Revolution 1989

by Victor Sebestyen

  East Germans had been used to this electoral process for four decades. Generally, they conformed obediently, or did not take the business seriously. But at this election there was a difference. More people than before had taken the risk and bravely voted against the regime. On this occasion a sizeable number of people knew for sure that the results were fixed. For the first time, in a few score polling stations, the votes were monitored. A quietly-spoken forty-six-year-old Lutheran pastor from Berlin Friedrichshain, Father Rainer Eppelmann, and a few other priests had asked the government if Church groups could exercise the right laid down in the GDR constitution for the public to watch the casting of votes. They were joined by activists from a few fledgling peace groups and environmental organisations which were tolerated, though barely, by the regime. The government agreed. It was a bad mistake.2

  The monitors saw as soon as the first results were announced that the election was a fraud. The figures they produced of the numbers who voted against the official candidates differed widely from the official claims. Overall, they said that between 9 and 10 per cent voted No. Among young people and students the figure was much higher - spectacularly so in some places. At the School of Fine Arts in Berlin, 105 students voted against the official candidates and 102 voted for. Nevertheless the official tally recorded 98.5 per cent in favour. In Dresden, Party boss Hans Modrow knew that four times the officially published number voted against the approved list, but he declared the doctored figures as a matter of routine.

  Honecker and his henchmen realised quickly they should not have permitted the monitors anywhere near the polling booths. For several days West German television was full of well-informed coverage of how the election had been rigged. Often it repeated the point that in the Soviet Union a few weeks earlier there had been a free election of sorts - at least the counting appeared to have been fair. In Poland there would be an election a month ahead in which a real opposition was permitted to stand. Yet in East Germany the regime persisted with an old-fashioned, Soviet bloc-style stolen election in which intelligent people were expected to believe that barely one citizen in a hundred opposed the regime.

  This was the first time West German TV played a serious role in the GDR’s politics. Most East Germans watched - except around Dresden, where for some reason reception was unavailable. That area was called The Valley of the Clueless. The faces of many West German broadcasters were as familiar as those of the presenters on their own television. On the whole, people watched West German TV for entertainment; East German television was exceptionally dull and never showed any American soaps or films. West German news so far had made marginal impact, but that was now changing. Viewers could see alternative interpretations of East German reality beamed into their living rooms in their own language. If they wished - and increasingly many people did - they could watch a half-hour 7 p.m. news bulletin on West German ZDF, followed by the East’s official news broadcast at 7.30 p.m. and then an 8 p.m. news and current affairs programme on the Federal Republic’s ARD channel.

  The availability of Western media in East Germany was to have a profound effect, starting with the stunned and angry response to the fraudulent election. Spontaneous, but peaceful, demonstrations erupted in the main cities, at first numbering just handfuls of people. Allegations of electoral malpractice poured into Party committees throughout the country. Government propaganda claimed they were ‘groundless calumnies inspired by the Western media and agents of imperialism in an attempt to smear the State’. But the public knew which version of German truth to believe. In the church at Berlin Friedrichshain a week after the poll, 400 people gathered to formulate a letter asking the government to launch an official inquiry into the conduct of the elections. As they left the church, a Stasi truck appeared. Security guards attacked them with sticks and truncheons. Around twenty were taken to Stasi headquarters, where they were beaten up more thoroughly.

  Later, Communist chiefs admitted the fraud. Some in the leadership had reckoned there would be a ‘dissent’ rate of 5 to 7 per cent. ‘But district mayors were convinced that the Party wanted better results,’ Günter Schabowski said. ‘The tally was doctored. The offiicials accepted it ... as their task in life and set about it. They did it out of habit and Party discipline.’3

  The Party bosses in Berlin did not need an election to tell them that opposition was growing. Accurate Stasi reports about the level of discontent went to Mielke, though it is unclear how many of them he showed to Honecker. One, produced by a senior officer at the Stasi’s Normannenstrasse headquarters, stated clearly that there had always been grumbling and complaints among workers but now,economic discontent is discrediting the regime . . . Workers are openly expressing their doubts about the objectivity and credibility of the balance sheets and economic results published in the mass media of the GDR. Frequently workers are demanding to be kept informed about problems and their solution . . . If they talk to West German visitors they deprecate the productive capacities of their own economy and condemn it . . . To an increasing extent manifestations of indifference and resignation are growing. GDR citizens who return from abroad on family visits glorify the West . . . and in general [talk of] the superiority of capitalism.4

  One report that landed on Mielke’s desk around the time of the local elections worried the Stasi boss. This did go to the rest of the top leadership. It said that there was an air of gloom and despondency within the lower and middle ranks of the Party itself. ‘There is widespread demoralisation,’ it said. ‘People no longer believe in the goals of the Party and the regime. Such attitudes are especially evident among those who hitherto were socially active but have . . . become tired, resigned or have finally given up.’ As apparently efficient as ever, the Stasi calculated opposition numbers in a report sent to Mielke and, on this occasion, circulated to Honecker a few days after the election. There were 160 scattered groups - ‘including pacifists, feminists, environmentalists . . . 2,500 people are involved and 600 were in leading positions . . . 60 people are hard core activists’.5

