Huge crowds mark fall of Berlin Wall

BERLIN (AFP) – Tens of thousands thronged the route of the Berlin Wall on Monday for emotional celebrations to mark 20 years since its fall, but Chancellor Angela Merkel said Germany still bears the scars of division.

World leaders joined huge crowds recalling the defining moment of the end of communist rule in Europe, when the embattled East German state finally opened the despised concrete border on November 9, 1989.

Merkel, who grew up in the communist state, attended a "very moving" memorial service at a church where pro-democracy rallies were held in the weeks before the end of the communist regime.

"German unity is still incomplete," Merkel told ARD public television, noting how east Germany still lagged behind the west in economic growth, with joblessness nearly twice as high.

"We must tackle this problem if we want to achieve equal quality of life."

The chancellor gave her warning before the main ceremonies at the historic Brandenburg Gate with British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, presidents Nicolas Sarkozy of France and Dmitry Medvedev of Russia and US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, ex-Polish president Lech Walesa and dissidents who helped end European communism will also be on hand at the former "death strip" where border guards once had shoot-to-kill orders.

At a ceremony late Sunday, Clinton issued a call for a new transatlantic push to free those still oppressed.

"Our history did not end the night the Wall came down," she said.

"To expand freedom to more people, we cannot accept that freedom does not belong to all people. We cannot allow oppression defined and justified by religion or tribe to replace that of (communist) ideology."

Following weeks of protests against the regime, East Germany's Stalinist authorities suddenly allowed people to travel to the West that autumn night.

After 28 years as prisoners in their own country, euphoric East Germans streamed to checkpoints and rushed past bewildered guards, many falling tearfully into the arms of West Germans on the other side.

Along the Wall's route on Monday, former easterner, Karl-Heinz Buchholz, a 63-year-old retired social worker, said he had spent a year in a Stasi prison as a young man and was part of a 30,000-strong demonstration on the night of November 9.

"When we came home, we heard on the radio that the Wall had fallen," said Buchholz.

Forbidden to travel to see his relatives in the west, Buchholz travelled straight across the border and was stunned at what he saw there.

"On the weekend after the Wall had fallen, I went to Lower Saxony. I was shocked because the economic gap was even worse than I had thought although I knew that in the east, we were really on the brink," he said.

In a tribute to be delivered at the Brandenburg Gate, Brown called the unity of Berlin, Germany and Europe "majestic" achievements.

The Wall "was swept away by the greatest force of all -- the unbreakable spirit of men and women who dared to dream in the darkness," he said.

But Medvedev said Russia had often felt on the back foot since the Wall fell, despite assurances at the time that NATO would not expand eastward as it since has.

"We believed that as the result of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Russia's place in Europe would be defined somewhat differently," he told Germany's Der Spiegel magazine.

"We were hoping the disappearance of the Warsaw Pact would be accompanied by a different degree of Russia's integration into common European space. What have we received as a result? NATO is still a bloc whose rockets are targeting the Russian territory."

Merkel, Walesa and Gorbachev, who remains a revered figure here, will join former dissidents in crossing the former checkpoint at Bornholmer Strasse, where hundreds of East Germans had their first taste of freedom.

The celebrations will later move to the Brandenburg Gate for an open-air concert and the symbolic toppling of 1,000 giant styrofoam dominoes along two kilometres (1.2 miles) of the Wall's former course.

An overwhelming majority of Germans are still grateful for the Wall's fall, according to a poll in the Leipziger Volkszeitung daily, with 79 percent of those surveyed calling November 9, 1989 a joyous day.

But sociologist Frithjof Hager of Berlin's Free University said national unification, sealed in 1990, was still a work in progress.

"I believe the authoritarian mindset is still an issue (in the east) -- such things only change very slowly," he told AFP. "But I think simply pointing the finger at easterners would be deeply unfair."