The Berlin Wall and us

Nov 11, 2009 Editorial

Monday, November 9th, was the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Thrown up in 1961 in the height of the “Cold War” between the USA and the USSR, the latter’s East German ally closed off West Berlin completely by a wall that was progressively reinforced over the next two decades.
During those decades some two hundred East Germans were killed attempting to scale the wall and enter West Berlin – and freedom. The Berlin Wall became a symbol of the repression demanded by the communist ideology of the “Eastern Bloc”, which necessitated walls and guns to keep their citizens “home”.
But the Cold War was waged not only in Europe – or confined only to the cloak and dagger operations as described in the novels of John le Carré. The goal was to prove the superiority of capitalism vs. socialism – to be demonstrated by the number of states each side was able to sign up.
In almost every country of the underdeveloped world, the two superpowers attempted, by almost every stratagem under the sun, to inveigle leaders to join their respective camp. Economic assistance and military hardware were their major carrots; assassinations and coups d’etat were the corresponding sticks.
1961 was a key year in the Cold War, with a new US President John F. Kennedy, determined to prove that despite his “liberal” leanings, he was not ‘soft” on communism. The disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, the only open ally of the USSR in the Western hemisphere, in April 1961, was to colour his orientation for the remainder of his brief tenure.
The CIA was authorised to destabilize Cuba and even assassinate Castro: this led to Cuba’s request for Russian missiles for protection and lead to the missile brinkmanship between the US and USSR, the following year. Advisers were increased to South Vietnam and an open confrontation with the USSR over access to West Berlin was averted only when the latter agreed to the construction of the wall.
Then there was, of course, our own tragedy that does not even trigger a footnote in most accounts of the Cold War. The PPP’s victory in the 1961 elections under the socialist Dr Cheddi Jagan raised all sort of red flags (no pun intended) in the skittish JFK administration that had vowed, “No other Cuba’s in the Western Hemisphere!”
Jagan’s October 1961 visit to the White House only served to reinforce Kennedy’s suspicion that Jagan was “Moscow’s man”. As the NY Times noted in 1994, “Still-classified documents depict in unusual detail a direct order from the President to unseat Dr. Jagan, say Government officials familiar with the secret papers. Though many Presidents have ordered the C.I.A. to undermine foreign leaders, they say, the Jagan papers are a rare smoking gun: a clear written record, without veiled words or plausible denials, of a President’s command to depose a Prime Minister.”
The rest, as they say is history, and our history became the story of the brutal Burnhamite dictatorship. But history is also dynamic and that dynamism was dramatised by the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. That fall was the direct consequence of the détente between the USA of Reagan and the USSR of Gorbachev. The lessening of tensions led to the latter’s perestroika or domestic “openness” that he explicitly advocated to his Eastern bloc allies. He assured them that the USSR would not intervene in their domestic affairs.
In Guyana, Mr Hoyte had begun his own “openness” and signed an agreement with the IMF in 1989 – with all the “Washington Consensus” conditionalities. The USA, as the soon-to-be superpower (1991), did not take much persuasion to support calls for “free and fair” elections that took place in 1992. But that was only a beginning. We should not forget the lesson of the Berlin Wall: a society cannot be run if the state is not willing to allow its citizens to express, in real terms, their freedoms.
To believe otherwise is to court disaster – unfortunately not just for the rulers but also for the ruled.

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