The world seemed not only a dangerous but also a dispiriting place as the presidency of Jimmy Carter wound to its conclusion. Iran held American hostages, and a daring rescue raid authorized by Carter failed miserably. Détente, the cornerstone of American policy toward the Soviet Union since the days of Nixon, was in tatters after the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979 and exiled dissidents like Andrei Sakharov. Carter proposed an international boycott of the Summer Olympics, to be held in Moscow in 1980.
Afghan refugees and anti-Soviet resistance fighters in a camp in Pakistan
Ronald Reagan, taking office in January 1981, nevertheless held out the sunny promise that it was “morning again in America,” although many of his listeners wondered how a politician who had spent a lifetime denouncing Communism could sit down at the same table across from the Russians to work out a livable nuclear policy.
Amazingly enough, he did, despite the rhetoric reflected in mottos like “peace through strength” and “trust but verify.” In Britain, he had a like-minded ally in Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, a “conviction politician,” in her own words, keen to challenge the Soviet Union with the same iron will that she displayed in taking on the power of the British labor unions. Israel invaded Lebanon and expelled the Palestine Liberation organization from Beirut.
British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher with German Federal Chancellor Helmut Schmidt in 1982.
The nuclear-freeze movement gathered momentum when it was announced that the United States intended to base cruise missiles in Europe. In the United States, proponents of accommodation with the U.S.S.R. were aghast at the implications of Reagan’s pet project, the Strategic Defense Initiative, a futuristic-sounding missile shield popularly known as “Star Wars.”
U.S. solders near St George’s, the capital of the Grenada Island. U.S. troops invaded the island on October 27, 1983, ousting the Marxist government.
Relations between the two superpowers were chilly, but a genuine crisis never materialized. Instead of nuclear war, the 1980’s experienced a series of nasty small-scale conflicts. The United States invaded the Caribbean island of Grenada and overthrew its new Marxist government. Britain declared war on Argentina over the Falkland Islands. The antigovernment forces known as “contras” waged a guerrilla war against the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua, secretly funded by the United States with money gained from the sale of arms to its bitter enemy Iran. When the secret dealings became public, the scandal badly damaged Reagan’s presidency.
Mikhail S. Gorbachev in 1985.
Fissures in the Eastern bloc widened, the Soviet economy weakened and a succession of aged, infirm Soviet leaders resisted change until, mid-decade, the relatively young, reform-minded Mikhail Gorbachev took over. Under the watchwords glasnost (openness) and perestroika (reform), he hoped to craft a more humane, efficient version of Leninism, but he too was at the mercy of powerful, historic changes beyond his power to direct.
In Poland, a prolonged strike by shipyard workers led to the creation of an independent trade union, directed by Lech Walesa, and the imposition of martial law. A long standoff ensued, and the future of the Soviet Empire hung in the balance. On their side, Poland’s dissidents had a mighty ally, Pope John Paul II, a Pole whose forthright opposition to Communism and Soviet domination made him, in a sense, the spiritual leader of a movement that would spread throughout Eastern Europe.
Pope John Paul II with the Dalai Lama during Pope’s ten-day visit to India in 1986.
By the end of the decade, the postwar order decided at the Yalta Conference in 1945 had unraveled with startling rapidity. Hungary, with Moscow’s blessing, opened its borders and allowed East German tourists to reach the West. As the trickle became a flood, Erich Honecker, the longtime Communist leader, resigned, and his successor allowed East Germans to move freely through the gates in the Berlin Wall. In a wild night of jubilation, East Germans walked without restriction to greet their counterparts in West Berlin. Some began shattering the wall with hammers. It was a moment that millions had dreamed of but never expected to see.
West Berliners crowd in front of the Berlin Wall early on November 11, 1989 as they watch East German border guards demolishing a section of the it.
There was more to come. The dismantling of the wall signaled the end of the Soviet empire. One by one, communist dictatorships collapsed. In the Soviet Union itself, Gorbachev discovered that he had unleashed forces far more powerful than he had envisioned. Instead of reforming the Soviet Union, he presided over its demise.
Chairman. Deng Xiaoping with PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat, in Beijing, China, in 1989.
In China, events took a different course. Economic reform proceeded apace as the ideological grip of Maoism loosened and the Chinese heeded, with gusto, Deng Xiaoping’s memorable injunction, “Enrich yourselves.” It became clear that political freedom was not part of the equation when, in 1989, the government crushed, with startling brutality, a demonstration calling for civil liberties and political reform.
It was a bitter conclusion to a period of exhilarating change. Once again the world learned that in history, happy endings are rare.
OIL SITES IN IRAN AND IRAQ BOMBED AS BAGHDAD TROOPS CROSS BORDER
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Wednesday, Sept. 24–Iraq attacked Iran’s huge oil refinery at Abadan yesterday, setting oil and gas tanks on fire, and Iran struck both Baghdad and Iraqi oil installations as hostilities between the two Persian Gulf nations widened.
The Iraqi military command said last night that its troops, crossing into Iran at several points, had surrounded Abadan and the neighboring port of Khurramshahr and were besieging the refinery itself.
Despite Iraqi raids on Iranian airfields Monday, Iranian planes struck three times at Baghdad yesterday, bombing the civil and military airports and firing rockets into the center of the city. The northern centers of Kirkuk and Mosul and a petrochemical complex near Basra in the south also came under Iranian air attack. Iraqi officials estimate that 50 people had been killed.
A power plant of Baghdad after being bombarded by the Iranians in October 1980.
Twenty-nine of these were said to have died in the raid on the petrochemical complex, at Zubair, among them four Americans and four Britons working there, according to a British Foreign Office announcement in London.
The Iraqi command said yesterday that the latest advance had been decided upon in response to an announcement from Iran on Monday that is was in control of the Strait of Hormuz and that it would not allow any ships to carry cargo to Iraq. It said the cross-border attacks were also necessary to force Iran to accept Iraq’s claim to sovereignty over the entire Shatt al Arab and to 90 square miles of territory in the Musian area. 
Israel Enacts a Law Making all of Jerusalem The Capital
JERUSALEM, July 30–In a final hectic session before its summer recess, the Parliament overwhelmingly enacted into law a bill affirming Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.
The legislation, which was approved by a vote of 69 to 15, with 3 abstentions, does nothing to change the city’s defacto status.
Israel annexed the eastern, Arab part shortly after capturing it from Jordan in the 1967 was and has regarded the entire city as its capital for 13 years.
The bill, which was introduced in May by Geula Cohen, an ultranationalist who opposed the peace treaty with Egypt, has been criticized by Washington and Cairo, and many Israeli legislators admitted to having reservations about its value. Its enactment follows an announcement by Prime Minister Menachem Begin that he intends to move his office to East Jerusalem.
The developments together could make it harder to resuscitate the deadlocked negotiations between Israel and Egypt on the issue of self-rule for Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza. After a suspension of three months, a session of the talks had been scheduled for next week in Alexandria.
MAY 14, 1981
POPE IS SHOT IN CAR IN VATICAN SQUARE
ROME, Thursday, May 14–Pope John Paul II was shot and seriously wounded yesterday as he was standing in an open car moving slowly among more than 10,000 worshipers in St. Peter’s Square.
The police arrested a gunman who was later identified as an escaped Turkish murderer who had previously threatened the Pope’s life in the name of Islam.
Pope John Paul II being helped by his bodyguards after being shot by Mehmet Ali Agca at St Peter’s Square in Rome on May 13, 1981.
The Pontiff, who was struck by two pistol bullets and wounded in the abdomen, right arm and left hand, underwent 5 hours and 25 minutes of surgery in which parts of his intestine were removed. A hospital bulletin at midnight said he was in “guarded” condition, but the director of surgery expressed confidence that “the Pontiff will recover soon.”
The attack occurred as the Pope, dressed in white, was shaking hands and lifting small children in his arms while being driven around the square. Suddenly, as he reached a point just outside the Vatican’s bronze gate, there was a burst of gunfire.
One hand rising to his face and blood staining his garments, the Pope faltered and fell into the arms of his Polish secretary, the Rev. Stanislaw Dziwisz, and his personal servant, Angelo Gugel, who were in the car with him.
The gunman, who the police said was armed with a 9-millimeter Browning automatic, was set upon in the square by bystanders, who knocked the pistol out of his hand. He was then arrested, taken away by police car and later identified as Mehmet Ali Agca, 23. Despite reports that another man had been seen fleeing from the square, the police said they were convinced that the gunman had acted alone.
The police quoted Mr. Agca as having told them, “My life is not important.” He was said to have arrived in Italy last Saturday, landing at the Milan airport, and to have come to Rome on Monday. The police said that he had in his pocket several notes in handwritten Turkish, one of them saying, “I am killing the Pope as a protest against the imperialism of the Soviet Union and the United States and against the genocide that is being carried out in El Salvador and Afghanistan.”
The Turkish news agency Anatolia reported that Mr. Agca had been convicted of murdering Abdi Ipekci, the editor of the Turkish newspaper Milliyet, in February 1979 but escaped from prison later that year. Anatolia said he wrote a letter to the newspaper on Nov. 26, 1979, saying that he had fled from prison with the intention of killing the Pope, who was just then due in Ankara and Istanbul.
AMID SPLENDOR, CHARLES WEDS DIANA
LONDON, July 29–In a blaze of martial and spiritual pageantry on a glorious summer morning, the Prince of Wales took as his wife today a shy and charming member of one of the kingdom’s greatest families.
The 2,500 guests inside Christopher Wren’s Baroque master-piece, St. Paul’s Cathedral, the hundreds of thousands who watched the wedding party ride in magnificent horse-drawn carriages from Buckingham Palace to the cathedral and back and the 700 million television viewers around the world witnessed a fairy tale come to life: the handsome Prince Charles in naval uniform marrying the lovely 20-year-old Diana Spencer, daughter of an earl, amid the sort of splendor the modern world has all but forgotten.
All the panoply of monarchy was deployed on this, one of the great days in the history of the House of Windsor: the stirring music of Handel and Purcell and Elgar; the Household Cavalry, in their burnished breastplates and helmets with red plumes; the stately royal horses, caparisoned in silver; almost all of the reigning sovereigns of Europe, come in their finery to share in the happy occasion, and the royal bride herself, resplendent in a gown of pale ivory, with puffy sleeves and a train 25 feet long.
Diana, Princess of Wales and Prince Charles, Prince of Wales, on their wedding day at St Paul’s Cathedral. Sarah Armstrong-Jones is the bridesmaid behind them.
It was a day that symbolized for the British people the continuity of the monarchy and thus of the nation itself, a day that many will recall as a punctuation mark in their own lives, a day that afforded surcease from a summer of joblessness, urban unrest and intractable problems in Ireland. It was a day that provided “a flash of color on the hard road we have to travel,” as Sir Winston Churchill described the marriage of Prince Charles’s mother, now Queen Elizabeth II.
As the bell in the tower above struck the first note of 11 o’clock, the organist sounded the first chord of the “Trumpet Voluntary” composed by Jeremiah Clarke, who was himself the organist of St. Paul’s from 1699 to 1707. Down the aisle came Lady Diana in her gown of frills and flounces, pearls and crinolines. Sewn into the gown for luck was a tiny golden horseshoe, studded with diamonds. It took her four minutes to reach her fiance.
