Call for rehabilitation of German communists THE CAMPAIGN for the rehabilitation of the victims of Stalin's purges has not only had a response from the Soviet embassy in West Germany, but led to a further controversy about rehabilitating the German communist leaders who perished in exile in the Soviet Union. On February 15, four signatories of the appeal (for the full text, see IV 137, March 21, 1988) sent an open letter to the Soviet ambassador asking him to accept a copy of the appeal with the signatures of those supporting it.
In the letter, the four - Lev Kopelev, Jakob Moneta, Peter von Oertzen, Professor Herman Weber and Winfried Wolf - stressed: "The signatories of this appeal are all friends of your country and of the peoples of the Soviet Union. Precisely for that reason, they are sorry that people who played an outstanding role in the Russian revolution, who were among the founders of the Soviet Union and the Communist International, were condemned by the Moscow trials and are still considered traitors, despite their service to your country and their wider services to humanity."
The authors of the open letter (except Lev Kopelev) were received in mid-May by a representative of the Soviet embassy. The following is an account of the discussion that took place and the subsequent press conference.
T HE EMBASSY first secretary,
Ivan Piskovoy, received a delegation including Jakob Moneta, Peter von Oertzen and Winfried Wolf. He said that all those who had been unjustly condemned and murdered under Stalin's rule would be rehabilitated, not only the victims of the three [Moscow] trials, who would shortly be juridically rehabilitated by the Supreme Court of the
The first secretary offered his assurance that the commission appointed by the Politburo to oversee this would continue its work. He asked, however, for understanding that this would be a long process, and there were still many enemies of glasnost in the Soviet Union and that too much publicity would harm the process.
The first secretary reacted also to the Open Letter to the Soviet ambassador. He pointed out that the members of the Politburo of the German Communist Party (KPD) who were killed at Stalin"s orders (Hermann Remmele, Leo Flieg, Heinz Neumann, Hugo Eberlein, Herman Schubert, Fritz Schulte, Heinrich Süsskind) had already been rehabilitated in the biographical dictionary of the history of the workers' movement published in 1970 in East Germany. In it, he said, they were described as friends of the Soviet people who in the USSR had been "arrested and condemned on false charges."
Peter von Oertzen, from the National Executive of the SPD, said that GermanSoviet scholarly collaboration should also be stepped up in the historical field in order to bring out the whole truth about this chapter of the past. The Soviet embassy official
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WEST GERMANY mission should have the task of uncovering the injustice done to Soviet soldiers in the German Reich during the second world war.
After the visit to the embassy, a press conterence was held in which Ulrich Briefs from the parliamentary group of the Greens and Professor Herman Weber, a specialist in the history of the KPD and author of several books on this subject, took part. The latter explained that inclusion in the biographical dictionary that First Secretary Piskovoy cited could not be considered rehabilitation, since in these entries it was not stated in what conditions the leading members of the KPD lost their lives in the Soviet Union. Moreover, shortly after its publications, the dictionary was withdrawn.
Professor Weber described it as the "tragedy of the German communist movement that more German Communists died at the hand of Stalin than by that of Hitler." In order to wipe out this tragedy and once again make communism a hope, a telegraphic recognition of the services of the pre-1933 KPD leaders was not enough. A public and political rehabilitation was necessary, for example through a posthumous restoration of their membership in the party, as is now being discussed for Bukharin in the Soviet Union, and a public settling of accounts with Stalin's policy, including toward the German Communists.
So far, nothing like this has happened. At the press conference the signatories of the appeal expressed their hope that the West German CP, if it supported Gorbachev's reform course, might publicly come out for rehabilitation of the German communists
Military takes center
HAITI stage
A SAD SETBACK for democracy in Haiti was the way the press presented the June 19 military coup that ousted a formally elected president who had been in office only four months. The spectacle was certainly a dreary one. But is this coup really the end of the anti-dictatorial movement that led to the downfall of Jean-Claude Duvalier, the playboy heir of Papa Doc?
The following article analyzes the factors that ended the rule of the "constitutional" president, Leslie Manigat, and the prospects for the new, openly military, government. ARTHUR MAHON
P OLLS carried out before Novem-
ber 29, 1987, when the presidential elections were supposed to be held, showed that Leslie Manigat had no chance of setting himself up in the National Palace. The elections drowned in blood by Duvalierist and army commandos, with, it seems, the consent of the CIA. The army remained in power.
When the military decided to hold a parody of an election on January 17, the four main candidates in the November 29 elections called for a boycott. For the ambitious Leslie Manigat, supported by the Christiandemocratic international organization, this was an unhoped-for chance. He accepted the accord offered by the military, who took care of getting him "elected" by 2 per cent of the voters.
Leslie Manigat had accepted being the prisoner of the army. But he thought he was cleverer. After all, he had a brilliant precedent to look to. Francois Duvalier had in fact become president in quite similar circumstances. He, nonetheless, managed to escape the grip of the army by relying on 28 the Tontons Macoutes [a private militia of criminals]. International Viewpoint #145 • July 11, 1988
LATI
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