Persistence of division: after the Berlin Wall

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Hello and welcome to the Intelligence on Economist Radio. I'm your host, Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shap. Until recently, the Ethiopian state of Somali was ruled by a vicious tyrant. Its central prison the site of untold repression. Our correspondent returned to the state after its leadership changed and found a dramatic turnaround underway. And China's leader would dearly like to see his country win a World Cup. But the national football team has been underperforming. The solution? Bring in some international talents and naturalize them as Chinese citizens. But first. Tomorrow marks 30 years since the Berlin Wall fell. With it, the Iron Curtain separating East.

And west, young East Germans dashed the last 100 meters to the Wall and were hauled into the west by West.

Ger climbed on top.

Come on.

The Wall was built overnight in 1961, dividing a city and a country and symbolizing a divided continent. But three decades ago, there was a change in the air in East Germany. Revolutions had begun to sweep through Central and Eastern Europe. Communist rule was beginning to come to an end.

There was a sense of having Lived in a pressure cooker, not just that year, but for a number of years preceding it. And I think we all had a sense that it cannot go on like this.

Anne McElvoy is a senior editor at the Economist. In 1989, she was working as a correspondent in East Germany.

My experience of the fall of the Berlin Wall was sitting at a press conference with Gunther Schabowski, the head of the Berlin Party, who accidentally opened the border by trying to relax travel restrictions and then saying from immediately. So a number of us then rushed to Checkpoint Charlie and to the other crossing points, tried to persuade the border guards that the Wall was open. They didn'. And then a couple of hours later, it was on the evening news. And that seemed to sort of pull people like a suction from across the city, tens of thousands of people to go to the Wall and to start shouting, let us cross, let us cross. And about 11 o' clock in the evening, the guards, with no other advice, just gave up and did that. And that's the way it happened. As quickly as that. It was so easy after all those years.

People celebrated on both sides of the Wall. Some took to it with hammers and shovels, tearing it down piece by piece.

Lots of crying, lots of hugging, lots of glasses of vodka. And we clinked some with a bit of the Berlin Wall in it.

For those living in East Germany, the change was profound.

I watched television all night and I was in tears and I just couldn't believe what I saw. I had the feel something is happening this year. Of course, no idea and no thought that the Wall would come down.

Cornelia Gunther manages our Berlin bureau and was born in East Germany.

My life has changed enormously in many aspects. First of all, I was able to travel. That was always my wish and my desire. For me, it was a very, very happy thing and it has had a very positive impact on my life.

But not everyone in the east felt the same. In a speech last month, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who is herself East German, we must all learn to understand why. For many people in East Germany, German unity has not been a solely positive experience. Reunification made successes of some and victims of others. And today it's being debated like never before.

One of the interesting things that's happened in the last few years is that large parts of West Germany have started to realize that the way that they look at reunification is not the way many people in the east saw it or experienced it. Almost half of West Germans say that they consider reunification to have been a success story. And the Same goes for less than a third of East Germans.

Tom Nuttall is our Berlin bureau chief.

The speed with which change was brought to East Germany was almost unfathomable. If East Germany was to be folded into what was a modern market economy like West Germany, then mass layoffs and deindustrialization were inevitable because vast waves of East Germany were simply uncompetitive. There was mass privatization of East German companies to bring them into the market. There was a union of the currencies that ensured that the East German currency could be exchanged at a one to one rate for the West German Deutsche mark. What that meant is that firms in East Germany were all of a sudden having to pay their workers salaries that they could no longer afford. And vast waves of them went bust overnight essentially and had to lay their workers off. By one estimate, 80% of East German workers at some point in the post reunification years found themselves out of a job.

And do you see evidence of that trauma still today?

Yes, you do. You see it in a small but persistent economic gap. Wages in the east are between 80 to 85%, the average of what they are in the West. There's a productivity gap. The proportion of large German companies that are headquartered in the east is absolutely tiny. And then you have things like they call it the transfer of elites of the sort of upper echelon of public jobs. In the east, only 4% of them are occupied by East Germans.

