Memory Lane: Remembering the Collapse of the Berlin Wall 20 Years After

Dibussi Tande

This week was the 20th anniversary of the collapse of the Berlin Wall, an event which symbolically marked the end of the cold war. Today, the memory of that event has faded, becoming a blur even to those who witnessed it. To my generation, the collapse of the wall was a momentous event, some would even say the most momentous one. In fact, it is easy to make a distinction between the world BEFORE and AFTER the wall;

a BEFORE, so difficult to recapture today in words, dominated by superpower rivalry and superpower summits, the iron curtain, intercontinental ballistic missiles and the fear of mutually assured destruction, unending arms reduction talks – SALT, START, etc. Ours was the last generation that grew up under the cloud of nuclear annihilation, and in awe of the grim looking old men who held sway in the Kremlin.

The collapse of the Berlin wall, the culmination of Gorbachev’s Glastnost and Perestroika policies, marked the beginning of the AFTER characterized by the great thaw, the collapse of communists states in Eastern Europe like dominos, and dreams that the “East Wind” would eventually blow over Africa – then under the stranglehold of single-party and military dictatorships – and transform it into a beacon of liberal democracy, human rights, economic growth, equal opportunity and rule of law.

The collapse of the wall, which millions did not expect to see in their lifetime, was the most spectacular event in a long summer of dissent which began with the (re)legalization of the banned Solidarity movement in Poland which later went on the win the parliamentary elections of June 4 and lead a coalition government. This was followed by unrest in Hungary which abandoned Leninism that October, transformed the communist party into a “regular” socialist party, introduced multipartyism, and rehabilitated executed nationalist leader Imre Nagy who led the 1956 revolt against Soviet domination. Events in Hungary cascaded into unrest in Eastern Germany resulting in the massive exodus of East Germans trying to flee to West Germany through Czechoslovakia and Hungary. Eventually, Eastern Germany caved in to the pressure, lifted travel restrictions to the West and opened the wall on November 9.

At midnight East Germany’s Communist rulers gave permission for gates along the Wall to be opened after hundreds of people converged on crossing points.
They surged through cheering and shouting and were be met by jubilant West Berliners on the other side.
Ecstatic crowds immediately began to clamber on top of the Wall and hack large chunks out of the 28-mile (45-kilometre) barrier. (BBC News Archives)

With this act, the Berlin wall, the most palpable and deadly symbol of the East / West divide, was gone, and a new world order born. As John Berger later wrote in Le Monde Diplomatique (May 1990, p. 8) in an article titled « Quelque chose de gigantesque a pris fin » (something gigantic has come to an end):

Ce qui se passe ces derniers jours en Europe de l’est ne ressemble à aucune autre révolution des temps modernes, cette cascade d’affrontement politiques, cette libération de la parole critique ont provoqué des secousses d’une telle ampleur à l’échelle planétaire / What is happening in Eastern Europe these last few days is unlike any other revolution in modern times. This cascade of political confrontation, this freeing of critical speech, have provoked a major earthquake at the planetary level.

Waiting for the East Wind
The events in Eastern Europe were followed with keen interest in Africa. Just as in Eastern Europe where images of the consumer societies in the west had contributed to the revolt, so too did images of unarmed citizens heroically standing up to communist dictatorship have a profound effect in Africa. Pictures of the collapse of the Berlin wall, and later, of the Romanian revolution and later and the bullet-riddled body of Ceuceuscau, made Africans believe that their time too had come.

At the University of Yaounde where I was a student, the political awakening sparked by the events in Eastern Europe was visible. The unending and tiresome discussions about the Cameroon’s national football team and the French football league gave way to passionate and acrimonious debates on political liberalism, multiparty politics, press freedom, etc. Some of the most heated discussions took place under that mythical mango tree across from the old university restaurant – “Sous le manguier” it was called. This was the University’s own Hyde Park where political activists, budding politicians and pundits held court. It was at “sous le manguier” that the first rumblings of student discontent with the political status quo were heard, where the first pro-democracy rally on campus began six months later. But that is story for another time…

Although African regimes tried desperately to deny it, the similarities between the discredited regimes of Eastern Europe and Africa were obvious – bureaucratic strangulation of the economy, excessive and crippling centralization, the unbearable weight of an ever-increasing debt burden, a dramatic drop in living standards for the majority of the population, a massive exodus into the black market sector, very severe austerity programs, a loss of confidence in the official ideology, the squandering or dilapidation of valuable human capital through coercion and terror leading to what Achille Mbembe described as “the inertia of political and intellectual structures”, etc.

The climate in Africa was therefore a very fertile one where the seeds of political liberalism brought in by the “East wind” could blossom into beautiful plants. In Gabon, Cote d’Ivoire, Zaire, Niger, Togo, Benin, Mali, etc., the spiraling cycle of protest, violence and repression went on as citizens took to the streets calling for the dismantling of the repressive systems in place. In February 1990, Cameroon felt the first gust of the “East wind” following the arrest of  Yondo Black, Albert Mukong and others for subversion...

As in Eastern Europe, rebellion against authoritarian one-party or military regimes mostly took the form of popular uprisings inspired by a budding civil society centered around associations such as the church, human rights associations, and corporate groups such as trade unions. Many observers described this transition from authoritarian rule as Africa's "second decolonization" because it was generally considered to be "a corrective political tendency," a peoples' revolution that intended to put an end to the exclusionary, violent and predatory dictatorial systems of the first three decades of African independence. 

