Cold War

"In September 1980, Iraq went to war with Iran. Saddam's ostensible aim was to capture the Shatt al-Arab waterway that separates the two countries, but in reality he wanted to secure the Iranian oilfields and strike a blow against Iran’s Islamic revolution which threatened to seduce his own Shia minority. After some initial successes, the Iraqi army was pushed back. Saddam’s forces seemed on the verge of collapse until the US provided Iraq with satellite intelligence on Iranian troop manoeuvres, allowing Saddam to deploy his aircraft with greater effect."

"General Secretary Gorbachev’s policy of restructuring brings with it, for the first time since the end of World War II, a justifiable hope of overcoming the East-West conflict."

"The Soviet Government and the Soviet people should not lend themselves to co-operating in the conversion into a concentration camp of part of a large neighbouring country against the will of its inhabitants."

"A reformation of relations between the Soviet people and the German people is not possible along the lines pursued by the authorities of the Soviet zone of Germany. The Germans in that zone have come to hate and despise those who violate them in so inhuman a manner. And they must be having similar feelings towards those who support that system. The closing of the border is an unprecedented admission of bankruptcy. It shows that the people who are compelled to live in that part of Germany can be prevented only by the use of physical force from leaving that paradise of workers and farmers."

"At midnight on August 13, all troops involved in the construction of the Wall are alerted. The action begins, it is supported in the hinterland by the Soviet armed forces stationed in the GDR. At 0.30 o'clock, tanks roll over the street Unter den Linden. Shortly after 1 o'clock the lights go out at the Brandenburg Gate. Armed GDR border police and members of the combat groups are positioning themselves at the demarcation border. Ghostly scenes take place: pavement is torn open in the spotlight of the military vehicles. Piles are rammed into the ground, barbed wire rolled out, tank barriers erected. The "Melodies for the Night" are running on Berliner Rundfunk. At 1:11, they are interrupted. The news anchor reads out a special message: "The Governments of the Warsaw Pact States are addressing the People's Chamber and the government of the GDR with the proposal to introduce such an order on the West Berlin border, which reliably shunts the activity of rioting against the countries of the socialist camp and around the whole area of West Berlin a reliable watch is ensured. " This informs the citizens of the GDR about what has already been going on for 71 minutes: the building of the Wall."

"The world is full of the markers of abandoned empires, from Hadrian’s Wall to the Great Wall of China, from the remnants of the one in Arizona to the remnants of the one in Berlin."

"Honecker was deposed by his colleagues on 16 October 1989, but, under pressure from popular action, they could not gain control of the situation, nor even, more significantly, produce an impression of control. The entire government and Politburo resigned on 7–8 November, and, on 9 November, the Berlin Wall was opened. An occasion and symbol of freedom, the Fall of the Wall became a totemic act, like that of the Bastille in Paris in 1789 at the outset of the French Revolution. However, whereas only a few insignificant prisoners were freed from the Bastille, large numbers of East Berliners poured over the now open border. The significance of the popular action in East Germany in 1989 was picked out in March 2014 when President Park Geun-hye of South Korea spoke in Dresden setting out proposals to ease reunification with North Korea. Developments in East Germany invite counterfactuals including, ‘What if the Hungarians had not opened their Austrian border, permitting a mass exodus of East Germans that destabilised the state?’, as well as the question whether the East German system could have been stabilised by removing Honecker earlier, and giving reform Communism a greater chance."

"Walls in the mind often stand longer than those built of concrete."

"On the very same day the first brick of the Ram Shila foundation was being laid at Ayodhya, the Berliners were removing bricks from the Berlin Wall. While a temple was going up in Ayodhya, a communist temple was being demolished five thousand miles away in Europe. If this is not history, I do not know what is. (...) The post-Nehru era began at Ayodhya on November 9, and it will gather momentum in the years to come, just as the post-communist era in Europe and elsewhere."

"For almost three decades the Berlin Wall was the Cold War’s most powerful symbol. In a surrounded West Berlin the West had gained an island outpost: a major intelligence site as well as a precious propaganda tool against communist repression. But for Chancellor Adenauer and West Berlin mayor Willy Brandt, the wall was also proof of America’s acquiescence in the division of their homeland and an important spur to pursue a more independent and dynamic German foreign policy"

"The [Berlin] wall can disappear when those conditions that created it fall away."

"In the summer of 1989, neither Helmut Kohl nor I anticipated ... that everything would happen so fast. We didn’t expect the wall to come down in November. And by the way, we both admitted that later. I don’t claim to be a prophet. This happens in history: it accelerates its progress. It punishes those who are late. But it has an even harsher punishment for those who try to stand in its way. It would have been a big mistake to hold onto the Iron Curtain. That is why we didn’t put any pressure on the government of the GDR. When events started to develop at a speed that no one expected, the Soviet leadership unanimously – and I want to stress “unanimously” – decided not to interfere in the internal processes that were under way in the GDR, not to let our troops leave their garrisons under any circumstances. I am confident to this day that it was the right decision."