  It was an understatement, but not by much in the early summer of 1989. Nobody emerged as an inspirational figure like Lech Wałesa or with the reputation of Václav Havel. Some Protestant pastors were politically active, such as Eppelmann in Berlin, a one-time bricklayer who went to jail for nine months for refusing army service. Like many young people who wound up in the East German clergy, he retrained as a theology student for pragmatic rather than spiritual reasons: ‘I asked myself, what can you become for a contented, or even happy life in this country? The only answer which occurred to me was: pastor. Only the study of theology was able to offer me a little mental freedom.’ Christian Führer, pastor at the beautiful and famous Nikolaikirche in East Germany’s second city, Leipzig, had originally started a peace group in the mid-1980s to campaign for nuclear disarmament on both sides of the Iron Curtain. At first these peace groups were permitted, even encouraged by the regime, which thought they were harmless and were as great an irritant to the West as to the East. But Führer’s congregation became a thorn in Honecker’s flesh. Regular demonstrations began after prayers each Monday night from the week after the rigged election. At the beginning a few hundred attended; then, during the summer, numbers grew to thousands.

  But the churches had been deeply compromised by the regime and only a few wanted anything to do with opposition politics. Biologist Frank Eigenfeld wished to set up a peace group in Halle, about 140 kilometres south-west of Berlin. ‘We had basic problems with churches,’ he said. ‘We had problems finding rooms for people to meet in. We depended on parishes to support our efforts and help to provide rooms for grassroots groups. In most cases it was hard to get support. In Halle only three out of fourteen parishes provided any space for us . . . Most churches wanted nothing to do with us.’6

  The best-known secular group was the Initiative for Peace and Human Rights, established by the forty-three-year-old artist Bärbel Bohley and her partner Werner Fischer. In January 1988 they were a
rrested at a demonstration marking the anniversary of the murder of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, two of the founders of the German Communist Party and heroes in the Marxist pantheon. Their offence was to unfurl a flag which in large letters quoted one of Luxemburg’s most famous sayings: ‘Freedom is the freedom to think differently.’ Bohley was given the choice of remaining in jail or leaving the country. After around four hundred people marched in Berlin protesting at her treatment she reached a compromise with the Party that went right up to Honecker for personal approval. She would go to live in Britain for six months, as long as she was allowed to return. By May 1989 she was back in East Germany leading new protest groups and citizens’ committees that the regime dismissed as ‘illegal groupings’.

  Yet few people were interested in negotiating with the Communists or reaching a compromise with them. Some enterprising young East Germans looked for a new way to show how they felt. Five days before the municipal elections, West German television had screened a special broadcast from the Hungarian border with Austria. Hungarian soldiers were cutting the wire fence - the Iron Curtain - and opening the border to the West. It was an extraordinary sight that showed some East Germans a way out of their prison nation. If they could not climb over the Wall, tunnel under it or fly over it, perhaps there was a way around it? In small numbers to begin with they started to make their way to Hungary, hoping they might never have to return to the GDR.

  THIRTY-SIX

  EXPULSION OF THE TURKS

  Sofia, Saturday 20 May 1989

  THE WINTER HAD BEEN one of the harshest on record in Bulgaria. The spring was proving no easier. Queues in the shops were the longest in living memory. Bread, milk, cheese, eggs, fresh vegetables of all kinds were hard to obtain for most families. After the oil price crashed in 1985-6, Bulgaria’s ruse of selling cheap Soviet oil on to the West ceased to be profitable. Western bankers were refusing to lend further money. The country was bankrupt. Todor Zhivkov turned to a tried and tested tactic to deflect any criticism of himself: once again he unfurled the flag of nationalism. The country’s problems, he said, were all caused by the foreigners within. So they would have to go. He announced that he would throw out all the ethnic Turks from Bulgaria. The decision was as bizarre as it was cruel. It triggered a reaction he had not predicted. Zhivkov thought he would strengthen his position on a wave of patriotic fervour. But this time his campaign was treated with disdain by the majority of Bulgarians, prompted a plot against him among his own clique of elite Communist officials in Sofia, and created an international outcry.

  By 1989 all but a fraction of the ethnic Turks had been compelled to change their names, as the regime had been forcing them to do since the mid-1980s. Those who refused were either dead or had been jailed, but the bitterness among the minority population ran deep. From 9 May 1989, Turks in the north-east and south of Bulgaria began a series of demonstrations to coincide with the Conference on Security and Co-operation summit held in Paris. There were three marches - in Kaolinovo, Todor Ikonomovo and in Tolbukhin near Varna, organised by the Democratic League for Human Rights. This had been founded by Turks who had spent time on the prison island of Belen for refusing to adopt Bulgarian names. Demonstrators demanded the right to speak Turkish, the right to practise Islam and the restoration of their original Muslim names. The regime’s response was brutal.

