title: 1989 The Berlin Wall: My Part in its Downfall
author:  Peter Millar 
description: Peter Millar was born in Northern Ireland and educated at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he read French and Russian. He worked for Reuters news agency as the sole non-German correspondent in East Berlin in the early 1980s, also covering the Solidarity movement in Poland before moving to Warsaw, where he pressed the button to tell the world of the election of Mikhail Gorbachev, a defining moment in Soviet history. In 1985 he joined the Sunday Telegraph in the newly created role as Central Europe Correspondent - a title he invented to anticipate the dramatic changes about to overtake the continent - before moving to The Sunday Times, in early 1989, just in time to catch the climactic final stages of The Cold War. Millar was seized by the Volkspolizei on the streets of East Berlin during the demonstrations which accompanied Gorbachev's visit in October, interrogated by the Stasi and expelled from the country. Nonetheless he managed to get back by November 9, the dramatic night the Berlin Wall came down. These events form the background to his 2009 autobiographical book: 1989, The Berlin Wall (My Part in its Downfall), a title he freely admits much to the late Spike Milligan. He is a firm believer that there is humour (if occasionally dark) behind even the greatest historical events. In the 1990s Millar worked briefly with Robert Maxwell, as deputy editor of his ill-fated newspaper The European, a role he has since described as "like being aide-de-camp to Stalin." For the past decade Millar has concentrated on books, with two thrillers to his name and a third - The Black Madona - due out in the autumn of 2010. He is also author of All Gone to Look for America, a travel book reflecting his love of trains, history and good beer, crisscrossing the United States in a 10,000 mile journey on the now little used railways that were instrumental in turning most of a continent into a single nation. He is married with two grown-up sons, divides his time between the north Oxfordshire brewing village of Hook Norton and South London where he can often be found (often in a state of chronic despair and with fingernails chewed to the bone) following the vicissitudes inflicted by fate on his beloved Charlton Athletic.
zlib_text: Dedicated	to	my	mother	Margaret	McDonald
  and	a	life	spent	building	bridges
  
  CONTENTS
  	
  Introduction
  1				China
  2				USA
  3				Israel	and	Palestine
  4				The	Middle	East
  5				The	Indian	Subcontinent
  6				Africa
  7				Europe
  8				UK
  Conclusion
  Bibliography
  Acknowledgements
  Index
  
  T
  INTRODUCTION
  	
  HE	 BORDER	 WALL	 BETWEEN	 ISRAEL	 AND	 THE	 WEST	 BANK	 IS	among	the	most
  forbidding	 and	 hostile	 in	 the	 world.	 Viewed	 from	 up	 close,
  whichever	 side	 you	 find	 yourself	 on,	 it	 rears	 up	 from	 the	 ground,
  overwhelming	and	dominating	you.	Faced	by	this	blank	expanse	of	steel
  and	 concrete,	 you	 are	 dwarfed	 not	 only	 by	 its	 size	 but	 by	 what	 it
  represents.	You	are	on	one	side;	‘they’	are	on	the	other.
  Thirty	years	ago	a	wall	came	down,	ushering	in	what	looked	like	a
  new	 era	 of	 openness	 and	 internationalism.	 In	 1987	 President	 Ronald
  Reagan	went	to	the	Brandenburg	Gate	in	divided	Berlin	and	called	out	to
  his	opposite	number	in	the	Soviet	Union,	‘Mr	Gorbachev	–	tear	down