The ceremony, which lasted just over an hour, was the musical and emotional experience that the Prince said yesterday that he wanted. He said “I will” huskily but firmly; she said “I will” in a little girl’s tentative voice. The stillness was broken first by the sound of a falling camera in the press stand. When Dr. Runcie said, “I pronounce that they be man and wife together,” the joyous shouts of the crowd listening on loudspeakers outside was clearly audible.
Sadat Assassinated at Army Parade as Men Amid Ranks Fire into Stands
Egyptian president Anwar el-Sadat (left) and Ronald Reagan during a White House state arrival ceremony two months before his assassination.
President Anwar el-Sadat of Egypt was shot and killed today by a group of men in military uniforms who hurled hand grenades and fired rifles at him as he watched a military parade commemorating the 1973 war against Israel.
Vice President Hosni Mubarak, in announcing Mr. Sadat’s death, said Egypt’s treaties and international commitments would be respected. He said the Speaker of Parliament, Sufi Abu Taleb, would serve as interim President pending an election in 60 days.
The assassins’ bullets ended the life of a man who earned a reputation for making bold decisions in foreign affairs, a reputation based in large part on his decision in 1977 to journey to the camp of Egypt’s foe, Israel, to make peace.
Regarded as an interim ruler when he came to power in 1970 on the death of Gamal Abdel Nasser, Mr. Sadat forged his own regime and ran Egypt single-handedly. He was bent on moving this impoverished country into the late 20th century, a drive that led him to abandon an alliance with the Soviet Union and embrace the West.
That rule ended abruptly and violently today.
Information gathered from a number of sources indicated that eight persons had been killed and 27 wounded in the attack. Later reports, all unconfirmed, put the toll at 11 dead and 38 wounded.
The authorities did not disclose the identity of the assassins. They were being interrogated, and there were no clear indications whether the attack was to have been part of a coup attempt.
The assassination followed a recent crackdown by Mr. Sadat against religious extremists and other political opponents. There were unverifiable reports that some members of the armed forces had also been detained.
OBITUARY
SEPTEMBER 15, 1982
PRINCESS GRACE IS DEAD AFTER RIVIERA CAR CRASH
Princess Grace of Monaco, whose stately beauty and reserve gave her enduring Hollywood stardom even long after she ended her film career, died yesterday in Monte Carlo of injuries suffered when her car plunged off a mountain road Monday. She was 52 years old.
The Princess, the former Grace Kelly, died of a cerebral hemorrhage, a palace spokesman said in Monaco. Princess Grace was driving her British Rover 3500 on a snaking road at Cap-d’Ail in the Cote d’Azur region when she lost control and plunged down a 45-foot embankment. The car burst into flames, and the Princess suffered multiple fractures, including a broken thighbone, collarbone and ribs.
Initial reports gave no sense that her life was in jeopardy. But a Monaco Government announcement yesterday said that her health had “deteriorated during the night.”
“At the end of the day all therapeutic possibilities had been exceeded,” the announcement said. With her in the car was Stephanie, 17, her youngest child by Prince Rainier III of Monaco. Stephanie was under observation at a hospital where she had been treated for shock and bruises.
Princess Grace’s death brought expressions of grief from former Hollywood colleagues and from residents of her hometown, Philadelphia. President Reagan called her “a compassionate and gentle lady.” In Philadelphia, a spokesman for John Cardinal Krol said the Cardinal, who was a close friend, would offer a memorial mass for her at noon Friday.
Alfred Hitchcock, who directed Grace Kelly in three films and was certainly in a position to judge, once said she had “sexual elegance.” And it was that very elegance that probably made its most lasting impression on movie audiences of the 1950’s.
Whether playing the heiress in “To Catch a Thief” or the Quaker pacifist in “High Noon” or the amusedly detached career girl—a term still in vogue when “Rear Window” was made—Grace Kelly carried herself with straight back and clippedvoice self-assurance. Yet just beneath the frosty exterior lay a sensuality and warmth that cracked the formidable reserve.
It was this delicate balance of contrasts that helped give her legendary status—a remarkable achievement for an actress whose career encompassed only 11 films. She made more of that small portfolio than actors who lasted in Hollywood many more decades. Twice she was nominated for an Academy Award, and once she won it, for her 1954 performance in “The Country Girl.” There was a certain irony in the fact that the Oscar came, not for her portrayal of yet another detached beauty but of a frumpy harridan, desperate in her unhappy marriage.
The year before she was in Cannes filming “To Catch a Thief” with Cary Grant and it was at the film festival there that she met the Prince, a member of the Grimaldis, Europe’s oldest royal family.
On April 18, 1956, shortly after she completed the movie “High Society,” they were married in the Cathedral of St. Nicholas in Monaco. It was a media event of such staggering proportion that Miss Kelly, now Princess Grace, later suggested that she and the Prince should have been awarded battle ribbons for all the fighting that was required for them to push through the crowds.
With marriage, she abandoned acting. The effect, as time passed, was to burnish her film career in public memory. Early on in her marriage she received many offers of movie roles but she kept turning them down.
Periodically, there would be reports that she was indeed about to resume her career but nothing ever came of them. “Here I have my obligations and duties as a princess and mother,” she said. “One cannot do everything.”
Her life as Princess of Monaco was obviously enhanced by privilege but also circumscribed by duty. She became a supporter of charities and cultural events. Much of her time was devoted to her three children, the oldest of whom, Princess Caroline, was born in 1957. In recent years, Princess Caroline outranked her mother as a source of fascination for curiosity-seekers, mostly as a result of her marriage to and then divorce from Phillipe Junot, a French businessman whom some people liked to describe as “the playboy next door.”
A lot of people would have said the same thing about her. Always, she had a beauty that came perilously close to iciness but managed to stop safely short. Scratch that coating of ice—and most of her directors did—and exposed just beneath the surface was, variously, warmth, intelligence and sexuality. She could even be whimsical, in a detached fashion, a quality that she showed to advantage in “Rear Window,” in which she was the girlfriend of James Stewart, a photographer with a broken leg who witnesses a murder across the courtyard from his apartment.
For herself, Miss Kelly was never comfortable with her popular image as an ice queen. “I’m not an extrovert—but I’m not unfriendly either,” she told an interviewer early in 1955. “I’m not the exuberant type, but I don’t like to read that I’m cold and distant. I don’t think I am.”
Princess Grace’s car accident in Monaco, 1982.
THE BEIRUT MASSACRE: THE FOUR DAYS
BEIRUT, Lebanon, Sept. 25–The massacre of more than 300 Palestinian and Lebanese men, women and children at the Shatila refugee camp by Christian militiamen has left many unanswered questions.
The slayings, which began Wednesday, Sept. 15, and continued until Saturday, Sept. 18, raise questions that focus particularly on the role played by the Israeli Army in what is certain to be regarded as one of the most important events in the modern history of the Middle East.
Much is at stake in the answers to these questions. The relations between the Israeli people and their Government, the relations between world Jewry and Israel, the relations between Washington and Jerusalem and the relations between Israelis and Palestinians will all be affected by the truth of what happened in Shatila.
Surviving families return to the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila near Beirut after the 1982 massacre.
The full truth may never be known. Too many people have already fled the scene. Too many people were killed on the spot. Too many people are now under pressure to hide their deeds.
There has been no announcement of any investigation in Lebanon of the militiamen who actually did the killing. In Israel, Prime Minister Menachem Begin rejected the idea of an independent judicial commission of inquiry into the Israeli involvement in the massacre. On Friday, he proposed an investigation of lesser scope, but it was unclear whether the Chief Justice of Israel’s Supreme Court will accept the invitation to head it.
BREZHNEV TRIED TO ADVANCE MOSCOW’S GOALS THROUGH DETENTE SOVIET LEADER
Soviet President Leonid Brezhev in 1981.
As the leader of the Soviet Union, Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev was a canny and careful Communist Party functionary who sought to make his country the military equal of the United States and promote its political influence around the world through the policy of detente.
In domestic affairs, as General Secretary of the Communist Party, Mr. Brezhnev ruled as first among his equals on the Politburo, not as an autocrat, and professed to want economic development of his country of 265 million people spread over a sixth of the globe’s land area.
Both his policy and his health faltered in these tasks in the last years of his life. Detente, which had seemed a necessity to many Western leaders after Soviet tanks moved into Czechoslovakia in 1968 to crush the liberalization of the “Prague Spring,” lost much of its appeal in the United States after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, and President Carter imposed an embargo on grain sales and other trade curbs.
After the Polish military authorities ceded to pressure from Moscow and declared martial law in December 1981, President Reagan imposed further economic and political sanctions on the Soviet Union, though not an embargo on grain sales. The Western European allies remained more reluctant to cut back their important industrial trade with the Russians, and insisted on going ahead with the deal, creating a political rift within the NATO alliance that Mr. Brezhnev obviously sought to exploit.
But domestic economic stagnation had become an acute domestic problem by the end of the Brezhnev years. In this area, despite their recognition of the crisis, the aging Soviet leaders made no effective attempt to reform the rigidities of centralized economic planning. And as the standard of living declined, political repression increased. Dissidents, who had emerged openly in the mid-1970’s to criticize violations of human rights, were later harassed until most had either left the country or were in prison camps by the early 1980’s. Soviet Jews, who had been permitted to emigrate by the thousands a month in 1977 and 1978, found that by 1982 permission to emigrate was virtually impossible to get.
In his last years, Mr. Brezhnev’s speech became labored and his features pale and bloated, apparently as a result of medical treatments for a disability that was never publicly revealed. At the height of his powers in the early 1970’s, in contacts with Presidents Nixon, Ford and Carter and Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger, he was a burly, gray-haired, black-browed figure of 5 feet 10 inches, gregarious and talkative, but powerful and very much aware of his power over associates and adversaries alike.
Then he had a reputation as a lover of good food and drink, fast cars—which he collected—and hunting. Mr. Brezhnev talked extensively about his weight, which he sought vainly to keep under control, and often joked about his excessive cigarette smoking, which was thought to have aggravated his health problems.
His smoking (Philip Morris Multifilters) was such a vexation that he used a box with a time lock to slow his pace. But he conceded to one visitor, “I keep a reserve pack in the other pocket.” Ultimately he had to give up smoking altogether.
APRIL 25, 1983
SKEPTICISM GROWING OVER THE ‘HITLER DIARIES’
Skepticism over the authenticity of Hitler’s purported diaries widened yesterday among historians, former aides of the dictator and handwriting experts in Britain, West Germany and the United States as the first excerpts were published.
Disbelief was expressed by David Irving and Lord Bullock, British historians and experts on Hitler; Werner Maser, a West German historian; two of Hitler’s former personal aides; and Charles Hamilton Jr., an American expert on handwriting who has just completed an 800-page, two-volume study called “Autographs of the Third Reich.”
“I’m sure it’s a hoax,” Mr. Hamilton said in an interview in New York yesterday after seeing three photostatic sheets from the purported diaries, including two bearing Hitler signatures. “The whole story is a misbegotten prevarication. The forgers are probably luxuriating right now in the south of France.”
Some protagonists said the diaries, supposedly found in an East German hayloft in 1981 and bought by the West German news magazine Stern, were a major historical discovery and would contribute to the world’s understanding of Hitler, the Third Reich and the events of the Nazi period.
Referring to the story of the loss and rediscovery of the documents, Mr. Hamilton said: “It’s something Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm could have written. Stern said they have not got some parts of the diary ready for release yet. The only thing I can suggest is to tell the forger to hurry up and get them ready—and to make sure the ink is dry before he delivers them.”
