Once a year, North Korea’s often vitriolic rhetoric machine fires up with special intensity to attack those who attack its human rights record. The exchanges usually come toward the end of the year when the U.N. General Assembly approves what has become an annual measure criticising North Korea for having one of the worst rights records in the world.

Reclusive North Korea is a member of only a few international organisations so the annual rebuke at the United Nations stings particularly hard for the state that bills itself as a workers’ paradise, or as it said in a state media report on Tuesday: “the best socialist state in the world as it is centred on the popular masses”.

North Korea comes under special scrutiny this year because it will be subject to official international questioning of its human rights record at the United Nations in December, which could provide even more embarrassment for the North’s thinned-skinned leaders as the prickly state is put on the defensive.
North Korea has prepared for this event by changing its Constitution earlier this year and adding clauses about human rights protections.

But many of the rights of North Korean citizens spelled out in the document are not carried out. For example, it guarantees freedom of assembly, but Pyongyang can send to political prison anyone who gathers without permission of authorities. The regime guarantees freedom of religion, but jails those who try to exercise the right. Privacy is a right, but the government’s large internal spy network keeps tabs on almost all citizens.

According to human rights groups, the United States and other leading democracies, North Korea maintains a vast political prison system to stamp out dissent. It intimidates the masses through public executions and by guilt by association where it can jail family members of those it accuses of crimes.

North Korea’s official media usually unleashes some of its harshest rhetoric during this human rights season, saying this is all part of a plot by a hostile United States to topple its leaders. Already this week, the North slammed “the ceaseless mean ‘human rights rackets’ kicked up by the U.S. and its followers.”

“This is nothing but a despicable plot to attain their sinister purposes by putting political pressure upon the DPRK (North Korea),” its KCNA news agency said.

The points to watch this year when North Korea is raked over the coals for its record are whether Pyongyang will use the criticism as a means to back away from international nuclear disarmament talks – as it has done previously – or if it will finally grant the request of Vitit Muntarbhorn, the U.N. special rapporteur for human rights in North Korea, to see for himself what is going on in one of the world’s most isolated states.

For years Mohamed ElBaradei, Nobel Peace Prize laureate and outgoing head of the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency, has warned the United States and other Western powers against jumping to conclusions about Iran’s nuclear program. While Washington, Israel and their allies see increasing indications that Tehran’s secretive nuclear program is aimed at developing weapons, ElBaradei told an audience of academics, politicians and diplomats at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York City that his agency has “no concrete evidence” that Tehran is pursuing an atom bomb.

So is Iran’s nuclear program intended solely for lighting light bulbs in the world’s fourth biggest oil producer as Tehran insists? According to ElBaradei, its purpose is something completely different.

“Iran’s nuclear program is a means to an end, it wants to be recognized as a regional power,” the outspoken Egyptian lawyer and diplomat said. “They believe that the nuclear know-how brings prestige, brings power, and they would like to see the U.S. engaging them. Unfortunately that holds some truth. Iran has been taken seriously since they have developed their program.”

In other words: Don’t mess with us. We can enrich uranium.

U.N. officials who know ElBaradei have told Reuters for years that the IAEA director-general is convinced that Iran is pursuing what is often called the “break-out option” — the capability to produce nuclear weapons should it ever decide it needed them. He is not convinced, they say, that Iran has taken a decision to follow North Korea’s example and build an actual weapon.

But Western diplomats who follow the Iranian issue say that it is doubtful Iran would choose to hover on the threshold of the nuclear club without entering the door. A more likely scenario, they argue, is that the Islamic Republic would secure its place at the table of world powers by developing and possibly even testing a nuclear device. They also say the impact on the Middle East would be the same whether Iran has the “break-out option” in the drawer or a live bomb in its basement. In either case the result would be a nuclear weapons race across the already unstable Middle East.

ElBaradei has spent six of his 12 years at the helm of the IAEA neogotiating with Iran to get access to Iran’s nuclear facilities, many of which were hidden from U.N. inspectors for decades before their existence was revealed by Iranian exiles or Western intelligence agencies.

The IAEA chief chastised the administration of former U.S. President George W. Bush and the European Union’s three biggest powers — Britain, France and Germany — for failing to seize what he said was an opportunity they had years ago to persuade the Iranians to suspend their uranium enrichment program.