Well, what's your view on how East Germany was impacted by reunification, its development since the Wall fell?

I think you have to start by saying that reunification has been a success in the sense that people in East Germany are no longer living under a communist dictatorship. Economically, actually, the convergence has been pretty good. There are those gaps that we mentioned. But of course people are free to migrate to the west and a hell of a lot of them have done but the of the East. We've had several state elections in the east this year in which the alternative for Deutschland, the far right AfD, have done very well. The AfD started off as a sort of conservative Eurosceptic party, worried about Eurozone bailouts and so on. But over the years it's morphed into anti immigration, in particular, anti Muslim, keen to wage culture wars. And in the east, it has tried to tap into this particular sense of East German grievance about the mixed legacy of reunification. I've been at AFD events in places like Dresden where you see speakers attempt to tap into a sense that East Germany has sort of remained pure while West Germany has been corrupted by, I don't know, Merkel or migrants or Muslims. And I think it is important and I think it's worrying that it is finding an audience amongst younger voters, I think that has shaken some people in the west out of a sense of complacency about the progress that was made about reunification and alerted them to the fact that a lot of work remains to be done.

I wonder if there is still a divide in terms of identity. Do people still think of themselves as East Germans or West Germans?

The identity question is absolutely crucial to understanding this. One statistic I think is quite telling in that regard is that 47%, almost half of East German, says that they identify as East Germans before Germans. And that number is much higher than it was at the point of reunification. And the converse is true of only 22%, 1/5 of Germans in the West. One thing that I found in my travels across parts of East Germany, talking in particular to young East Germans, was that they developed some sort of East German identity when they went to the West. And often they were surprised to encounter what they had considered archaic stereotypes of East Germans. There's this idea, the so called Yamaossi, the complaining Easterner, they've never satisfied despite all the money that they've been given from the west and so on. Or there's an old Cold War term, Dunkel Deutschland, dark Germany, which sort of connoted backwardness and ignorance and stupidity. And I spoke to some people who encountered that term directed against them when they went to the West. And so they often developed a sort of East German identity as a sort of protective shield almost. And I spoke to some who had returned to East Germany and found themselves a lot more comfortable there.

Why do you think it is that these questions of identity debates around reunification are coming to the fore now?

There's almost a sort of a psychoanalytical account which Angela Merkel has floated, and that's that if you compare what's happening in East Germany now to what happened in West Germany in 1968, when across the country you had younger people who were turning on their parents and said, what did you do in the Nazi era? What did you do to fight for freedom? Some people have suggested that in a sort of comparable way, 25 years after a traumatic experience, younger people are starting to confront questions that their parents were not able to do. Now, of course, in the East German case, it's younger people asking questions not of their parents, but on behalf of their parents. But the success of the AfD amongst some segments of the young electorate may be related to that in some sense, a sort of buried trauma that only comes to the surface a generation or a generation and a half later.

Thank you very much for joining us, Tom.

No problem at all.

Thanks. In today's episode of the Economist asks our interview show, Anne McElvoy speaks to people whose lives were shaped by the wall. Ralph Kabish was an engineer who dug tunnels by hand beneath the wall to help East Germans cross into the West.

You know, I have seen there the people coming through the tunnel, and I've seen them, I've seen their faces. And if you once looked in those faces, in these faces, in these eyes.

You will not forget this. So finally, the result. It was really worth to do that, to hear more. Look for the Economist asks wherever you listen.

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The Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote that the degree of civilization in a society can be judged by its prisons. The experiences of those in one Ethiopian prison reveal just how uncivilized a society can really become.

We were not controlled by normal human beings. They were animals. They had no limits. You were more likely to die in prison than survive.

The jail is in the capital of an area that for years had suffered brutal suppression by its government.

I went to Somali regional state, which is the second largest region of Ethiopia by land mass.

Tom Gardner is our Addis Ababa correspondent.