INDIRA GANDHI ASSASSINATED BY GUNMEN
NEW DELHI, Wednesday, Oct. 31–Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was assassinated today by two gunmen who opened fire on her near her home.
Mrs. Gandhi, the dominant figure in Indian politics for nearly two decades, died less than four hours after undergoing emergency surgery at the All-India Institute of Medical Sciences for between 8 and 16 bullet wounds in the abdomen and thigh. She was 66 years old.
The Press Trust of India reported that the Prime Minister was gunned down by two members of her own security guard armed with a revolver and submachine gun as she walked from her residence to her office at 9:40 A.M. (11:10 P.M., Tuesday, Eastern standard time). The Press Trust report said the two assailants were members of the Sikh religion and had been captured.
Mrs. Gandhi fell to the ground with a cry
Reports from news agencies and witnesses said Mrs. Gandhi fell to the ground with a cry and that members of her household and other security guards raced to her. She was admitted to the hospital and underwent surgery about 40 minutes after the shooting, according to hospital sources.
The body of Indira Gandhi during the funeral procession on November 3, 1984.
The Press Trust of India reported that the two gunmen were members of the Sikh religion, but this could not be independently confirmed. Mrs. Gandhi has been the target of Sikh anger since she ordered Government troops to raid the Golden Temple in Amritsar earlier this year to drive out Sikh militants who have been agitating for greater autonomy in the northwestern state of Punjab.
SEPTEMBER 5, 1985
MANDELA: MAN, LEGEND AND SYMBOL OF RESISTANCE
JOHANNESBURG, Sept. 4–Percy Qoboza remembers the days fondly. One of them goes like this: In the early 1960’s the man was on the run from the police, and Mr. Qoboza, a young black reporter, was following the story.
“He would disappear and then turn up, somewhere, at a public telephone, and call in with a statement. Of course the police would trace the call, but by that time, he was long gone. We had our own pimpernel.”
Mr. Qoboza is now a prominent newspaper editor. The man he was talking about is Nelson Mandela, the imprisoned leader of the African National Congress, whose days as the pimpernel ran out in August 1962, when he was arrested for sabotage because of his role in the militant wing of the congress. He has been in prison ever since and has become, through incarceration and steadfast defiance from within the prison walls, South Africa’s leading black hero, the man, according to a recent newspaper survey, whom 90 percent of the nation’s black people want unconditionally freed.
“I think,” Mr. Qoboza said in an interview today, “that he symbolizes black determination to be free.”
The symbolism, from a black nationalist point of view, is evident. Pollsmoor prison, outside Cape Town, where Mr. Mandela is held, represents the system against which he rebels. His rebellion, from within, is the ambiguous emblem of defiance in a society where the rulers seem to call the shots.
The enigma, however, seems to be that, invisible and unheard, removed by white authority from black political activism, Mr. Mandela has captured the spirit and devotion not only of those who knew him at the time of his incarceration, but also of those who have, in the last year of upheaval, assumed the custodianship of black resistance—the teen-agers who were not yet born when he was jailed.
If Mr. Mandela, 67 years old, was released tomorrow, said Michael Morake, 18, in an interview in Soweto, Johannesburg’s sprawling black satellite, “I will probably pass him by because I would not recognize him.”
“All his life has been dedicated to the struggle,” Mr. Qoboza said, “and I bet that the first thing he would do if he was released would be to organize a rally in Soweto and re-dedicate himself to the struggle.”
APRIL 16, 1985
APARTHEID LAWS ON MIXED-RACE SEX TO BE ABOLISHED
CAPE TOWN, April 15–The South African Government said today that it had decided to abolish the laws forbidding marriage and sex across racial lines.
Officials said they would accept a recommendation from a special committee of South Africa’s new three-chamber Parliament to remove longstanding legal barriers to marriages and sexual relations between whites and and nonwhites.
The abolition of the marriage and sex laws is most likely to affect couples of different races whose marriages, contracted abroad or performed in South African churches, are not legally recognized by the Government. The parliamentary committee recommended that such marriages be legalized.
Remove longstanding barriers
There are estimated to be thousands of such couples living in the legal shadows here, unable to travel on trains together or to get Government schooling for their children. They are forced to live in “gray” areas, places generally on the borders between white and nonwhite residential districts where they are less likely to attract attention.
Some legislators and Western diplomats said last month that they believed repeal of the laws relating to sexual behavior would be the main accomplishment of the first sitting of the new Parliament.
In the last five years, 918 people have been prosecuted for violating Article 16 of the Morality Act, 160 of them last year.
The proposed repeal of this feature of apartheid seems to be part of a Government effort to remove some parts of the system of racial separation.
APRIL 19, 1986
PRETORIA RESCINDS PASS-LAW CONTROL ON BLACKS’ MOVES
JOHANNESBURG, April 18–President P. W. Botha announced today that the pass laws controlling where black people can live and work would no longer be enforced. For blacks, the pass laws are among the most hated aspects of apartheid.
Blacks who have been convicted of violating pass laws, and those who are in jail awaiting trial, will be freed immediately, the President said in a speech to Parliament.
Mr. Botha said that the passes carried by black people would be abolished and that a standard identity card would be issued for all races beginning in July. Government officials have not said whether the new ones would contain racial information or restrictions.
Bishop Desmond M. Tutu, who was elected Archbishop of Cape Town this week, gave conditional praise to Mr. Botha’s announcement.
Bishop Desmond M. Tutu attending a funeral in 1985.
“The moratorium and release of pass offenders can only be welcomed,” Bishop Tutu said. “However, I hope there is not a sting in the tail. One has to be very careful that they are not going to find another way of harassing blacks.”
Other anti-apartheid activists said they doubted whether the President’s statement meant blacks would be free to live and work where they wanted.
Hundreds of thousands of blacks are arrested each year for violating various provisions of the pass laws, including failure to carry the pass book, an identity document, and for illegally being in restricted white urban and residential areas.
Figures are not precise, but arrests are thought to have averaged 200,000 to 300,000 a year in recent years. Amnesty International, the human rights organization, reported that 238,000 black people were arrested in 1984 for pass-law violations.
Scholars have calculated that 18 million blacks have been arrested in the last 70 years for violations.
Swedish Premier Assassinated on Stockholm Street
Olof Palme, the Prime Minister of Sweden and an internationally prominent left-wing activist, was shot and killed by a gunman Friday night on a brightly lit street corner in downtown Stockholm. He had dismissed his security guards and was walking with his wife after attending a movie premiere.
The assailant escaped, apparently in a car driven by an accomplice; the police said they had no evidence of a motive. In a call to a news agency in London, however, a terrorist group called the Holger Meins Commando claimed responsibility.
It was the first assassination of a Swedish head of government or state in more than 200 years. The last European leader killed while holding office was the Prime Minister of Spain, Luis Carrero Blanco, in 1973, who died in a car-bombing attributed to Basque separatists.
Mr. Palme, who was 59 years old, led his Socialist Party for 17 years, serving as Prime Minister from 1969 to 1976, when he lost an election, and regaining the office in 1982. Educated at Kenyon College in Ohio, he was a frequent and sharp critic of United States policies. In 1968 he marched alongside a North Vietnamese diplomat in a demonstration against the American war in Vietnam, and he campaigned vigorously against deployment of American nuclear weapons in Europe.
He was faulted for muting criticism of the Soviet Union, even when Soviet submarines were repeatedly sighted in Swedish waters. But Sweden, which proclaims itself a neutral nation, remained Western-oriented in trade, culture and democratic institutions.
President Reagan sent condolences, denouncing the murder as “a senseless act of violence.” He praised Mr. Palme for “his devotion to democratic values and his untiring efforts to promote peace.”
APRIL 29, 1986
SOVIET ANNOUNCES NUCLEAR ACCIDENT AT ELECTRIC PLANT
MOSCOW, April 28–The Soviet Union announced today that there had been an accident at a nuclear power plant in the Ukraine and that “aid is being given to those affected.”
The severity of the accident, which spread discernable radioactive material over Scandinavia, was not immediately clear. But the terse statement, distributed by the Tass press agency and read on the evening television news, suggested a major accident.
The phrasing also suggested that the problem had not been brought under full control at the nuclear plant, which the Soviet announcement identified as the Chernobyl station. It is situated at the new town of Pripyat, near Chernobyl and 60 miles north of Kiev.
The announcement, the first official disclosure of a nuclear accident ever by the Soviet Union, came hours after Sweden, Finland and Denmark reported abnormally high radioactivity levels in their skies. The readings initially led those countries to think radioactive material had been leaking from one of their own reactors.
The Soviet announcement, made on behalf of the Council of Ministers, after Sweden had demanded information, said in its entirety:
“An accident has occurred at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant as one of the reactors was damaged. Measures are being taken to eliminate the consequences of the accident. Aid is being given to those affected. A Government commission has been set up.”
The Chernobyl plant, with four 1,000-megawatt reactors in operation, is one of the largest and oldest of the 15 or so Soviet civilian nuclear stations. Nuclear power has been a matter of high priority in the Soviet Union, and capacity has been going into service as fast as reactors can be built. Pripyat, where the Chernobyl plant is situated, is a settlement of 25,000 to 30,000 people that was built in the 1970’s along with the station. It is home to construction workers, service personnel and their families.
A British reporter returning from Kiev reported seeing no activity in the Ukrainian capital that would suggest any alarm. No other information was immediately available from the area.
But reports from across Scandinavia, areas more than 800 miles to the north, spoke of increases in radioactivity over the last 24 hours.
Repairs being carried out on the Chernobyl nuclear plant in the Ukraine, following a major explosion in April of 1986 which, according to official statistics, affected 3,235,984 Ukrainians and sent radioactive clouds all over Europe.
The first alarm was raised in Sweden when workers arriving at the Forsmark nuclear power station, 60 miles north of Stockholm, set off warnings during a routine radioactivity check. The plant was evacuated, Swedish officials said. When other nuclear power plants reported similar happenings, the authorities turned their attention to the Soviet Union, from which the winds were coming.
A Swedish diplomat here said he had telephoned three Soviet Government agencies—the State Committee for Utilization of Atomic Energy, the Ministry of Electric Power and the three-year-old State Committee for Safety in the Atomic Power Industry—asking them to explain the high readings over Scandinavia. All said they had no explanation, the diplomat said.
JANUARY 9, 1986
PRESIDENT FREEZES ALL LIBYAN ASSETS HELD IN THE U.S.
WASHINGTON, Jan. 8–President Reagan today ordered Libyan assets in the United States frozen, and the State Department issued a report giving details of its charges that Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s Government supported terrorism around the world.
Muammar el-Qaddafi in 1985.
The action came a day after the President announced measures virtually severing all economic ties with Libya and ordered Americans living there to depart.
The report charging Libyan complicity in terrorism included some new allegations about assistance given to terrorist groups by Colonel Qaddafi. It was issued in an effort to bolster the Government’s case for a worldwide boycott of Libya.
But the American appeal for cooperation received a tepid response from European governments and Japan, all of which expressed doubts about the merits of economic sanctions. At the same time, the Federal Bureau of Investigation said it had prevented six potential terrorist attacks last year within the United States that were to be carried out by terrorists from abroad. Three of the incidents involved a Libyan diplomat who the F.B.I. said had entered this country to coordinate violence against Libyan dissidents.
In Libya, the state radio described the new United States moves as proof that President Reagan “and his intelligence services are involved in lowly conspiracies” to overthrow the Qaddafi Government.
