REHMAN RASHID:
`They also serve who only stand and wait'

2009/11/08

REHMAN RASHID

A MOVING reunion took place in a Berlin cabaret several days ago, in commemoration of tomorrow's 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Former president George H.W. Bush of the United States, former West German chancellor Helmut Kohl, and former president of the Soviet Union Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev appeared together and received an ovation for having been pre-eminent among those nominally in charge of the planet back then.

The gravity of what happened in Berlin on Nov 9, 1989 was clear and obvious even in the moment, but few would have believed it would herald changes so profound, it's almost startling to think this happened only 20 years ago.

The world today is unrecognisable from what it was before those crowds took sledgehammers, crowbars and history into their own hands that cold autumn night in a suddenly single Berlin.

Everyone in the world awake at the time would remember where they were when they watched those slabs of preternaturally strong concrete come down; the force it took; the sheer work those people were doing; the astonishing, scary, jubilant thing that was happening.

Tearing down the Berlin Wall did for that generation what the Moon landing or the Kennedy assassination had done for the one before; defining not just a time but everyone living in it.

Former president Bush the Elder is now 85 and walks with the aid of a stick. Former chancellor Kohl, that mountainous man, is 79 and has been wheelchair-bound since breaking his hip a couple of years ago. But their smiles were as warm and twinkly as old men's can be when someone cares to remember who they were and what they did, and thank them for it.

Former president Gorbachev did not smile. He looked pensive and awkward; as though wondering if people still thought he'd brought down the Berlin Wall because Ronald Reagan had told him to. The truth was, of course, Gorbachev hadn't done anything at all -- mobs of determined Germans had. He'd just let them.

At 78, Gorbachev was the youngest and healthiest of the three, though he too had been worn grey by the years. In this last act of his incomparable political role in world history, Gorbachev seemed ill-at-ease; a bystander. Perhaps the last leader of the Soviet Union could not deflect the tragedy of commemorating an event history records as a good thing, but which entailed the dismantlement of his nation.

If so, one would wish to console him: Cheer up, Gorby, it wasn't your fault. We loved you, Mik. You were the coolest communist in history, with that wine-stain birthmark on your head and your ease of engagement with the West. After the decrepit Konstantin Chernenko, the archaic Yuri Andropov, and the final ruinous showdown with Reagan's Strategic Defence Initiative, your glasnost and perestroika were beautiful. It was what the people of the Soviet Union and the world needed to hear and to have and to hold.

Gorbachev allowed "openness" and "restructuring". And he always knew that what he unleashed, he could not be expected to rein in. He knew he had to leave the consequences to fate and faith. Boris Yeltsin, he could have done without. But that's the way it is when genies are let out of their bottles. You might think you get three wishes, but they're going to mess you up.

Two decades later, Gorbachev was able to join Kohl and Bush Sr. in memory of his life's greatest achievement, which was essentially to let it go, then let it be. As he did on becoming general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1985, so too did the East German armed forces just four years later choose to stand down and stand by as a tide of popular sentiment changed the course of history.

Unlike Deng Xiaoping in China just five months earlier in that geopolitical watershed of a year, they let it flow unimpeded as it swept away everything they had known.

That took some gumption. They didn't necessarily like what was happening. At Berlin's historic Friedrichstadtpalast on Oct 31, Gorbachev reminded Kohl that he, Britain's prime minister Margaret Thatcher and France's president Francois Mitterand had not been keen on a reunited Germany. "I'm sorry, Helmut," Gorbachev said.

But they had let it happen, and smiling apple-cheeked in their audience was Germany's present Chancellor Angela Merkel, who had grown up in the German Democratic Republic.

So the applause for these three old men was genuine, prolonged and affectionate. It was not for what any of them had done, however, but for what they had allowed to happen. Theirs was the wisdom of recognising lost causes, and the courage not to persist in them. They were the Great Permitters of history, and for their monumental resolve not to act, the present world grants them due credit.

This world has since managed to survive another 20 years, with as yet uncertain effects on the English Premier League, failing British newspapers, and the prospects for Europe's economic recovery before the end of the world as the Maya knew it.

The Cold War ended, hot ones began; another wall sprang up, this time in the West Bank; Russia is a fiefdom of insanely rich young oligarchs, and China is in charge. Go figure.

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