Word: krenz
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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SENTENCED. EGON KRENZ, 60, East Germany's last communist leader; to 6 1/2 years in prison, for responsibility in the shooting death of people trying to cross the Berlin Wall; in Berlin...
Walled In: East Germany's last hardline leader Krenz is sentenced to six and a half years in jail for having citizens killed as they tried to get over the Berlin Wall... Friendly Fire: Seventeen percent of violence-related injuries are caused by a friend or relative, according to a US Justice Department survey... I Am Not a Crook: Teamsters President Ron Carey denies knowledge of a scheme to launder illegal contributions into his election campaign... Will They Accept Delivery?: UPS makes a final contract offer to its strike-threatening pilots... Holy Crowd!: A million show up to hear...
BERLIN: What made Egon Krenz so unlucky? East Germany's last communist leader, convicted today of manslaughter for the deaths of civilians who tried to escape his country before the fall of the Berlin Wall, got none of the breaks of his predecessor. Erich Honecker, the quintessential hardliner who ruled East Germany for 18 years, was judged too ill to stand trial, went into dignified exile in Chile, and died there in 1994. Spymaster Markus Wolf scored a similar coup, convincing a constitutional court to overturn a treason conviction and leave him free to pen a best-selling memoir. Until...
...even Krenz got off lightly: The 60-year-old will serve only six-and-a-half years for six counts of manslaughter ? that's little over a year per civilian killed, and a drop in the 900-person ocean of people killed trying to escape from East Germany. "There's very little vendetta in the air," says TIME's Bonn bureau chief, Jordan Bonfante. "Germans are not in the mood for a witch hunt. They have enough problems trying to consolidate eastern into western Germany." Krenz, it seems, was simply the one holding the ball when the Wall fell...
...Egon Krenz, who succeeded Honecker as communist leader for 50 tumultuous days in 1989, contends that "not all 2.3 million party members were villains." If Germany opts to deal with them only through Ausgrenzung, he says, "we will never have a peaceful unification." Krenz is a victim of that policy, although some might argue that he had it coming. Both he and Keller fear that the shunning -- combined with hardships caused by the collapse of the socialist economy -- could encourage a popular tide of nostalgia for the good old, bad old days. Politically, of course, there is no going back...