The State Department report issued today accused Colonel Qaddafi of using terrorism as “one of the primary instruments of his foreign policy.”
Included in the “white paper” report, prepared by the Central Intelligence Agency, were several charges of Libyan support for guerrilla groups throughout the world and other terrorist actions. For example, it said that Libya had sent planeloads of gunmen to Saudi Arabia in 1984 and 1985 to try and disrupt the annual Moslem pilgrimage to Mecca.
The paper confirmed for the first time that Egypt had thwarted a plot of Libyan-backed Palestinians to blow up the American Embassy in Cairo with a truck bomb in May. In addition, it said that several known Libyan terrorists have been assigned to the Libyan Embassy in the Sudan and that Libya had provided arms to Sudanese revolutionary committees dedicated to overthrowing the Sudanese Government. The White House spokesman, Larry Speakes, said there had been 695 terrorist incidents last year, with about 200 directed at Americans. In addition, he said, there were 126 aborted terrorism incidents last year, including 23 in the United States.
OBITUARY
MAY 10, 1986
TENZING NORKAY, 72, IS DEAD: CLIMBED EVEREST WITH HILLARY
DARJEELING, India, May 9–Tenzing Norkay, the Sherpa who stood atop the world on Mount Everest with Sir Edmund Hillary in 1953, died here today of a lung infection. He was 72 years old.
He and Sir Edmund, the New Zealander who was knighted for his feat, became the first to climb the world’s highest mountain when they reached the summit of Everest on May 29, 1953. The Sherpa who began as a climber’s porter became an inspiration to a generation of mountaineers.
Tenzing Norkay died at dawn today at his home at this picturesque resort about 310 miles north of Calcutta. He had been ill for two years and served as an adviser to the Himalayan Mountaineering Institute.
Sir Edmund, now New Zealand’s Ambassador to India, said the death of his partner in the successful assault on the 29,028-foot-high crest was “an unexpected shock.”
Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi called the Sherpa a “simple man of indomitable spirit who inspired the Indian youth to take to mountaineering.”
“The entire country will mourn the passing away of the legendary figure,” Mr. Gandhi said.
The mountaineer lived in a three-story villa with his wife, several of their 6 children and 25 dogs. He once complained that, even many years after the expedition, so many people sought him out that he had to post a mastiff on his door to keep them away.
The one question he consistently refused to answer was probably the one he was asked most often: Who stepped on the summit first, Tenzing or Sir Edmund?
“This is teamwork; actually, we climbed together,” he said. “Whatever Hillary say, I don’t care, but I say, teamwork. There shouldn’t be controversy there.”
Tenzing Norkay was born in 1914 in the Sherpa village of Solo Khumbu in Nepal, one of 13 children. He was unsure of his birthdate and there were no records, but he reckoned it to be in May.
His name at birth was Namgyal Wangdi, but he said a Buddhist holy man insisted he was the reincarnation of a rich man who had recently died. The holy man suggested he be renamed Tenzing Norkay, which means “wealthy-fortunate follower of religion.”
It was while herding his family’s yaks, he said, that his dream of climbing Everest took shape.
Members of the small Sherpa tribe, which has no written language and a forgotten history, generally work as attendants and porters for mountaineers. Tenzing was one of the few to become a full-fledged climber.
George Michael Westmacott, a British member of the history-making climb, said today that others in the party were “disappointed, but not resentful” that Lord Hunt, the leader, chose Tenzing to make the final drive to the summit.
“He was different from most Sherpas because he wanted to get to the top of the mountain,” Mr. Westmacott said. “The others were quite happy to carry the loads.”
MAY 31, 1987
Teenager’s Flight to Kremlin Wall Jolts Politburo
To the amazement of all and the consternation of Soviet authorities, a 19-year-old amateur pilot from West Germany flew a tiny single-engine plane across more than 400 miles of heavily guarded Soviet territory last week and landed next to the Kremlin wall at the foot of Red Square.
Matthias Rust, a vacationing computer operator, took off in a rented Cessna 172 from Helsinki, Finland, ostensibly bound for Stockholm. Then he made an abrupt U-turn toward Moscow, where he reportedly circled the main Government palaces before landing on a cobblestone square amid startled strollers Thursday evening. Passers-by got the pilot’s autograph, and an artist painted the blue-and-white plane parked near the famous onion domes of St. Basil’s Cathedral. The police took Mr. Rust into custody.
Soviet authorities were not amused. The ruling Poliburo called a special meeting yesterday and removed the 76-year-old Defense Minister, Marshal Sergei L. Sokolov, and Aleksandr Koldunov, an aide who headed Soviet air defense forces.
Moscow television said air defense radar had spotted the Cessna as it approached the border. “Soviet fighters twice flew around it,” the broadcast said. “The Politburo noted that the commanders of the air defense forces manifested an unpermissible carelessness and indecisiveness,” it added, and they criticized the “absence of proper alertness and discipline and major failures in management of troops from the Ministry of Defense.”
Mathias Rust arrives in a Moscow court on September 4, 1987. He was sentenced to four years in a labour camp for violating Soviet airspace.
A Western attache was gentler. “We can’t paint them as dumb,” he said. “Is the profile of a sporting aircraft at low altitude the same as the profile of a cruise missile?”
Flipping the dials of their short-wave radios last week, Soviet listeners encountered a surprising absence of the customary Kremlin-sponsored drone overpowering the Voice of America’s programs in Russian, Ukrainian, Uzbek and six other languages. Officials in Washington said Moscow had stopped jamming the Voice’s Soviet-language programs for the first time since 1980.
OCTOBER 13, 1986
REAGAN-GORBACHEV TALKS END IN STALEMATE AS U.S. REJECTS DEMAND TO CURB ‘STAR WARS’
REYKJAVIK, Iceland, Oct. 12–President Reagan and Mikhail S. Gorbachev ended two days of talks here today with no agreement on arms control and no date for a full-fledged summit meeting in the United States.
While officials said that the two leaders had succeeded in developing tentative understandings on most arms control issues, a possible accord foundered over Soviet insistence that the United States scrap its space-based missile-defense plans.
Mr. Reagan, speaking to American forces at the Keflavik Air Base near here, before returning home, said, “We came to Iceland to advance the cause of peace and, though we put on the table the most far-reaching arms control proposal in history, the General Secretary rejected it.”
Mr. Gorbachev, at a news conference, attributed the failure to American intransigence on the plan for a space-based missile defense, known officially as the Strategic Defense Initiative, and popularly as “Star Wars.” The Soviet leader said he had told the President at the end of their meeting: “We missed a historic chance. Never have our positions been so close.”
When the Iceland meeting was first arranged, it was expected to set a date for a regular summit meeting in the United States in the coming months, as called for by the two leaders at their first meeting in Geneva last year.
JUNE 12, 1987
THATCHER CLAIMS HER THIRD VICTORY, BUT MARGIN DROPS
After a bruising campaign, Margaret Thatcher claimed victory this morning in the British general election and a place in history as the first Prime Minister in this century to win three consecutive terms.
At dawn, the count stood at Conservatives 345, Labor 225, and the Alliance parties 13.
In the popular vote, Mrs. Thatcher had 42.9 percent, up half a point from 1983. Labor got 32.3, up more than four points. The Alliance got 22.7 percent, a slippage of almost three points.
In claiming victory, Mrs. Thatcher declared it a “day of history.”
“It is wonderful to be entrusted with the Government of this great country once again,” Mrs. Thatcher told a cheering crowd at Conservative Central Office at 3:15 this morning. She reminded them that her platform called for extending her freemarket principles to Labor’s strongholds in the decaying “inner cities.”
Throughout the campaign, the Labor leader, Neil Kinnock, had hammered at Mrs. Thatcher as an advocate of a country “divided by privilege.” In the election, the Conservatives scored heavily in London, prosperous southern England and across the Midlands, while Labor was strong in areas of economic decline in Wales, Scotland and the north.
Prime Minister of Great Britain, Margaret Thatcher, waves to supporters during her victory on election night June 11, 1987, in London.
“I think what we’re witnessing is an a even greater abyss of division than that which we’ve witnessed previously,” Mr. Kinnock said in a grudging acknowledgement of Mrs. Thatcher’s victory. Referring to his own victory in his home constituency, Mr. Kinnock said, “We shall work for the day when not just we shall win, but England shall win.”
After a campaign in which Mr. Kinnock’s stinging oratory and polished use of television had clearly rattled Mrs. Thatcher, Labor was disappointed by the modesty of its gains over the 206 seats it had held.
RAZE BERLIN WALL, REAGAN URGES SOVIET
WEST BERLIN, June 12–President Reagan sought today to undercut Europe’s perception of Mikhail S. Gorbachev as a leader of peace, bluntly challenging the Soviet leader to tear down the Berlin wall.
Speaking 100 yards from the wall that was thrown up in 1961 to thwart an exodus to the West, Mr. Reagan made the wall a metaphor for ideological and economic differences separating East and West.
“There is one sign the Soviets can make that would be unmistakable, that would advance dramatically the cause of freedom and peace,” the President said.
“Secretary General 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.”
Mr. Reagan made the remarks with the Brandenburg Gate in East Berlin in the background. An East Berlin security post was in view.
The Berlin police estimated that 20,000 people had turned out to hear the President, but some observers thought the crowd was smaller than that.
JULY 4, 1987
French Court Finds Barbie Guilty and Orders Him To Prison For Life
Klaus Barbie, the wartime Gestapo chief of Lyons, was convicted early today of crimes against humanity and was sentenced to life imprisonment.
Mr. Barbie, who walked out of the trial on its third day, nearly two months ago, and had returned only twice since then, was brought into the courtroom just after midnight for the reading of the verdict.
He stood motionless and without expression, his head bowed slightly toward his court interpreter, as the presiding judge, Andre Cerdini, pronounced him guilty on all 341 separate items of the indictment, involving the deportation, unlawful imprisonment and torture of Jews and members of the French Resistance during the German occupation of Lyons between 1942 and 1944.
The life sentence means that Mr. Barbie, 73 years old, will be eligible for parole in 15 years, when he will be 88.
France abolished the death penalty in 1981. French courts had convicted Mr. Barbie of war crimes twice in absentia and sentenced him to death, but the statute of limitations in those cases expired before he could be returned to France. Trial Riveted the Country
The verdict, after six hours of deliberation by the panel of three judges and nine jurors, ended an eight-week trial, the first in a French court on a charge of crimes against humanity. The proceedings had commanded the attention of this country, first by several weeks of often gripping and dramatic testimony and then by a bitter, often angry contest between prosecution and defense lawyers.
“This shows that the French people have not forgotten,” Serge Klarsfeld, a lawyer and Nazi crimes researcher, said after the verdict.
Mr. Klarsfeld, who led a 10-year campaign to have Mr. Barbie brought to France from a 32-year refuge in South America, said: “There was an exceptional crime, and this was an exceptional trial. And because memory is related to justice, it means that the children of Izieu will not die away in memory. They will not be forgotten.”
Mr. Klarsfeld was referring to 44 Jewish children who were taken by the Gestapo from a rural hiding place just east of here and sent to their deaths in the Nazi concentration camps.
Mr. Barbie, who came to be known as the Butcher of Lyons, was the chief of the Gestapo here from late 1942 until the Germans were driven from this part of France in August 1944. He was brought to France four years ago from Bolivia, where he had lived under the assumed name Klaus Altmann since escaping from Europe in 1951.