The euphoria over the second decolonization soon gave way to disillusion and despair as the regimes in place successfully subverted the democratic process. 20 years on, most African regimes have instituted cosmetic multiparty systems while successfully staving off the promise of political liberalism – apart from a few exceptions, the dream of a truly democratic Africa has long crumbled. The dream of Berlin is now just a mirage for most Africans…

Comments

[Joseph M.Ndifor]

Dibussi:
Accurate analysis. I remember those days when we all thought the end of tyranny in Cameroon was around the corner. Nineteen years later, the ills of that system are still unfolding right before our eyes.

[John Iteshi]

The Wink That Changed the World

This is the way the Warsaw Pact folded, not with a bang but a gesture.

By Michael Meyer

Nicolae Ceaucescu in Bucharest in 1989On July 7, 1989, the masters of the Eastern empire gathered in Bucharest for a fateful summit. They were a rogue's gallery of the world's dictators, assembled in the capital of the worst among them: Romania's own Nicolae Ceausescu, Europe's last Stalinist, the dark lord of the old Eastern bloc's most repressive Communist regime.

They were the hunters: Erich Honecker, the murderous boss of the German Democratic Republic, architect of the wall that separated his East Germany from the West. There was Poland's Wojciech Jaruzelski, the man who declared martial law in 1980 and broke the famed trade union Solidarity. Czechoslovak strongman Milos Jakes was there, as well as Bulgaria's Todor Zhivkov, whose secret police stooges once tried to assassinate Pope John Paul II.

This day, however, the hunted was one of their own: reformist Hungarian Prime Minister Miklos Nemeth, whose determination to bring democracy and free markets to his country threatened them all. And so, in the interests of self-preservation, the satraps of the Warsaw Pact marshaled their forces. The goal: a classically Commie "fraternal intervention" of the sort the world had seen before—Hungary in 1956 and Prague in 1968. Only one man stood between them and their quarry. His name: Mikhail Gorbachev.

The coming months will see a crescendo of anniversary commemorations of communism's end, culminating with the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989. For many, Americans especially, it was a glorious moment, emblematic of the West's victory in the Cold War. It seemed to come out of the blue. But if you watched the Eastern bloc's disintegration from the ground, as I did over the course of that epic year, you know that the process was far longer and more complex than most people realize. Often, it unfolded in melodramatic little chapters, unnoticed by the rest of the world, as on that fine summer day in Bucharest two decades ago.

To grasp the full dimension of that drama, you must remember how Europe was still locked in the old order defined by the Cold War—and glimpse the changes afoot that would, abruptly, transform it. Nemeth arrived on the scene in late November 1988 as a new-generation "reform" Communist in the mold of Gorbachev himself. But if his titular master in Moscow remained a committed socialist, however liberal by contrast to his old-guard predecessors, Nemeth was the real deal.

Moving quickly, he had drafted a new constitution for Hungary—modeled on America's, complete with a Bill of Rights and guarantees of free speech and human rights. Then he allowed new political parties to form and promised free elections. And if the Communist Party should lose, hard-liners asked, what then? Why, said Nemeth, with perfect equanimity, "We step down." Worst, just a few months before, in early May, Nemeth had announced that Hungary would tear down the fence along its frontier with Austria. At the height of the Cold War, he cut a hole in the Iron Curtain.

In the Communist world, this was heresy. It had to be punished. And so it was that the Warsaw Pact's leaders assembled in Bucharest. Seated in a great hall, surrounded by banners and the full pomp of Communist circumstance, they launched their attack. Ceausescu went first, brandishing his fists and shouting an impassioned indictment: "Hungary will destroy socialism." His "dangerous experiments" will destroy the entire Socialist Union! Honecker, Jakes, and Zhivkov followed. Only Jaruzelski of Poland sat quiet, sphinxlike behind his dark sunglasses, betraying no emotion.

Nemeth had been in office for only seven months. This was his first Warsaw Pact summit. He was nervous, but he knew his enemies would act only with Soviet support. The man who could give it sat roughly opposite him, 30 feet away on the other side of a large rectangle of flag-draped conference tables. As Ceausescu and the others ranted on, calling for armed intervention in Hungary, Nemeth glanced across at the Soviet leader. Their eyes met, and Gorbachev … winked.

"This happened at least four or five times," Nemeth later told me. "Strictly speaking, it wasn't really a wink. It was more a look, a bemused twinkle. Each time he smiled at me, with his eyes, it was as if Gorbachev were saying, 'Don't worry. These people are idiots. Pay no attention.' " And so he didn't. As the dogs of the Warsaw Pact brayed for his head, Nemeth went outside to smoke a cigarette.

On this small moment, history turned. Nemeth flew back to Budapest and continued his reforms, dissolving the country's Communist Party and opening Hungary's borders so that tens of thousands of East Germans could famously escape to the West—and causing, four months later, the Berlin Wall to topple. Erich Honecker went home a spent political force who would be ousted in a coup d'état that began taking shape even before he left Bucharest. As for Nicolae Ceausescu, he would die by firing squad during the revolution that convulsed Romania at year's end.

http://www.slate.com/id/2221960/?from=rss&obref=obinsite