Before last year, it was the most ill treated part of the country. The government waged a scorched earth campaign there for the best part of a decade against secessionist rebels who wanted independence from Ethiopia or to join neighboring Somalia. And this was led by the then state president, Abdi Mohammed Omar, who was a sort of cartoon dictator, really sort of sadistic in his cruelty. And he was backed by the central government and he had this heavily armed special police force, the liyu, who murdered and raped civilians, imprisoned and tortured tens of thousands of alleged rebels. Now, in April 2018, Abiy Ahmed became Ethiopia's prime minister. And in August, he deposed Abdi and put him on trial.

So you went to the region to see how the change was playing out. How was it?

Yeah, so I went to jail Ogeden, which is the infamous central prison in Jig Jigga, the capital of Somali regional state. And this was the site really of some of the worst human rights abuses in Ethiopian history, certainly in the last few decades. And under Abdi's rule, it held thousands of political prisoners. When I went there a year ago, under Abdi's rule, no one would talk to me about the regime. No one would speak ill in public or on the record of Abdi. I had to interview people, you know, privately in my hotel room. Now, a year later, all political prisoners have been released. Many of them are even in government. People are able to talk in public in crowded restaurants, hotels, in full view of other people about the brutality they suffered in jail Ogaden, which has now been closed and is going to be turned into a museum. And among them was Mohammed Emi, who was a member of the secessionist rebel group, the Ogeddon National Liberation Front. He spent four years in prison.

They would change the ways they tortured us because they were worried we'd get used to it. They would do weird things. They would make us make animal noises. They tried to dehumanize us. In the late afternoon, they would put us in a pit and cover us with human feces. Over time, our skin would become infected. We would have open wounds. When things got really bad, we were made to lie outside. All the flies in the city would come to us. I've never seen so many flies in my life. Then they would spray us with insecticide. When the guards got too tired to beat us. They would pay other prisoners in cigarettes to do it. Instead of them prisoners beating other prisoners.

I mean, These are horrific abuses. I suspect the political shift that you're seeing there now is therefore that much more profound.

Yes, definitely. Under its new president, Mustafa Omer, I think some of the most serious and far reaching reforms across the whole country are underway. Some people consider it the safest part of Ethiopia. Separatist leaders of the Ogedan National Liberation Front, they've ditched their weapons. They plan to contest elections next year. They're engaged in a broadly constructive and quite positive dialogue with the regional government, which is also quite exceptional. I visited the new prison, for example, and when I went there, there were people were smiling, the inmates were hugging the prison commissioner. They were taking selfies with him. He was giving them his phone to call their families. It was a very different place. Someone else I spoke to while I was in Somali regional state was Haji Seflam, who is from a rural part of the region. He's an elder with colorful, dyed orange beard. He suffered arrests and imprisonment as well. He lost his five year old son, his ten year old daughter, wife in a car bomb during Abdi's rule. He says only he and his newborn child survived. He had all his property confiscated, including his livestock, which is obviously crucial in a kind of subsistence society like Somali region. And I asked him how things changed in the last year.

Things never stop here. In the 1977 Civil War, I was shot by an Ethiopian soldier. The bullet went through my body. The hole is still there. There's never been a peaceful time in this region, but I would describe Abdi's time as being the worst of the worst. I've never experienced that level of oppression before. It was a country under occupation. It went to another level. We used to be in hell and now we are in heaven.

But it must be difficult to make that kind of turn, to turn around a region like that and its governance. What are the sort of roadblocks been?

Yeah, so the main thing really is what lawyers call transitional justice. So one of the complaints I heard repeatedly from those who suffered in the past is that many of those who helped orchestrate all the crimes of the passe regime have not only not been held accountable, but in some cases they remain at large, even serving in the notorious special police. Still, Mohammed Emi says that since he's been released from jail, Ogaden he's struggled to come to terms with seeing his tormentors walking free.