His trial, more than 40 years after the German defeat, had been heralded by many here as a historic event and one whose purpose was not only to bring a presumed Nazi criminal to justice, but also to enrich the memory of the wartime persecution of Jews—more than 60,000 of whom died in deportation—and members of the Resistance.
AUGUST 18, 1987
Rudolf Hess Is Dead; Last of the Hitler Inner Circle
Rudolf Hess, the onetime deputy to Hitler who early in World War II parachuted into a Scottish meadow in what he called an attempt to make peace between Nazi Germany and Britain, died yesterday in West Berlin. He was 93 years old.
Hess, once one of Hitler’s designated successors, was the last survivor of the 19 German officials convicted by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg in 1946. Given a life sentence, he had been an inmate of Spandau Prison in West Berlin since 1947; for the last two decades, Hess had been Spandau’s only occupant.
Hess’s son, Wolf-Rudiger, was informed by British authorities yesterday afternoon that his father died at the British Military Hospital in West Berlin. Allied officials said he was taken there earlier in the day from Spandau.
There was no immediate report on the cause of death. Hess had been treated at the British hospital last spring for a heart condition.
With Hess’s death, Allied officials said Spandau Prison would be torn down.
“The purpose of Spandau Allied War-Crimes Prison has ceased with the death of Rudolf Hess,” the Allied Prison Administration said in a statement. “In accordance with the decision of representatives of Great Britain, France, the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R., the Allied Prison Administration will be terminated and the prison will be demolished.”
Allied sources have said in the past that the prison would be demolished promptly to prevent its becoming a focus of neo-Nazi sentiments.
A disgruntled World War I veteran, Hess became an early member of the Nazi Party and, in the 1920’s, Hitler’s secretary and bodyguard. He rose to be head of the party’s Political Central Commission in 1932. When Hitler gained power in Germany in 1933, he made Hess his deputy as chief of the Nazi Party—formally, the National Socialist German Workers’ Party—and brought him into his Cabinet as a Minister Without Portfolio. He also, in 1939, declared Hess second in the line of succession, after Hermann Goring.
Rudolph Hess, Joachim Von Ribbentrop and Hermann Goring sitting in the defendents box at the Nuremberg Trials in 1946.
Hess has been called shy, bland and unintelligent by historians. He also had a reputation for dogged loyalty to Hitler, and he recalled his Nazi career proudly in a statement he made before being sentenced at Nuremberg:
“I am happy to know that I have done my duty to my people, my duty as a German, as a National Socialist, as a loyal follower of my Fuhrer. I do not regret anything.”
In the last decades of his life, Hess was one of the world’s best-known and most controversial inmates, particularly as the number of surviving Nazi leaders dwindled.
Details of Hess’s prison life were occasionally reported: how he suffered from pneumonia and pleurisy and, in 1977, apparently tried to kill himself; how he was sometimes sent to a British military hospital in West Berlin; and how his son visited him once a month and campaigned in vain to have him set free.
Over the years, the United States, Britain, France and West Germany made appeals to have Hess freed on humanitarian grounds.
The requests generated some controversy. Noting that Hess signed the infamous Nuremberg laws that stripped German Jews of their civil rights, a key event in the Holocaust, Rabbis Marvin Hier and Abraham Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, a center for the study of the Holocaust, wrote some years ago:
“A life sentence for this unrepentent Nazi is an act of compassion in comparison with the fate suffered by the millions who were redefined as subhuman by a stroke of Hess’s pen.”
The Germans insisted that Hess was “the victim of hallucinations.” Several British and American psychiatrists contended that Hess was insane, noting his dealings with astrologers, his paranoia and his lapses of memory.
Hess did not testify at Nuremberg, and did not seem to have interest in the trial. Sometimes he read a book in court, sometimes he appeared to follow the testimony; mostly he sat, apparently lost in meditation.
In later years, historians tended to doubt that Hess was crazy. “He just had a bee in his bonnet,” said A. J. P. Taylor, the British historian, “a strong conviction that war between England and Germany was a mistake and that if he came over himself he could influence the British to make peace.”
338 GUILTY IN SICILY IN A MAFIA TRIAL; 19 GET LIFE TERMS
The largest Mafia trial in history ended today with guilty verdicts against 338 of 452 defendants accused of running a vast criminal empire financed largely with heroin trafficking to the United States.
The jury ordered life sentences, the maximum penalty, for 19 men, including the foremost leaders of the Sicilian Cosa Nostra and professional killers who did their bidding.
Among them was Michele Greco, nicknamed the Pope because of his place atop the Mafia hierarchy. Mr. Greco was found guilty of ordering 78 homicides, including the assassinations of several important government officials.
The most important evidence came from two informers, Tommaso Buscetta and Salvatore Contorno, who have also testified at New York Mafia trials. The prosecutor, Giuseppe Ayala, told reporters tonight, “Their testimony was accepted when other facts confirmed it.”
On the basis of that testimony, for the first time in Sicily the Mafia was prosecuted as a single, unified orgnanization with its own leadership.
Most of the specific crimes cited in the trial occurred in the early 1980’s, when the Sicilian Mafia provided 50 percent of the heroin reaching the American East coast, the United States Justice Department estimated.
The “maxi-trial,” as it became known, was viewed throughout Italy as a demonstration of the state’s willingness to strike back at a criminal organization that grew steadily more powerful and murderous as it expanded its lucrative drug trade.
Much of the reaction to the verdict by public authorities was subdued in recognition of the fact that the Mafia is still very much alive in Sicily. Proof of that arrived less than four hours after the sentencing when one of the defendants declared innocent, Antonino Ciulla, was murdered immediately after he was released from custody.
About a thousand lawyers, defendants and spectators had been waiting for three hours when Presiding Judge Alfonso Giordano entered the amphitheater-shaped courtroom and began, “In the name of the Italian people …”
The short, plump judge, who grew a beard during the 35 days he guided jury deliberations, read as fast as he could. A nearly indecipherable stream of names and legal citations poured forth. Gradually it became apparent that men once considered untouchable were being sent to jail.
DECEMBER 9, 1987
THE SUMMIT; REAGAN AND GORBACHEV SIGN MISSILE TREATY AND VOW TO WORK FOR GREATER REDUCTIONS
With fervent calls for a new era of peaceful understanding, President Reagan and Mikhail S. Gorbachev today signed the first treaty reducing the size of their nations’ nuclear arsenals.
The President and the Soviet leader, beginning three days of talks aimed at even broader reductions, pledged to build on the accord by striving toward what Mr. Gorbachev called “the more important goal,” reducing long-range nuclear weapons.
U.S. President Ronald Reagan with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev during welcoming ceremonies at the White House on the first day of their summit in 1987.
In their White House conversations, the leaders were said to have reviewed their previous proposals aimed at furthering those negotiations, and they established an arms-control working group of ranking officials to hold parallel sessions.
An immediate mood of warmth was established as the two leaders agreed this morning to call each other by their first names, a White House official said. He quoted the President as telling Mr. Gorbachev, “My first name is Ron.”
Mr. Gorbachev answered, “Mine is Mikhail.”
“When we’re working in private session,” Mr. Reagan reportedly said, “we can call each other that.”
The new treaty, which provides for the dismantling of all Soviet and American medium- and shorter-range missiles, establishes the most extensive system of weapons inspection ever negotiated by the two countries, including placing technicians at sensitive sites on each other’s territory.
The visit to Washington by Mr. Gorbachev was the first by a Soviet leader since Leonid I. Brezhnev was here 14 years ago, and it took on immediate drama as Mr. Reagan, who entered office with deep suspicions of the Soviet Union, welcomed Mr. Gorbachev on the South Lawn of the White House.
“IIf approved by the Senate, the accord would require the dismantling within three years of all 1,752 Soviet and 859 American missiles with ranges of 300 to 3,400 miles and their nuclear warheads. It also provides for stationing inspection teams at sensitive sites on each other’s soil, with the right to make a certain number of short-notice inspections elsewhere each year for 13 years.
IN CHINA, THE BUCK STARTS HERE
Her life has changed in many ways since she became a tycoon. There is the stereo to play Chinese opera, and a refrigerator to keep drinks cold.
But Yip Hongcheung, a 36-year-old capitalistic Communist, slyly points to her greatest triumph: an indoor bathroom with running water. “It’s a big improvement,” she explains cheerfully. “Before, I could only dream of such a thing.”
Mrs. Yip and her husband are Chinese “Rockefellers”: sunburned, mud-between-the-toes landlords with 40 acres and 60 laborers under them; they pay their workers about $50 a month, and earn more than $100,000 a year by raising chickens; rabbits; fish, in ponds; fruit, and young fruit trees destined to be planted in orchards elsewhere.
Forty years ago, the local Communist Party might have shot them; now it gives them a 30-year lease on the land. It is no wonder that Mrs. Yip is so enthusiastic: “Everyone’s becoming richer in Guangdong. Everybody’s living a better life.”
It is propaganda, but it is true. Guangdong Province, a region almost the size of the British Isles and a bit more populous, is China’s vanguard, awakening from a few hundred years’ economic slumber to set a frenetic pace as one of the fastest-growing economies in the world. Step into a New York shop and a product with a “Made in China” label—a purse, a sweater, a pair of shoes—probably comes from Guangdong. The province’s agricultural bounty does not get as far as New York, but most of the fish, crabs, bananas and lychee fruit overflowing in Hong Kong’s markets are harvested by Guangdong’s peasants.
A bustling street in the city of Canton, China, which is in the Guangdong province.
A crowded patchwork of rice paddies, banana plantations and brick villages, Guangdong surrounds Hong Kong and, perhaps as a result, is the most open, most capitalistic and most prosperous part of China. Guangdong has nearly tripled its economic output in eight years, and more and more Asia experts think that if China continues on its present course of economic liberalization, Guangdong could become the “next Taiwan” or the “next Korea.”
Last month, China announced that the Communist Party had designated Guangdong Province an “experimental region” for political and economic reform. The announcement appeared to confirm the province’s role as a trailblazer, but it also suggested that Guangdong is different from the rest of the country, that it has been given more rope—to prove itself or hang itself. Even if the province continues to flourish, the regulators in Beijing may decide that the methods are ill-suited for the rest of the nation, or that, though promising, they are too risky to be generally prescribed.
Meanwhile, Guangdong these days is an exhilarating tapestry of progress, where families that have toiled for hundreds of generations only to get nowhere suddenly are bounding toward what is, to them, unimaginable prosperity. A largely flat, fertile agricultural land, the province brims with sugar cane, bananas, peanuts and pigs. The province is home to 63 million people, roughly three-quarters of whom are peasants, the elderly ones gnarled like driftwood.
Cease-Fire Takes Effect in 8-Year Iran-Iraq War
After almost eight years of a war that has claimed an estimated one million lives, a cease-fire between Iran and Iraq was reported holding tonight.
The truce, arranged by the United Nations, went into effect today at 7 A.M. local time. By nightfall, there were no reports of violations.
“I really think both countries are serious,” the United Nations Secretary General, Javier Perez de Cuellar, told reporters in London, where he was on his way to formal peace talks between the two nations in Geneva starting Thursday. “They are committed to the cease-fire.”
A team of 350 United Nations observers spread out along the 740-mile border between the combatants.
“They are on the ground in large numbers from north to south, and the cease-fire is holding,” Col. William Phillips, the Irish operations chief of the 24-nation Iran-Iraq Military Observer Group said.
