to do so.

In 1997 our organisation issued several statements which show a differentiated judgement in this question, among these in particular a large publication "José Carlos Mariátegui and Cultural Questions of the Peruvian Revolution" (June 30, 1997) by our chairman Klaus Sender (the longtime pen-name of Hartmut Dicke), in which he made a detailed inquiry into the PCP's fundaments. Since the publication of this article the pressure on our organisation and on other organisations, too, to unconditionallly support these so-called friends of the PCP, has faded out and disappeared. 

The description given by Rolf Martens on the course of events in 1997 in this question is a free invention. To the author of the article about Mariátegui, Rolf Martens then attested that he had written an "actually very good criticism", he even all of a sudden started a patronizing behaviour and demanded the article's publication also in Spanish (which actually had been done by ourselves already some time ago), and now himself played the critic of the PCP, for example in the following way:

"Such a party as the PCP, which they at the same time genuinely feared as a revolutionary one, in the other aspect of it was an ideal one for the US imperialists to divert on to a wrong track, by flattery, for instance, and by massive infiltration which they no doubt have engaged in against the PCP since long, and make use of it as an instrument against the whole international Marxist-Leninist movement."

"These organizational principles peculiar to the PCP have been utilized by the US imperialists to establish a 'chain of command' that has no corresponding 'chain of criticism' from below. The 'orders', the deceptions, first come from the CIA, or from the direct muppets it's using, to the PCP in Peru, and - if successful at least, that is, if accepted as OK by the PCP leadership - then transmitted to the MPP:s in the different other countries..." (Rolf Martens, in his UNITE! Info #38en, 06.07.97)

We have never said something like this about the PCP. 

The whole RIM within which the PCP formerly had been a model party, had been publicly attacked by Rolf Martens since 1994 to be an 'instrument of the CIA for the encirclement of the PCP'. That we had not unconditionally followed this opinion had equally been a final proof against Neue Einheit for Rolf Martens. On the one hand demands for the unconditional support, on the other for the unconditional condemnation of parties and coalitions of parties. 

The matter continued. In January, 1998, our organisation issued the above-mentioned long explanation about the development of its position concerning the RIM, but Rolf Martens failed to ever write a statement about that. 

The whole policy by Rolf Martens in this question aimed at pressuring us to subordinate ourselves to these so-called surroundings of the PCP at any rate, which proved utterly shady and infiltrated with the work of agents. The Group Neue Einheit, resp. the KPD/ML (Neue Einheit) as it was called previously, remained tough, though, and uninfluenced by the rabid howling.

Rolf Martens's demagoguery is also to be seen by the following: since then, many important statements by our organisation have appeared, and regularly there came a comment by Rolf Martens saying that our statement as such was correct, but the authors were every time inundated with incredible suspicions and accusations. In this way he every time attempted to cast doubts upon the positive impression among the readers, which our organisation had achieved by its statements, and to hammer his message that they were dealing with an ominously strong force which propagates nothing but correct things but, in reality, was something completely different. Everybody, yet, can follow how the Group Neue Einheit has over 30 years conducted a continuous revolutionary propaganda which is developing further. 

Thus we only can state that the sympathy movement for the Democratic Republic of Congo has obviously become the field where this person which is utterly contradictory in its political alliances is acting now. This we think a necessary information for the readers. Unfortunately, most of our publications so far are available only in English because our capabilities for French translations are very limited, regrettably. We shall try to improve this. The article about Mariátegui is available also in Spanish, as mentioned already. 

A further case of Rolf Martens is, for example, his calling the alteration of our organisation's name into Group Neue Einheit "a heavy crime", an alteration which is completely natural and has long since been given reasons for in a detailed statement by us. What kind of a heavy crime should it be, if a group takes the naming Group Neue Einheit as its name and lays off the name KPD/ML (Neue Einheit) which it cannot bear any longer and which has been outdated for already some time? 

There is hardly anything else to be found in the internet which is as contradictory as Rolf Martens is. In a certain way his way of action is also a reaction to the Group Neue Einheit itself which over many years has been following a correct course which this man cannot criticize. This drives him towards these defamatory statements, which have a long history. The actual source from which all the rabble-rousing against the Group Neue Einheit comes is to be found in the fact that this group has broken through the machinations around the international parties which were connected with the People's Republic of China of the time of Mao Zedong, in the fact that it has in particular thoroughly disturbed und destroyed the attempts from the part of the US rightists to occupy this movement for themselves. We ourselves have our origin in this Marxist-Leninist movement and have always played a particular role. The fits of rage by people as Rolf Martens who essentially are in cahoots with the American rightist bourgeoisie stem from nothing else. Rolf Martens essentially is an agent beneficial to the rightist forces, similar to such people who for a long time "supported" the People's Republic of China in order to attempt to encircle it from the part of the US. 

In addition it has to be mentioned that Rolf Martens who was in connection with the circles abroad around the PCP, for some time simultaneously sought the connection to the obscure LaRouche-party of the US, as if one could have normal relations with such people, and we don't think this connection to have happened by chance. This occurrence, by the way, was used by other demagogues to blame us for such an approach, although we never had anything to do with it. 

We have to say, therefore, that people who enlist the support by Rolf Martens should think over these points. Of course, we understand that such a solidarity movement has to rely on as many forces as possible, has to enlist technical support etc. We fully understand this, but we also feel compelled, after the libels which this man is spreading in the context of the Congo solidarity movement, to give a clear statement, as this kind of libels cannot remain unrefuted.

  Editorial Staff of Neue Einheit 
  July 24, 1999 

  Translation from the original German text