Article by Rui Paz, collaborator of the International Department
In June 2007 80,000 people demonstrated in Rostock, in the north of Germany, against the G8 Summit.
In the weeks which preceded the protest actions, the Federal Chief Public Prosecutor, Monika Harms, ordered a series of measures of an illegal and repressive nature, with the pretext of being in the presence of a "terrorist organization".
With the purpose of intimidating the demonstrators, police searches were performed, espionage equipment was installed in private homes and vehicles, computers were confiscated along with personal objects and violation of mail belonging to left–wing organizations and activists. Everything that a fascist dictatorship usually carries out, in order to silence the expression of popular discontentment.
During the actions of protest, many kilometres of barbed wire and iron walls, many metres high, were raised to keep the demonstrators away from the Summit site.
The Ministry of Defence violated the constitutional law, by placing military commands in state of alert, with tanks and rapid intervention boats and by overflying the demonstrations with "Tornado" war airplanes.
It was a real general rehearsal towards a war against the people, this time not in Afghanistan, but in Germany itself.
But last week, and although with a delay of 7 months, the repressive measures undertaken by Merkel’s government against the participants and the protest organizers, were considered illegal.
According to the Court, which is far from being constituted by left-wing judges, the 12 reasons called upon by the German State to classify the protests as "terrorist" had no legal basis, nor did they endanger the State or the German population’s security.
The Rostock scandal is a paradigmatic example of how Germany and the European Union use the psychosis of the so-called "war against terrorism" in order to restrain the left-wing opposition and those who condemn the greediness of the exploiter oligarchy.
At the same time, the vice-president of the Constitutional Court of Karlsruhe, judge Winfried Hassemer, in a recent interview to the weekly " Focus ", (nº52/2007), advises all citizens not "to leave behind any trace of their activity, as, nowadays, even if one does not confront or violate the law, nobody is safe from being under State surveillance". Besides, nobody knows in which files they are registered. Citizens are too much under watch, with no apparent motive". The judge considers this behaviour by a State, before which Socrates and other servants, in Portugal, of the interests of foreign powers kneel in adoration, as incompatible with "human dignity".
The shamelessness with which security measures and anti-democratic laws are implemented against the political parties, proves the existence of a reactionary notion of the State, which makes each politically aware citizen a suspect, a potential criminal.
The PCP’s alerts on the growing degradation of political democracy are relevant not just for communists, but also for all democrats.