The war—fought on land and in the air, in the oil lanes of the Persian Gulf and with missile and chemical weapons attacks—produced no major territorial gains for either side.
Yet Iraq, which invaded Iran on Sept. 22, 1980, has proclaimed victory. Motorists and demonstrators poured onto the streets of Baghdad overnight, blowing horns, beating tambourines and spraying water.
The response in Teheran, the capital of Iran—which accepted United Nations peace terms last month after delaying for a year—was more cautious. It reflected the uncertainties provoked by an Iranian about-face described by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the Iranian leader, as deadlier than poison.
“We will abide by the cease-fire completely, and there will be no shooting,” the Iranian President, Hojatolislam Ali Khamenei, reportedly told Iranian soldiers.
Hojatolislam Hashemi Rafsanjani, Speaker of the Iranian Parliament, said on the Teheran radio, “There should be no violations on the front, and God forbid not one unauthorized bullet should be fired.”
But he cautioned: “We have not yet arrived at peace. God willing, if we reach that day, we will declare it ourselves.”
The sudden string of Iraqi victories, war weariness in Iran, depleted military supplies and Teheran’s increasing isolation in the face of Arab, United States and other Western backing for Iraq are widely thought to have spurred Iran to seek peace.
SEPTEMBER 9, 1988
U.S. ASSERTS IRAQ USED POISON GAS AGAINST THE KURDS
The United States said today that it was convinced Iraq had used poison gas against Kurdish guerrillas and condemned the action as “abhorrent and unjustifiable.”
American officials had maintained until today that the Government had no conclusive proof that Iraq had renewed its use of chemical weapons.
An Iraqi Foreign Ministry official, leaving a meeting at the State Department, characterized the charge as “absolutely baseless.”
Since 1984 in its war against Iran, Iraq has been accused of using mustard gas, which burns, blisters and blackens the skin and can be lethal if inhaled. Iraq also has used, to a lesser extent, a lethal nerve gas called Tabun, which prompts convulsions and foaming and bleeding at the mouth before death. Cyanide gas also has been used by both sides in the war.
The State Department spokesman, Charles E. Redman, said the United States was certain of Iraq’s use of such weapons within its own borders.
“As a result of our evaluation of the situation, the United States Government is convinced that Iraq has used chemical weapons in its military campaign against Kurdish guerrillas,” Mr. Redman said. “Any use in this context is abhorrent and unjustifiable.”
Officials at the White House and State Department did not specify the extent, frequency or type of gas that Iraq had used against the Kurds. Citing the need to protect intelligence sources, they declined to describe in any detail the evidence on which the American accusation and condemnation were based.
A State Department spokesman said today that a United States Embassy official from Ankara had spent two days assessing the situation in eastern Turkey. Thousands of Kurdish refugees have crossed the Iraqi border into Turkey, fleeing a new offensive against Kurds started by the Iraqi Government of President Saddam Hussein after the Aug. 20 cease-fire in the Iran-Iraq war.
Iraq issued a denial last weekend, through Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz, that it had used chemical weapons against the Kurds.
JETLINER CARRYING 258 TO U.S. CRASHES IN SCOTTISH TOWN; ALL BELIEVED DEAD
LONDON, Dec. 21–A Pan Am Boeing 747 on a flight from London to New York with 258 people aboard crashed tonight in a southern Scottish village, British military authorities reported. The airline said it knew of no survivors.
The plane was flying at 31,000 feet when it suddenly disappeared from radar and crashed into two rows of houses, setting them on fire. There was no immediate indication of the cause of the crash. British officials would not respond to speculation by some about a structural failure or an onboard explosion in the jumbo jet.
Pat Coffey, a spokesman for the British Royal Air Force, said the plane, Pan American World Airways Flight 103, left Heathrow Airport outside London after originating at Frankfurt, West Germany, and was bound for Kennedy International Airport.
Among those on board was the chief administrative officer of the United Nations’ Council for Namibia, Bernt Carlsson of Sweden, who was flying to New York for the signing of an accord on Namibian independence, aides to Mr. Carlsson said. Others included executives of Volksagen and The Associated Press. There were also unconfirmed reports that six members of the State Department’s Diplomatic Security Service were aboard.
Pan Am officials in New York said it was the worst single-plane disaster in the airline’s history.
A policeman walks near the cockpit of the 747 Pan Am Boeing that exploded in December, 1988.
The plane left Heathrow about 25 minutes behind schedule at 6:25 P.M. (1:25 P.M., New York time). It disappeared from air controllers’ radar scopes 52 minutes later, shortly before a series of explosions and fires were reported on the ground in the Scottish village of Lockerbie, according to witnesses and official accounts.
“The aircraft is reported to have hit two rows of houses, which have been demolished by the impact, and also to have hit vehicles on the highway,” said a spokesman for the Royal Air Force’s rescue and coordination center near Edinburgh. Houses and cars along the highway to Glasgow were still blazing fiercely several hours after the crash, he said. There were no survivors in these houses, about 40 in all, The Associated Press reported.
The airplane had a capacity of 412 passengers. There were 243 passengers on board, and 15 crew members, Pan Am said. Jeff Kreindler, a Pan Am spokesman in New York, said there was “no sign at all” of adverse weather that might have been a factor.
Mr. Kreindler, the Pan Am spokesman, said, “There was no indication of any problems on board that aircraft or with the machine itself,” Asked whether the plane’s crew had received any bomb threats, he said, “There were no threats.”
JANUARY 7, 1989
HIROHITO, 124TH EMPEROR OF JAPAN, IS DEAD AT 87
Emperor Hirohito, the last of the World War II leaders and Japan’s longest-reigning monarch, died today at the Imperial Palace. He was 87 years old.
In his 62-year reign, the Emperor presided over the most tumultuous era in Japan’s modern history, although like most of the 123 emperors before him, he watched more than he acted. During his reign, his nation embraced militarism, conquered much of Asia, waged war on the Allied Powers, suffered the world’s first atomic bombing, and painfully rebuilt, rising in just four decades to become the world’s most vibrant economic power.
Hirohito’s death came after more than a year of declining health. He had been confined to his bed for more than three months.
The whole nation is deeply saddened
Because Japanese tradition decrees that the Chrysanthemum Throne may not be empty, Crown Prince Akihito, Hirohito’s 55-year-old son, became Japan’s 125th Emperor. In a ceremony as ancient as his title, Akihito received two of the Imperial treasures—a sword and a jewel—and received the Imperial seal and the seal of state.
Shoichi Fujimori, the grand steward of the Imperial Household Agency, announced the Emperor’s death at 7:55 A.M. and revealed for the first time that Hirohito had been suffering from cancer of the duodenum, a section of the small intestine.
“The whole nation is deeply saddened by his death,” the steward said, using a special honorific verb reserved for the death of an emperor. “Despite the concerted efforts of medical treatment, finally today His Majesty passed away from a tumor in the duodenum.”
As news of Hirohito’s death spread, many Japanese throughout Tokyo put flags outside their homes and businesses. An elderly woman hoisted a flag to half-staff outside a sushi shop, radio stations played classical music and a crowd gathered near the Imperial Palace. A large contingent of riot police officers were deployed to guard against anti-imperial demonstrations or the possibility that avid followers might commit suicide.
When Hirohito ascended the throne, his subjects revered him as a descendant of Amaterasu, the sun goddess who, according to Japanese mythology, created the Japanese archipelago from the drops of water that fell from her spear. Fueled by militarist propaganda that drew on these myths, more than two million soldiers died in his name. But on Aug. 15, 1945, that myth was shattered as his subjects heard Hirohito’s voice for the first time. He announced Japan’s surrender on the radio and called on the Japanese to “endure the unendurable.” Now, he told his countrymen in a second precedent-shattering announcement five months later, the people were sovereign and the Emperor was not divine.
Emperor Hirohito in his kimono coronation robe in 1926.
Thus Akihito becomes the first Emperor to be installed since Japan was transformed into a constitutional democracy under the American Occupation at the end of World War II.
Eleven years old at the end of the war, the young Crown Prince diligently prepared himself to become Emperor in the new democratic era, studying English with an American tutor and becoming the first heir to the throne to marry a commoner.
The new Emperor is only the fourth in 120 years since Japan opened itself to the world, abandoned feudalism and began its industrial drive under his great-grandfather, the Emperor Meiji.
This morning, Prime Minister Noboru Takeshita said: “Our country has since pursued the realization of peace and democracy under the new constitution. It has achieved remarkable progress by virtue of the untiring efforts of our people and has now become an important member of the international community. I feel most keenly that these achievements have been made possible by the presence of His Late Majesty as the symbol of the state and of the unity of the people.”
Last Soviet Soldiers Leave Afghanistan
MOSCOW–The last Soviet soldier came home from Afghanistan this morning, the Soviet Union announced, leaving behind a war that had become a domestic burden and an international embarrassment for Moscow.
The final Soviet departure came on the day set as a deadline by the Geneva accords last April. It left two heavily armed adversaries, the Kremlin-backed Government of President Najibullah and a fractious but powerful array of Muslim insurgents, backed by the United States and Pakistan, to conclude their civil war on their own.
Lieut. Gen. Boris V. Gromov, the commander of the Soviet forces in Afghanistan, walked across the steel Friendship Bridge to the border city of Termez, in Uzbekistan, at 11:55 A.M. local time (1:55 A.M., Eastern time), 9 years and 50 days after Soviet troops intervened to support a coup by a Marxist ally.
“There is not a single Soviet soldier or officer left behind me,” General Gromov told a Soviet television reporter waiting on the bridge. “Our nine-year stay ends with this.”
Today’s final departure is the end of a steady process of withdrawal since last spring, when Moscow says there were 100,300 Soviet troops in Afghanistan. At the height of the Soviet commitment, according to Western intelligence estimates, there were 115,000 troops deployed.
The weekly Literaturnaya Gazeta described the killing of a carload of Afghan civilians, including women and children, and the order by a commander to cover it up.
The article was a foretaste of recriminations expected in the months ahead.
The war cost the Soviet Union roughly 15,000 lives and undisclosed billions of rubles. It scarred a generation of young people and undermined the cherished image of an invincible Soviet Army. Moscow’s involvement in Afghanistan was often compared to the American experience in the Vietnam War, in which more than 58,000 Americans died.
“The day that millions of Soviet people have waited for has come,” General Gromov said to an army rally in Termez, Reuters reported. “In spite of our sacrifices and losses, we have totally fulfilled our internationalist duty.”
MAY 3, 1989
Hungary Dismantling Its Barbed-Wire Curtain
Two soldiers help dismantle the iron curtain in Hungary on May 1, 1989.
VIETNAM PROMISES TROOPS WILL LEAVE CAMBODIA BY FALL
Ten years and three months after its soldiers invaded Cambodia and installed a new Government in Phnom Penh, Vietnam announced today that it would unconditionally withdraw the rest of its troops by the end of September.
Vietnam had previously insisted that a troop withdrawal by that time would have to be linked to a cutoff of all foreign military aid to the three factions that oppose Hanoi’s ally in Phnom Penh, Prime Minister Hun Sen.
Otherwise, Vietnam had said, it would not withdraw its troops until the end of 1990. Hanoi says those troops number 50,000 and American officials estimate them to be 60,000 to 70,000.
Vietnam’s occupation of Cambodia has been, along with the Soviet presence in Afghanistan, one of the major East-West issues. China had vowed not to improve relations with Moscow until the Vietnamese left Cambodia. And Vietnam’s own efforts to obtain aid and recognition from the United States in the aftermath of the Vietnam War were frustrated by Washington’s insistence that Hanoi withdraw its troops from Cambodia first.