"It was a historic deed that preserved the liberty of our people and laid the foundations for the sustained prosperity of our socialist state."

"The Wall will still be standing in 50 and even in 100 years; if the reasons for it have not been removed by then."

"When they met in Vienna in the spring of 1961 Khrushchev bullied the young president: “It is up to the U.S. to decide whether there will be war or peace.” “If that’s true,” Kennedy responded, “it’s going to be a cold winter.” Then on August 3, 1961, the Berlin Wall suddenly went up—much to Kennedy’s relief. “Why would Khrushchev put up a wall if he really intended to seize West Berlin?” Kennedy wondered. “There wouldn’t be any need of a wall if he planned to occupy the whole city. This is his way out of his predicament. It’s not a very nice solution, but a wall is a hell of a lot better than a war.”"

"[Erich Honecker] was succeeded by ‘a brief and embarrassed phantom’ (to use Disraeli’s phrase) called Egon Krentz, who lasted exactly seven weeks. On 4 November a million marched in East Berlin. Five days later, at a historic press conference held by the East Berlin party boss, Gunter Schabowski, it was announced that frontier police would no longer try to prevent East Germans from leaving the country. A Daily Telegraph reporter asked the key question: ‘What about the Berlin Wall?’ and was told it was no longer an exit-barrier. That night the Berlin Wall, the ugly and despised testament to Communist oppression, where so many hundreds of German democrats had died trying to escape, was the scene of a wild orgy of rejoicing and destruction, as young Germans hacked at it with pickaxes. Television carried these historic scenes around the world and in other East European capitals, and, to use, ironically, a phrase of Marx’s, ‘the enflamed masses began to scream ça ira, ça ira!’"

"Freedom has many difficulties and democracy is not perfect, but we have never had to put a wall up to keep our people in, to prevent them from leaving us."

"The Berlin Wall is perhaps the most visible expression of the moral gulf between free democracy and totalitarian dictatorship."

"As long as there is a wall, barbed wire and orders to shoot, there can be no talk of normality in Germany."

"I am not the one trying to speed things up. We are being driven."

"We welcome change and openness; for we believe that freedom and security go together, that the advance of human liberty can only strengthen the cause of world peace. There is one sign the Soviets can make that would be unmistakable, that would advance dramatically the cause of freedom and peace. General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization, come here to this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this Wall!"

"The Wall certainly ought not to be a permanent feature of the European landscape. I see no reason why the Soviet Union should think it is—it is to their advantage in any way to leave there that monument to communist failure."

"The fall of Wall Street is for market fundamentalism what the fall of the Berlin Wall was for communism."

"The Wall was in the long run a propaganda catastrophe for the East. Every day it existed, it screamed aloud one simple, damning statement: in Berlin we Communists stood in direct competition with capitalism, and we lost. Khrushchev and his successors had to live with this permanent mute accusation until a Soviet leader came along who just couldn’t or wouldn’t do it any more."

"Eventually, the buildings on the Bernauer Strasse, as elsewhere on the East Berlin/West Berlin border, were entirely demolished. No more dramatic escapes from windows. No more abseiling from the roof. No more desperate fugitives plummeting to their deaths on the cobbled street below. Nothing was to get in the way of the new, impregnable Wall. It would keep the state’s citizens trapped inside the GDR until... they resigned themselves to their fate and simply stopped resisting."

"By 1989, shooting people on the border was unacceptable, and even the cosseted old men at Wandlitz knew it. None the less, the Wall still stood proud and ugly, with its sturdy blocks, its spikes and fences and alarms and watch-towers, seemingly permanent and impregnable. Its fate would not be determined in Berlin. Mostly it would be decided hundreds of miles away, by people who had decided that a Communism which needed to be enforced by guns and barbed wire was not a Communism worth having."

"Every stone bears witness to the moral bankruptcy of the society it encloses"

"We do not want a united Germany. This would lead to a change to postwar borders and we cannot allow that because such a development would undermine the stability of the whole international situation and could endanger our security."

"The West German revanchists and militarists are using the peace-loving position of the USSR and the member-states of the Warsaw Pact on the resolution of German question, so as to inflict harm on the German Democratic Republic through subversive activity and the illegal recruitment of citizens of the German Democratic Republic. For this, they primarily use the open border in Berlin. In the interests of the peaceful work and construction by the citizens of the German Democratic Republic and of the member-states of the Warsaw Pact, it is necessary to stop the illegal recruitment and other hostile measures. Therefore, we propose that the member-states of the Warsaw Pact agree, in the interests of the cessation of the subversive activity, to implement control along the borders of the German Democratic Republic, including the borders in Berlin, comparable to the control along the state borders of the Western powers."

