their rebellious populations. Specifically, the East German government found they could no longer bottle up their entire population behind the Wall - the population was draining away though Hungary and other countries to the West. On the afternoon of the 9th of November 1989, the East German interior minister made an unremarkable speech, towards the end of which he announced that 'limited' travel by East Berliners to the West was to be permitted. Whereupon tens of thousands of East Berliners descended on the Wall's few crossing points. The East's border guards, who had received no instructions, first of all held the mob back, then yielded to the inevitable and opened the barriers. The wall was open, and thousands surged through to the West, not to cross permanently, but to meet long separated relatives, see the sights and go back home, at least for the first night. But when the wall was breached, it lost its relevance, and would soon go: without the Wall, the East German state lost its relevance and would soon go too. And if one communist satellite regime imploded, why not the others? And then what reason did the main communist regime have to exist? So within a couple of months, all the the eastern European countries had thrown off the Soviet yoke, followed by the fall of the Soviet union itself.
I was there soon after, in fact just before Christmas 1989 - the wall was still there, and border formalities were still in place, at least for foreigners, We crossed over into the East, and took a train down to Dresden, a very strange place, with little reconstruction from the terrible damage inflicted in world war 2, and had Christmas dinner in the People's palace of culture there - another very strange experience.
So, twenty five years on, there was a magnificent celebration in Berlin, even though, in a place heavy with history, the 9th of November has another connotation - Kristallnacht - when the Nazi regime led its first attack on Jewish businesses, culminating in the Holocaust. Nobody seemed to be thinking of that last night.
The Wall is nearly all gone now, and a young person could visit the city without knowing where it stood or indeed knowing anything about it at all. So the city put up a string of 7000 self luminous balloons along the line of the former wall, and last night after all the fireworks, speeches, music and massive street parties in front of the Brandenburg gate, let them fly one by one into the night, to symbolise freedom and the soaring human spirit, as a total opposite to the lifeless, leaden concrete of the Wall. It was a brilliant spectacle, maybe even worth the air Namibia flight to Germany, and I hope you saw it on TV.
Then across in the UK, the same day was Remembrance Sunday, the day in which the dead of Britain and the Commonwealth are remembered. This year especially relevant, as it is the centenary of the outbreak of World War 1, in which Namibia was the site of the first conflicts. In London, around the famous Tower of London, there is an amazing display 888 000 red ceramic poppies, to symbolise the lives of each of the British soldiers killed in the war. It is vast, amazing and beautiful, and gives a powerful impact of how huge a number nearly a million is. There's a picture of it above.
Of course, in 1989, on the other side of the world, UN resolution 435 had been passed, and Namibia was rapidly advancing to independence. Nearly all the countries of Africa wee independent, and many were converting from autocracies to multi-party democracy. All seemed right with the world. All the issues which had been dogging the twentieth century: the cold war, imperialism, colonialism, racism and international mistrust, seem to have been resolved, and Francis Fukuyama wrote a famous book called "The end of history". If history was mostly about war, and there were to be no more wars, what would there be to write about?
For a time, and apart from the tragic conflict in the former Yugoslavia, he seemed to be right.
But Mr. Gorbachev, now 83, was present at the weekend's Berlin celebrations, and in his speech cast a cloud over the event. We are facing the prospect, he said, of entering a new cold war? Why?
There was one exception to the general boom and prosperity throughout the world in the 1990's. This was Russia, whose economy imploded after the fall of the soviet union. State assets were sold off at ludicrous prices to the so-called oligarchs, who became fabulously wealthy, at the expense of the rest of the population. The former satellite countries of eastern Europe had thrown off Russian influence entirely, and for the most part had become members of the European Union and NATO.
The head of state who presided over this chaos, Boris Yeltsin, handed over power exactly at the end of the millennium, on 31st December 1999, to a little known ex-KGB colonel, Vladimir Putin, whose most famous dictum was that the collapse of the soviet union was the greatest disaster of the twentieth century. Slowly, the image of Russia changed, from a rather ramshackle but fairly open good humoured society, to a sullen, revanchist country, with increasing government, i.e. Putin control, over the media, accompanied by harassment of internal dissidents and occasion murder of external ones, corruption which characterises nearly all oil-based economies, run of course by Putin cronies, and an increasingly truculent and aggressive foreign policy, determined not to give another inch to the West, and if possible, take one back. This came to a head in the present crisis in Ukraine, a country which Putin regarded as fundamentally within the Russian sphere of influence, if not a part of Russia itself, whose nominal independence was tolerated so long as there was a pro-Russian government in power.
When pro-Western demonstrators overthrew this a year ago, the gloves were off. Putin seized the opportunity to annex Crimea, which admittedly with its huge Russian naval base was effectively part of Russia anyway, and to stir up trouble in the ethnically Russian parts of Eastern Ukraine, with the object of ensuring that the country would be kept in a state of eternal, bankrupt turmoil, and never become part of the Western bloc, especially NATO.
So are the gains of 1989 becoming undone, and are we heading towards a new uncertain world order? Maybe Mr. Fukuyama, still very much with us, will have to write a new book about how 'history' has re-started again.
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