Cambodians bid farewell to Vietnamese troops leaving Cambodia in the city of Battambang in September 1989.
Today, instead of waiting for aid to the opposition guerrillas to cease, Vietnam urged the supporters of the opposition guerrillas, most notably China, to honor promises to stop all military aid when Vietnam withdraws.
In a joint declaration, Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos reserved the right of Phnom Penh to request further “assistance” if military aid to the opposition did not stop. The declaration also said the nations of the world should take responsibility for insuring that the Cambodian civil war ends and that the “genocidal Pol Pot regime” not be allowed to take power again in Cambodia.
According to Vietnamese officials, five to seven Vietnamese soldiers are wounded or killed every day in Cambodia. Since 1978, there have been about 55,000 Vietnamese casualties, a third of whom were killed.
CRACKDOWN IN BEIJING; TROOPS ATTACK AND CRUSH BEIJING PROTEST; SCORES ARE KILLED
Tens of thousands of Chinese troops retook the center of the capital early this morning from pro-democracy protesters, killing scores of students and workers and wounding hundreds more as they fired submachine guns at crowds of people who tried to resist.
Troops marched along the main roads surrounding central Tiananmen Square, sometimes firing in the air and sometimes firing directly at crowds of men and women who refused to move out of the way.
A lone demonstrator stands down a column of tanks June 5, 1989, at the entrance to Tiananmen Square in Beijing.
Early this morning, the troops finally cleared the square after first sweeping the area around it. Several thousand students who had remained on the square throughout the shooting left peacefully, still waving the banners of their universities. Several armed personnel carriers ran over their tents and destroyed the encampment.
Most of the dead had been shot, but some had been run over by armored personnel carriers that forced their way through barricades erected by local residents.
The official news programs this morning reported that the People’s Liberation Army had crushed a “counter-revolutionary rebellion” in the capital. They said that more than 1,000 police and troops had been injured and some killed, and that civilians had been killed, but did not give details.
Changan Avenue, or the Avenue of Eternal Peace, Beijing’s main east-west thoroughfare, echoed with screams this morning as young people carried the bodies of their friends away from the front lines. The dead or seriously wounded were heaped on the backs of bicycles or tricycle rickshaws and supported by friends who rushed through the crowds, sometimes sobbing as they ran.
The avenue was lit by the glow of several trucks and two armed personnel carriers that students and workers set afire, and bullets swooshed overhead or glanced off buildings. The air crackled almost constantly with gunfire and tear gas grenades.
“General strike!” people roared, in bitterness and outrage, as they ran from Tiananmen Square, which pro-democracy demonstrators had occupied for three weeks.
While hundreds of thousands of people had turned out to the streets Saturday and early today to show support for the democracy movement, it was not clear if the call for a general strike would be successful. The Government had been fearful that a crackdown on the movement would lead to strikes, but its willingness to shoot students suggested that it was also capable of putting considerable pressure on workers to stay on the job.
Many of those killed were throwing bricks at the soldiers, but others were simply watching passively or standing at barricades when soldiers fired directly at them.
It was also impossible to determine how many civilians had been killed or injured. Beijing Fuxing Hospital, 3.3 miles to the west of Tiananmen Square, reported more than 38 deaths and more than 100 wounded, and said that many more bodies had yet to be taken to its morgue. A doctor at the Beijing Union Medical College Hospital, two miles northeast of the square, reported 17 deaths. Beijing Tongren Hospital, one mile southeast of the square, reported 13 deaths and more than 100 critically wounded.
“As doctors, we often see deaths,” said a doctor at the Tongren Hospital. “But we’ve never seen such a tragedy like this. Every room in the hospital is covered with blood. We are terribly short of blood, but citizens are lining up outside to give blood.”
Most Chinese seemed convinced that the tanks and troops had been ordered into the city to crush the pro-democracy demonstrations once and for all. The immediate result of the first clashes was to revitalize the pro-democracy movement, which had been losing momentum over the last 10 days, and to erase the sense that life in the capital was returning to normal. But the use of tanks and guns came later, and it was not clear if they would succeed in ending the movement or would lead to such measures as a general strike.
The tension was exacerbated by an extraordinary announcement on television Saturday night, ordering citizens to “stay at home to protect your lives.” In particular, the announcement ordered people to stay off the streets and away from Tiananmen Square.
JUNE 4, 1989
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, 89, Unwavering Iranian Spiritual Leader
The life of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini was so shadowy, so overlain with myth and rumor, that there was lingering disagreement or uncertainty about his ancestry, his true name and his date of birth.
But when he returned in triumph to Teheran on Feb. 1, 1979—after almost 15 years in exile—the imposing man in a black robe with a white beard and intense dark eyes left little doubt about who he was, or what he wanted for his ancient land.
Ayatollah Khomeini felt a holy mission to rid Iran of what he saw as Western corruption and degeneracy and to return the country, under an Islamic theocracy, to religious purity.
The Islamic Shiite leader’s fervor helped drive Shah Mohammed Riza Pahlevi from the Peacock Throne on Jan. 15, 1979, and into foreign exile. The Shah’s eventual arrival in the United States for cancer treatment was the spark that set off the American hostage crisis.
Under the Ayatollah, Iran was wrenched backward from widespread economic development and social change and onto a path that was broadly hostile to the Western world.
The Ayatollah’s path also led to eight years of bloody, costly, inconclusive war between Iran and its Arab neighbor Iraq. He demanded that his country fight unrelentingly after Iraq invaded Iran in September 1980, but he eventually accepted a truce in 1988.
Many longtime Iranian opponents of the Shah hoped that the Ayatollah would turn over power and allow a democratic society to emerge. But he held to his dream of an Islamic republic and retained his Islamic fervor—scuttling a tentative economic and political opening to the West with his call for the killing of a British author, Salman Rushdie, whose novel “The Satanic Verses” was deemed to have blasphemed the faith.
A month later, he dismissed Ayatollah Hussein Ali Montazeri, a relative moderate who had been designated as his political heir. There has been speculation that Ayatollah Khomeini’s son, Hojatolislam Ahmad Khomeini, is emerging from a power struggle as a prime contender to inherit his authority.
There was no one in Iran with sufficient authority to challenge the Ayatollah successfully. In the aftermath of the revolution, he moved relentlessly toward his theocratic goal, consolidating power and silencing the opposition.
In a frenzy of political retribution and Islamic purification, thousands of people were executed in public, including the Shah’s officials, torturers, criminals, homosexuals and prostitutes.
A 1987 report of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights estimated that as many as 7,000 people were shot, hanged, stoned or burned to death after the 1979 revolution.
The Islamic Revolution’s founder Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1979 in Tehran by his supporters.
SEPTEMBER 11, 1989
HUNGARY ALLOWS 7,000 EAST GERMANS TO EMIGRATE WEST
Hungary announced today that it is allowing thousands of East Germans who have refused to return home to leave for West Germany. It was another chapter, and a dramatic one, in a summerlong exodus through the new Hungarian gap in the Communist frontier.
The announcement cleared the way for more than 7,000 East Germans, who have said they wanted to go west, to do so beginning at midnight. But it was possible that this number might substantially increase as other East Germans, now in Hungary as tourists, take advantage of the new opportunity. Hungary’s Foreign Minister said there are 60,000 people in this category.
A declaration by the Hungarian Government said that because of the “unbearable situation” created by the tide of East Germans trying to leave their country, Hungary has decided to temporarily suspend a 20-year-old agreement with East Germany and to allow the refugees free passage “to a country of their choice.”
“It’s like Christmas,” said a young worker as he hugged his teary-eyed girlfriend in a flood of television lights. Next to them, a mother stood in silent embrace with three daughters. And all around, scores of children continued to romp among the tents, trailers and piles of knapsacks.
Late last night, the first of the departing East Germans, honking their car horns and cheering wildly, began pouring across the Hungarian border. For virtually all those who are refusing to return to East Germany, the destination is West Germany, where they are eligible for automatic and instant citizenship.
The agreement marked the first break by a Warsaw Pact country in the customary cooperation in blocking citizens from going to the West. In so doing, it dramatized the gap that has developed in the Eastern bloc between countries eager to embrace Western ways and those clinging to the old orthodoxy.
Johannesburg Acts to Ease Segregation
The city of Johannesburg opened swimming pools and recreational centers to all races today and proceeded with plans to desegregate buses.
The city’s action came after the Johannesburg City Council decided Tuesday night to eliminate the final remnants of what is called “petty apartheid” here. The council voted after a survey conducted among the city’s 271,000 white voters showed general approval for such a move.
At a news conference today, Jan Burger, the leader of the National Party councillors who control the council, said President F. W. de Klerk had been informed of the decision and had raised no objections. Mr. Burger said the repeal of the segregation laws was consistent with Mr. de Klerk’s promises of evolutionary change.
Restaurants, hotels and sports stadiums in Johannesburg and other major cities have opened to all races in recent years, but most public accommodations had remained technically closed to nonwhites.
Johannesburg is not the first city in South Africa to desegregate its public accommodations. Cape Town did so through the 1980’s and petitioned the Government last March for exemption from the Group Areas Act, which mandates residential segregation throughout South Africa, so it could admit nonwhite residents. The Government has withheld such permission.
Johannesburg and other cities are still bound by the Group Areas Act, though some downtown neighborhoods like Hill-brow and Berea have had an influx of blacks from the overcrowded townships. The Government has agreed in principle to designate such integrated areas “free settlement areas” open to all races.
The Separate Amenities Act, another basic law of apartheid that allows segregation of publicly owned accommodations, has fallen into increasing disuse, though it is still enforced in Pretoria and other more conservative cities. Mr. Burger said the act gave municipalities, including Johannesburg, the option to enforce or ignore it.
OCTOBER 2, 1989
Rights for Gay Couples in Denmark
In what gay rights advocates hailed as the first unions of their kind in the world, six homosexual couples were legally joined today in “registered partnerships” that gave them most rights of married heterosexuals, but not the right to adopt or obtain joint custody of a child.
Each of the couples entered a small room in the ornate City Hall, and in civil rites that differed from those of heterosexuals only in the description of the union were asked by Mayor Tom Ahlberg if they wanted to be “in partnership” with each other. After saying “I do,” the couples, all of them male, were given certificates of their partnership.
The ceremonies, followed by the traditional throwing of rice and confetti, were held on the day a new national law went into effect making Denmark the first country to legalize homosexual unions.
Members of Parliament passed the measure in May by a vote of 71 to 47, after a 40-year campaign by gay rights advocates. In this country where Government has traditionally been sympathetic toward minorities, opposition has come mainly from the small Christian People’s Party, which called the legislation unnatural, unethical and dramatically at odds with the laws of other countries.
Although the law stops short of calling the unions marriages, it gives homosexual couples most of the advantages and disadvantages of marriage. Partners—at least one must be a resident Danish citizen—are liable for each other’s maintenance. They also have the automatic right to inherit the other’s property, and must undertake legal divorce proceedings to dissolve the partnership. They can also be forced to pay alimony, and in some circumstances, a partner can be held responsible for the other’s tax liabilities.
Advocates said that Sweden last year became the first country to provide some minimum rights to homosexual couples, including rights involving inheritance, but that the Swedish law equates homosexual couples with unmarried heterosexual couples.