I feel both good and bad. Good because I can live freely. Bad because those people who ordered this to happen to us, they are not just walking freely, they are living better lives than us. Some of them are in government, in leadership positions. There's not a single moment I'm not feeling physical pain from my time in prison. We have had no support, no medication, no help for rehabilitation. We deserve that.

Well, with all of that absence of justice as these people see it end, and with the struggle of transition from a sort of governmental point of view, what are the odds, you think, that this region will remain stable?

Well, you know, as you've seen, this is a part of the country where human rights abuses were so pervasive. Almost everyone knows someone has a family member who was arrested, who was killed, who was tortured. So there's broad. At the societal level, there's an enormous amount of trauma. So that is itself a challenge and could potentially be a roadblock for peace. I also think, you know, this is a country with historic separatist tendencies and where, you know, the Ethiopian government has carried out enormous abuses in the past. So people are nervous of a return to the, you know, the past order. And, you know, if the government failed to deliver its promise for a genuine election next year or reverts to outright authoritarianism in the region, whether then, yes, there could be a return to conflict.

Thank you very much for joining us, Tom.

Thank you, Jason.

China's President Xi Jinping is a huge fan of football. In 2011, he set out his three goals for the national team to qualify for host and eventually win a World Cup. So far, the team has only qualified for one tournament in 2002, and it didn't score a single goal. Things haven't improved much since.

China's national team has consistently underperformed.

James Yan is our China correspondent.

It is currently ranked 69th in the world, which is one spot below the tiny country of North Macedonia.

And so why is it that the national team struggles so much?

Well, entire books have been written about this. Football is a very popular sport in China. Teams that play in the English Premier League are especially popular. But the popularity of the sport has not translated into success on the football pitch. I know that the government is trying hard to change that. China recently announced that it would build or renovate 29,000 football pitches on school grounds by the end of 2020.

And so China's plan to get better on the world stage is simply to attack things at the grassroots level.

Well, the government has recently resorted to a new strategy which is granting Chinese citizenship to foreign players. According to China's football Association, as many as seven or eight players are being naturalized.

So how does that work in a legal sense or a Rules of the game sense if you're building an international team just by granting citizenship, China does.

Not permit dual citizenship. Naturalized players have to give up their original passport in order to take up a Chinese one. Under FIFA's rules, in order to play for a foreign country, you have to fulfill one of several criteria, and this usually involves having a relative from the country you want to play for. Alternatively, if you don't have any connection with a foreign country, but if you have lived there yourself for 5 years continuously since they age of 18, you may also be eligible. The first player without Chinese ancestry to play for Team China is a Brazilian player named Elkison, and he made his debut in September. He already might be the best player on the team.

And so how does this sit with Chinese football fans then, that their national team doesn't look like it used to?

So public opinion is very divided on this. Some fans appreciate that China needs to do everything it can, including granting citizenship to foreigners, to try to secure a spot in Qatar in 2022. But I would say a sizable minority of fans are repulsed by this new tactic of granting citizenship to foreigners. These people cannot accept the idea that someone who doesn't look Chinese can play for Kim China. If you look online, for example, there are many angry comments from fans. One fan, for example, said, we are not a country of immigrants. And this other fan said, you don't love China, you only love Chinese Yuan. Directed at Elkerson, I imagine.

And so how do you think this will play out in the longer term though, that fight between the hardcore old school China fans and the ones who just simply have ambitions to succeed on the world stage?

China's Football association is certainly aware of the backlash. So in response to such criticisms, China's Football Federation has recently promised not to recruit as many foreign born players going forward.

And what about in the nearer term? How do you rate China's chances to get into the World cup in Qatar?

In order to guarantee an appearance in the next stage of World cup qualification, China needs to finish at the very top of its group. It currently sits in second place behind Syria. So if it beats Syria, its chances will improve.

James, thank you very much for joining us.

Thank you, Jason.

That's all for this episode of the the Intelligence. If you like us, give us a rating on Apple Podcasts and you can subscribe to the economist@exterator.com radio. Offer 12 issues for $12 or 12 pounds. See you back here on Monday.