News of 1989 Hasn’t Reached Some Countries

By: Theresa Bond

Cold War tensions linger on the Korean peninsula. Here, South Korean soldiers closely watch North Korean soldiers (AP Images)

Female members of Turkmenistan’s People’s Council. (AP Images)

This article is excerpted from The Berlin Wall: 20 Years Later, published by the Bureau of International Information Programs. View the entire book (PDF, 2.5 MB).

November 9, 1989. The iconic photo captures the crowded crest of the Berlin Wall as people celebrate its crumbling. It is a globally recognized symbol of the end of a world divided by oppressive communist regimes.

Or is it?

Twenty years after the event, not one single photograph of this event was legally viewed by any of the 23 million citizens of North Korea. This is ironic because the closest thing to the Berlin Wall’s Checkpoint Charlie is the Panmunjom border post between North and South Korea. There, soldiers of the last nation divided by communism look menacingly into each other’s eyes. Hardly anyone, including the North Korean regime, favors a wall between the two Koreas, but the North’s dynastic and paranoid dictators are particularly difficult to handle.

Cuba’s regime is another that clings to communism and oppresses its people in the name of that ideology. The Wall in Cuba is personified by a wall of Malecón, the seaside boulevard in Havana where Cubans come to look at the sea and the world beyond their island, a free world to which they cannot freely travel. Not one picture of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, has ever been legally published in Cuba.

These two are extreme cases of totalitarian communist dictatorships. Remnants of the Wall linger on in several parts of the former Soviet Union — Belarus, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan among the most prominent examples — but few people in Minsk, Ashgabat, or Tashkent ignore the wrong that victimizes them. They have dissident opinions — they just cannot voice them.

When asked about "dissident opinions," people in Havana may not know what the word "dissident" means. But in Pyongyang they will know neither the word "dissident" nor "opinion."

[Theresa Bond is a pseudonym for a respected political analyst specializing in closed societies.]