NOVEMBER 10, 1989
EAST GERMANY OPENS FRONTIER TO THE WEST FOR MIGRATION OR TRAVEL; THOUSANDS CROSS
East Germany on Thursday lifted restrictions on emigration or travel to the West, and within hours tens of thousands of East and West Berliners swarmed across the infamous Berlin Wall for a boisterous celebration.
Border guards at Bornholmer Strasse crossing, Checkpoint Charlie and several other crossings abandoned all efforts to check credentials, even though the new regulations said East Germans would still need passports and permission to get across. Some guards smiled and took snapshots, assuring passers-by that they were just recording a historic event.
The mass crossing began about two hours after Gunter Schabowski, a member of the Politburo, had announced at a press conference that permission to travel or emigrate would be granted quickly and without preconditions, and that East Germans would be allowed to cross at any crossing into West Germany or West Berlin.
Once Mr. Schabowski’s announcement was read on radio and television, a tentative trickle of East Germans testing the new regulations quickly turned into an jubilant horde, which joined at the border crossings with crowds of flag-waving, cheering West Germans. Thousands of Berliners clambered across the wall at the Brandenburg Gate, passing through the historic arch that for so long had been inaccessible to Berliners of either side.
Berlin Wall opening in Germany on November 10, 1989.
Similar scenes were reported in Lubeck, the only other East German city touching the border, and at other border crossings along the inter-German frontier.
All through the night and into the early morning, celebrating East Berliners filled the Kurfurstendamm, West Berlin’s “great white way,” blowing trumpets, dancing, laughing and absorbing a glittering scene that until now they could glimpse only on television.
Some guards smiled and took snapshots
Many East Germans said they planned to return home the same night. The Mayor of West Berlin, Walter Momper, toured border crossings in a police radio truck and urged East Berliners to return.
The extraordinary breach of what had been the most infamous stretch of the Iron Curtain marked the culmination of an extraordinary month that has seen the virtual transformation of East Germany under the dual pressures of unceasing flight and continuing demonstrations. It also marked a breach of a wall that had become the premier symbol of Stalinist oppression and of the divisions of Europe and Germany into hostile camps after World War II.
The Berlin wall—first raised on Aug. 13, 1961, to halt a vast hemorrhage of East Germans to the West—evolved into a double row of eight-foot-high concrete walls with watchtowers, electronic sensors and a no man’s land in between. Frequent attempts to breach the barrier often ended in death, and the very sophistication of the wall became a standing indictment of the system that could hold its people only with such extraordinary means.
In West Berlin, Eberhard Diepgen, the former mayor, said: “This is a day I have been awaiting since Aug. 13, 1961. With this the wall has lost its function. It can and must be torn down.”
THE BORDER IS OPEN; JOYOUS EAST GERMANS POUR THROUGH WALL; PARTY PLEDGES FREEDOMS, AND CITY EXULTS
As hundreds of thousands of East Berliners romped through the newly porous wall in an unending celebration, West German leaders today proclaimed this the moment Germans had yearned for through 40 years of division.
At the same time, change continued unabated in East Berlin, where the Communist Party’s Central Committee concluded a three-day session with the announcement of a program of radical changes. They included “free, democratic and secret elections,” a “socialist planned economy oriented to market conditions,” separation of party and state, parliamentary supervision of state security, freedom of assembly and a new law on the press and broadcasting.
The Berlin Wall opening in Berlin, Germany, in November 1989.
“The German Democratic Republic is in the midst of an awakening,” the Central Committee declared in the prologue to the newly adopted program. “A revolutionary people’s movement has brought into motion a process of great change.”
Though the West Berlin police could give no estimate of the numbers of East Berliners who crossed over in the last 24 hours, the authorities said that only 1,500 so far had announced their intention to stay.
Beyond Berlin, only one of many points along the border between the two Germanys where people could cross, 55,500 East Germans crossed over the border between the two Germanys since the wall was opened on Thursday, and 3,250 remained in West Germany, the West German Interior Ministry said.
Chancellor Helmut Kohl, who interrupted a state visit to Poland to come to West Berlin, told an emotional crowd of East and West Berliners gathered outside the West Berlin city hall: “I want to call out to all in the German Democratic Republic: We’re on your side, we are and remain one nation. We belong together.”
Speaking on the steps of the city hall, from which President John F. Kennedy had made his “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech shortly after the wall was raised, Mr. Kohl declared: “Long live a free German father-land! Long live a united Europe!”
In a development that gave further evidence of the figurative crumbling of the wall, East Germany announced the opening of five new crossings. One was at the Glienicke Bridge, famed as the site of past exchanges of captured spies between East and West, and another was at Potsdammer Platz, once the heart of Berlin.
The arrival of an army bulldozer at Eberswalder Strasse to drill another new opening quickly attracted a crowd on both sides and sent rumors through the city that the East German Army was breaking down the wall. When the machine finally broke through, West Berliners handed flowers to the driver and rushed to pick up pieces of the wall for souvenirs.
At the Potsdammer Platz crossing site, West Berliners mounted the wall to chip away pieces while East German workers laid paving stones in the no-man’s land, watched by about 50 soldiers.
In the giddiness of the grand reunion, German reunification was in the air. “We’ve done it! The wall is open!” proclaimed the popular tabloid Bild in a giant headline.
Upheaval in the East: Cheers as Brandenburg Gate Reopens
Leaders of the two Germanys reopened the Brandenburg Gate today, breaching a barrier that more than any other had come to symbolize the division of the nation.
Tens of thousands of Germans, oblivious to a steady drizzle, packed both sides of Berlin’s most famous gate to celebrate the formal inauguration of two new pedestrian crossings by West Germany’s Chancellor, Helmut Kohl, and East Germany’s new Prime Minister, Hans Modrow.
Although it has been six weeks since the Berlin wall fell open and at least half the East Germans have visited the West, the reopening of the two-century-old landmark offered symbolic confirmation that the German nation was again seeking to become whole.
Come together
Almost immediately, great numbers of East Germans began flowing through the new opening and across the previously sealed square on which the gate stands. They overwhelmed security barriers, happily mobbing the dignitaries and clambering on top of the wall. The new crossings were opened to the left and right of the gate, leaving a broad, flat arc of wall directly in front intact for now.
A similar mass of West Germans on the other side joined in the cheers and celebrations, though for two more days only East Germans will be able to pass through freely.
Hundreds of Berliners on both sides carried banners or West German flags. “Berlin is one city. Germany is one nation,” one placard read. Another said in English, “Come Together.”
DECEMBER 23, 1989
CEAUSESCU FLEES A REVOLT IN RUMANIA, DIVIDED SECURITY FORCES FIGHT ON
Rumanian civilians jubilate during a rally in Bucharest, holding newspapers announcing the arrest of Nicolae Ceaucescu on December 24, 1989. The communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife, Elena, were deposed and executed by a firing squad the next day.
After ruling Rumania as a dictator for a quarter of a century, President Nicolae Ceausescu was forced to flee Bucharest Friday when angry crowds of anti-Government demonstrators, backed by army units, took over large sections of the capital.
Reports spoke of fierce fighting in the capital between the army and the pro-Ceausescu security police, but by early today the army appeared to be gaining the upper hand.
Bucharest radio said the head of the security police changed sides and ordered his forces to support the army and the Rumanian people, Reuters reported Friday evening. The broadcast also said the Interior Minister and a Deputy Prime Minister had been arrested by anti-Ceausescu forces.
“The forces of democracy are in the ascendant,” a State Department official who is following the situation said Friday evening.
Loyalist forces also were reported Friday evening to be attacking Timisoara, the western city where the uprising began last Saturday. But the army said that it had repulsed that attack.
Early today, Maj. Gen. Stefan Gusa, the Army Chief of Staff, said regular army units opposing Mr. Ceausescu had taken control of almost the entire country from security police forces, Reuters reported.
Open graves were discovered in Timisoara Friday with what were believed to be as many as 4,500 bodies, many of them women and children, who were believed killed by security forces over the weekend.
Once Mr. Ceausescu and his wife, Elena, fled, the changes that took place in Rumania were more sudden and dramatic than any in Eastern Europe.
Early today, the Bucharest Radio reported that all Rumanian political prisoners had been freed.
The television and press, which yesterday had been the most rigidly controlled in Eastern Europe, declared their freedom. Viewers around the world saw live images of demonstrations and heard calls for freedom and change that had been inconceivable before. But shortly after midnight in Bucharest, the television station went off the air while heavy fighting was going on in the vicinity.
Asked to explain the forces that came together to bring about his downfall, one of the United States Government’s leading analysts of Rumanian affairs said today:
“I think it was a people in despair of their physical survival under Ceausescu, facing at last the choice to die fast or die slowly.”
The analyst, who asked not to be identified, said a combination of desires for “religious rights and wanting to live like human beings finally reached a stage where helplessness was replaced by rage.”
DECEMBER 23, 1989
‘The Year of Democracy’ Still Leaves Unanswered Questions
The armed rebellion against Nicolae Ceausescu in Rumania demonstrates that no hardline Communist regime in Eastern Europe can evade the popular wrath sweeping the region.
Already gone are the hard-line regimes in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, East Germany and Bulgaria, and now Rumania appears to be in the throes of revolution. These regimes jailed dissidents, disdained truth and scorned justice. Through long, dark decades, they seemed immutable, but they all began to founder in a matter of months.
The bloody and still-incomplete revolution in Rumania, the opening of the Berlin Wall at the Brandenburg Gate and the invasion of Panama, all within the final 10 days of 1989, provided a fitting denouement to a turbulent, dramatic, fascinating year in international affairs. Many called it “the year of democracy”—the most important 12 months, perhaps, since 1968, with all its rebellions, and worthy of comparison even with the annus mirabilis of 1848.
But like 1848, it leaves behind many problems, many questions and many signs of instability, especially in the main cockpit of change, the area between the Elbe and the Urals.
The tides of change are lapping dangerouThe swiftness of events in Rumania—even faster than in Czechslovakia -was what was so stunning. One day the regime looked resolute, impregnable. Then suddenly, “the coming unrest spread its thunderclouds under the eyes of the government.” as Victor Hugo wrote of the French revolution in “Les Miserables.”
But it is far easier to topple tired and rotten political and economic structures, as revolutionaries have discovered time and again over the centruies, than it is to build shiny, efficient, lasting new ones.
And building new ones will cause distress to the millions in Eastern Europe who want democracy but also want to keep at least part of their socialist safety net intact. Inevitably, as they lose their guaranteed employment when obsolete factories are closed, as they lose food and rent subsidies, severe tensions will develop. People may become disillusioned with the new way.
A couple knocking stones out of the Berlin wall in 1989.
But even in economic disarray, East Germany, Czechosolovakia and Hungary together have a gross national product larger than China’s. The potential is there. Help from the West is assured, coordinated by the European Community with the full approval of the United States in what Europeans are only now beginning to see as an historic decision reached at Paris this summer.
Political questions may be almost as difficult as the economic problems. Which German unification—or consolidation or amalgamation—seems inevitable to many scholars and diplomats, either in fact or in law. But what will the terms be? Which way will the new Germany look and think and feel? Can it find ways to avoid frightening, elephant-like, the smaller animals in its forest?
Such questions and their qualified, partial, contradictory answers, so slow to emerge, are less stirring than revolutions, and hence less likely to command the world’s continuing interest and help. Washington and other world capitals, which have a tendency to let their attention wander after a while, will find their patience and commitment sorely tested in the months ahead.