  About 15,000 attended the peaceful, silent protests, and were met with the full force of the State. They were surrounded by troops and militia who used dogs, clubs, tear gas and helicopter gunships against unarmed civilians. The official figures put the casualty toll at seven dead and forty injured, but reliable witnesses insist the more accurate number was sixty dead and well over a hundred injured. About a thousand demonstrators were arrested. The towns and villages where the protests took place were sealed off by military roadblocks and communications were cut. Four-day curfews were imposed and soldiers patrolled the streets, beating and arresting people indiscriminately. They sought out those who joined the demonstrations for special treatment. Dozens more died over the next few days.

  The government’s first reaction was to make an example of the organisers and the Turkish community leaders. But then Zhivkov chose a different, far more radical, route. On this day he decided to get rid of the Muslim minority once and for all, though he would start with the troublemakers. He ordered Interior Minister Georgi Tanev ‘to organise the quick expulsion of all the extremists and fanatics among the Turkish Muslims and to stimulate the emigration of the rest’. Tanev had been Communist Party boss in the predominantly Turkish area of Kurdjali in the mid-1980s and distinguished himself by the zeal he had shown in the earlier campaign to force the Muslims to change their names. Now, within a few days, 5,000 Turks were deported. They were mostly writers, journalists, artists and academics but included many doctors, engineers and teachers - a large proportion of the minority population’s professional class.

  A week later Zhivkov summoned his fellow Party chieftains and announced that all the Turks would be expelled speedily. ‘It is absolutely imperative to expatriate . . . at least 300,000 from the Turkish population,’ he declared. ‘If we don’t get rid of them, in fifteen years Bulgaria will not exist. Their population increases . . . Can you imagine what will happen in twenty years?’ Inwardly, as they said later, some of the leadership were appalled by Zhivkov’s pronouncement. But nobody opened his mouth to object.1 The next day, 29 May, Zhivkov appeared on prime-time television. He accused Turkey of trying to foment a crisis in Bulgaria and of provoking the disturbances for their own ‘expansionist’ ends. He demanded that Turkey open its borders to every Bulgarian Muslim. Ethnic Turks were forced to leave, often with only a few hours’ notice. Most were allowed to take with them no more than 500 leva, less than a month’s average wages and in any case unusable currency outside Bulgaria. They were banned from selling their property before they left, or damaging it in any way, on pain of long prison sentences.

  The Turkish Prime Minister, Turgut Özal, led the protests. For a while at least he opened Turkey’s borders, albeit with great reluctance. The European Community halted talks on a new trade agreement with Bulgaria. The country was isolated - even within the Soviet bloc. The Russians sent formal protests. Gorbachev was furious when he met Zhivkov in Moscow in June. The Bulgarian tried to argue that he had ‘no choice on the Muslim issue . . . if we don’t act we will soon look like Cyprus’. But Gorbachev barely allowed him to finish the sentence. ‘What you are doing is unhelpful and counterproductive at a time when we are seeking to improve our relations with Turkey. We cannot support you,’ he said. From that moment he was determined to see the back of Comrade Zhivkov - and soon.2

  The Turkish exodus was a disaster for Bulgaria. More than 350,000 fled within a few weeks, during the planting and sowing season. Even Zhivkov could see the damage it was doing to the land and desperately tried to backtrack. But it was too late. The regime said they could stay working their farms, and then leave later in the year when the harvest was safely gathered. In a desperate but vain effort to save the crucial tobacco crop in the south-west Gotse Delchev area local officials would issue only postdated passports. In six key villages there were demonstrations, strikes and protests, quelled by soldiers and militia who sealed off the area and forced the people back to work at gunpoint. Nevertheless, entire villages emptied, factories ground to a halt, crops and farm animals were left untended.

  Senior Party officials were alarmed. Men like the Foreign Minister, Petar Mladenov, the Prime Minister, Georgi Atanasov, and the finance chief, Andrei Lukanov, had done Zhivkov’s bidding for years. Now they were receiving international protests about Bulgaria’s behaviour and they knew the old despot had gone too far. But they were scared of disagreeing with him or taking any action against him. Zhivkov still had the powerful state security service, the Durzhavna Sigurnost, and the People’s Militia, another armed wing of the Party, on his side. It was dangerous to make any move to challenge him openly. There had been an attem
pt to force him to retire in the summer of the previous year. But he cannily outmanoeuvred his opponents. He summoned his ministers and cronies for a meeting of the Party leadership and declared that he was growing older and wearier and that he wanted to resign soon and lay down the heavy cares of office. Then, over the next few days, he held private meetings with some of them, at which they all pledged their fealty and assured him he had their support if there was any challenge. Lukanov explained what happened next. ‘Of course, everybody knew this was a provocation. If you had answered “Yes, why not resign” you were finished. So, having interviewed everyone, he held a smaller meeting to inform them that everyone was in favour of him staying in office so he would defer to their wishes reluctantly. This kind of theatre was then represented by him as a serious attempt to retire.’ There was a group of plotters ready to pounce against him, but they knew they had to wait until the time was right.3