"Forget not the tyranny of this wall...nor the love of freedom that made it fall..."

"The Soviet Union could not exist without the image of the empire. The image of the empire could not exist without the image of force. The USSR ended the moment the first hammer pounded the Berlin Wall."

"Haile Selassie was not an evil man, but his priorities were misplaced. He was so concerned with establishing a strong central government and modernizing the country that he failed to meet the challenge of natural disaster... It was his false pride, this lack of courage to admit mistakes, that brought about his downfall."

"The Emperor of Ethiopia has been deposed by a military coup … Poor Haile Selassie; over the past few years he'd lost control and the inevitable was bound to happen. I remember his attendance at the monarchy celebrations, how he snatched his hand away when I tried to help him from his car, telling me he could manage well enough on his own, thank you very much. Likewise during the recent drought when thousands of his people were dying he refused all HIM's offers of help, denying that anyone was suffering or even that there was a drought. He saw himself as a mighty ruler, but now the truth has caught up with him. At the Shavand Palace today I could think of nothing but Haile Selassie's fate. Inevitably one is inclined to draw parallels … They are not reassuring ..."

"The killing of General Aman and of the old regime notables was the turning-point for the Ethiopian revolution. To that moment events in Ethiopia had unfolded without bloodshed; thereafter blood flowed freely."

"There were two reasons why Mengistu and others in the Derg wanted Soviet arms. First, they came to power as revolutionaries with a radical program. They regularly denounced imperialism, yet they remained dependent on the bulwark of what they called imperialism, the United States, for the most critical of all commodities, weapons for their army. Could they be true revolutionaries and socialists and still have such a vital link to the United States? It was very embarassing. But it was more than that. For the second and equally powerful motive that pushed them toward the Soviets was that they wanted a much bigger army than Ethiopia had at the outbreak of the revolution."

"The Derg was largely a mystery to the Americans, as it was to others. The officers of the US military mission in the Ethiopian capital knew few of its members, and those that could be identified and approached shied away from contact with the Americans."

"Haile Selassie wanted to develop his country, but social justice was not a concept that made a great impression on him. Opinions differ over the degree to which Ethiopia's backwardness in the early 1970s was to be attributed to his policies. Unquestionably, however, the flaunting of the wealth of the aristocracy and the business class, many of them foreigners, made the poverty of the masses seem all the more terrible."

"[Haile Selassie] wanted to avoid bloodshed, so he gave up power for the good of his people and without fighting."

"Although I was now finally following the trail of the money and the rebel guns, I am only too aware that I was making these enquiries 20 years too late. The aid workers who did so much to help those suffering back then had not asked those questions either. But perhaps they would not have saved so many lives if they had."

"I accumulated evidence from secret CIA reports. Former ambassadors supported the story Aregawi had told me. Facts were found in the dusty back issues of obscure newsletters. Even former Ethiopian government officials, who had been on the government side of the conflict said they believed it was true. Was it significant that so many people refused to speak about these events, including civil servants, academics and politicians like Meles Zenawi? It became clear that 25 years on, this was still a subject too sensitive to be discussed openly."

"Aregawi Berhe is the former army commander of the rebel movement that operated in the Ethiopian province of Tigray. He now lives in a modest flat in the back streets of a Dutch town. He insisted on making me coffee. Then he told me his version of what took place all those years ago - how the lightly-armed rebels he led took on the mighty Ethiopian army which had all the latest Soviet weaponry. He told me that as the money began flowing in to feed the starving, a bitter debate had taken place inside the rebel movement. There were divisions over how the cash should be spent. He also explained how the aid money was diverted not just to buy weapons his troops needed, but also to build a hardline, Stalinist party - the Marxist Leninist League of Tigray. This initiative, he said, was led by a young ideologue, Meles Zenawi. In the bitter infighting, Aregawi and his allies lost out. Money that was being channelled through the rebel side went to the party and to buy guns. In 1985, Aregawi told me, just 5% of $100m (£65m) they received went to the starving. It was an extraordinary tale, but perhaps Aregawi and his associates were just embittered men, trying to blacken the names of their former comrades?"

"For years the rains had failed and by 1984 millions were starving. But, kickstarted by Michael Buerk's reports for the BBC, people responded as never before. Millions of dollars were raised. Food was brought in. Many died, but the worst was averted. Then a year ago, I began hearing a different take. I was contacted by Ethiopians who said we had all missed the real story of how money given with such worthy objectives had ended up being used to buy weapons."

"While Geldof rejected the report's principal allegation, he agreed that some funds may have been misused. "It's possible that in one of the worst, longest-running conflicts on the continent some money was mislaid," he told the Times. "[But] if that percentage of money had been diverted, far more than a million people would have died." (An estimated one million people died in the Ethiopian famine.) "The essence of the report also is not just about Live Aid. It's that all monies going into [the province of] Tigray – that would be Oxfam, Save the Children, UNICEF and Christian Aid – somehow, we were all duped and gulled. And that's simply not the case. It just didn't happen.""

"Bob Geldof has denied a new report claiming that millions of pounds were siphoned from the 1985 Live Aid concerts to purchase weapons for Ethiopian rebel groups. "It just didn't happen," Geldof insisted, despite accepting that "some money" may have been "mislaid". The allegations stem from an investigation by BBC Radio 4's Martin Plaut, who interviewed former rebels and NGO employees involved in aid work during the 1984-1985 famine. According to Aregawi Berhe, at one time a commander of the Tigrayan People's Liberation Front (TPLF), only 5% of the $100m (£65m) in aid money went to feed the starving. Of this $100m, a sizeable amount likely came from Bob Geldof's Band Aid campaign, including the Do They Know It's Christmas? single and the Live Aid concerts, which involved U2, Paul McCartney, Madonna and many more. Rebel soldiers allegedly disguised themselves as grain traders, exchanging camouflaged bags of sand for thousands of pounds at a time. "We showed them huge amounts of grains," Gebremedhin Araya, former head of finance for the TPLF, told the Australian. "But if you go there, half of the warehouse is stacked full of sand collected from the Tekeze River. We tricked them as well as possible." "The rebel leaders put [the money] in their accounts in western Europe, in so many different places," he said. "Some of it was used to buy weapons. The people did not get half a kilogram of maize." This claim is supported by a CIA assessment from 1985, in which the American intelligence agency claimed that "some funds [meant] for relief operations ... are almost certainly being diverted for military purposes"."

"I'm a military man, I did what I did only because my country had to be saved from tribalism and feudalism. If I failed, it was only because I was betrayed. The so-called genocide was nothing more than just a war in defence of the revolution and a system from which all have benefited."

"In this country, some aristocratic families automatically categorize persons with dark skin, thick lips, and kinky hair as "Barias" [Amharic for slave]... let it be clear to everybody that I shall soon make these ignoramuses stoop and grind corn!"

"Henceforth we will tackle our enemies that come face to face with us and we will not be stabbed in from behind by internal foes... To this end, we will arm the allies and comrades of the broad masses without giving respite to reactionaries, and avenge the blood of our comrades double - and triple - fold."

"Of all these offenses the one that is most widely, frequently, and vehemently denounced is undoubtedly imperialism—sometimes just Western, sometimes Eastern (that is, Soviet) and Western alike. But the way this term is used in the literature of Islamic fundamentalists often suggests that it may not carry quite the same meaning for them as for its Western critics. In many of these writings the term "imperialist" is given a distinctly religious significance, being used in association, and sometimes interchangeably, with "missionary," and denoting a form of attack that includes the Crusades as well as the modern colonial empires. One also sometimes gets the impression that the offense of imperialism is not—as for Western critics—the domination by one people over another but rather the allocation of roles in this relationship. What is truly evil and unacceptable is the domination of infidels over true believers. For true believers to rule misbelievers is proper and natural, since this provides for the maintenance of the holy law, and gives the misbelievers both the opportunity and the incentive to embrace the true faith. But for misbelievers to rule over true believers is blasphemous and unnatural, since it leads to the corruption of religion and morality in society, and to the flouting or even the abrogation of God's law. This may help us to understand the current troubles in such diverse places as Ethiopian Eritrea, Indian Kashmir, Chinese Sinkiang, and Yugoslav Kossovo, in all of which Muslim populations are ruled by non-Muslim governments. It may also explain why spokesmen for the new Muslim minorities in Western Europe demand for Islam a degree of legal protection which those countries no longer give to Christianity and have never given to Judaism. Nor, of course, did the governments of the countries of origin of these Muslim spokesmen ever accord such protection to religions other than their own. In their perception, there is no contradiction in these attitudes. The true faith, based on God's final revelation, must be protected from insult and abuse; other faiths, being either false or incomplete, have no right to any such protection."

"1,000 children have been killed, and their bodies are left in the streets and are being eaten by wild hyenas . . . You can see the heaped-up bodies of murdered children, most of them aged eleven to thirteen, lying in the gutter, as you drive out of Addis Ababa."

"No sooner had Mengistu seized power than he unleashed an orgy of killing. Arms were given out to the Kebelles ('Urban Dwellers Associations') and a 'people's militia' was formed. Mengistu publicly urged it and the army to 'dispense revolutionary justice' and 'liquidate counter revolutionaries'. Revolutionary justice meant summary killing, without trial, of suspected enemies of the regime."