“They were ready to stop at an R&D (research and development) level … that could have not have created any concern for the international community,” he said.

Making matters worse, the European and U.S. demands that Iran cease all enrichment activity before negotiations on a package of economic and political incentives could begin was among the conditions imposed on Tehran that ElBaradei described as “impossible to accept.”

Western diplomats, however, have said that it would be naive to think that the Iranians were ever truly prepared to suspend their enrichment program after the EU trio launched negotiations with Tehran in the fall of 2003. They have defied three rounds of U.N. sanctions for refusing to stop enriching.  Bush’s successor Barack Obama has reversed the U.S. position by offering to engage Iran’s leaders, but they have reacted coolly so far.

ElBaradei, who opposed the Bush administration’s decision to invade Iraq in March 2003, said Bush’s refusal to negotiate directly with North Korea and Iran was a colossal policy failure that had created “a total mess.” (North Korea tested nuclear devices in 2006 and 2009.)

ElBaradei added that if Israel, which neither confirms nor denies having a sizable nuclear arsenal of its own, follows through on threats to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities it would backfire. He said Tehran would simply launch a “crash course” to get an atom bomb and “would turn the Middle East into a ball of fire.”

One of the most amazing aspects about the Berlin Wall’s sudden collapse 20 years ago was that no one lost their nerve. Not a single shot was fired. The Cold War ended with the biggest street party Berlin, or any city anywhere, has ever seen. 

Who would have thought that’s how the Berlin Wall would go out? Berlin’s long division was the result of World War Two. The Wall was the focal point of the Cold War — Soviet and American tanks faced off almost barrel-to-barrel at Checkpoint Charlie. Not surprisingly, many people thought that the stalemate would only be changed by another war. But instead on Nov. 9, 1989 there was no bang, no blood. Just a lot of celebrating. And a lot of tears.

That’s for me probably the most fascinating thing about the sudden implosion of the Communist East German regime — it went out so peacefully. And that’s one of the themes that has been touched upon in the myriad of German media accounts in recent weeks ahead of the 20th anniversary of the Wall’s fall on Nov. 9.

It’s also an issue that’s been explored by Reuters correspondents in Berlin past and present — in a series of  stories that you can read on this special page . 

The collapse of the Wall was for Reuters a special occasion — not only because it was both the first to report the news to the world that the Wall had fallen but also because it was the first to report it was being built 28 years earlier, as my German language service colleague Volker Warkentin notes in his illumating story (click here) about the famous press conference on Nov. 9, 1989 that led to the Wall bursting open in the hours that followed.

Guenter Schabowski, a Politburo member, had inadverently announced at the very end of that otherwise dull hour-long news conference that East Germans would be allowed to travel directly to the West from now on.  Schabowski was asked when the new rules took effect and stammered: “That comes into effect…according to my information…. immediately, without delay,” he said, shuffling through the papers spread in front of him as he sought in vain for more information. It later emerged the announcement was not supposed to be released until 4 a.m. the next morning and it was supposed to include instructions for an orderly process of applying for visas first — not the mad dash to the border that he caused.

Tom Heneghan, the bureau chief for Germany at the time, was in East Berlin writing many of the stories on that famous evening when the Wall burst open. But as the American journalist notes in his intriguing story  (click here) there was so much going on that many of the details of the action only came to be known later.  “What we only found out much later was that Schabowski silently asked himself: ‘I wonder if this has been cleared with the Soviets.’ He didn’t know!”, Heneghan writes. “Later that evening, as the world’s eyes zeroed in on the partying at the Wall, East Germany’s communist leader Egon Krenz was pacing the long corridors of the Central Committee headquarters alone mumbling ‘What should I do now?’  What a gem that would have been in our story that night.”

Douglas Hamilton, who came to Berlin from Paris to reinforce the bureau, was out on the streets on that night and describes the scene here. Paul Taylor, who later came to Berlin from Jerusalem, steps back here to look at Germany’s relations neighbours then and now. Ralph Boulton, who worked for many years in East Berlin for Reuters, recalls some of his experiences here in this post.

Fabrizio Bensch, who was in his last year of high school in West Berlin, grabbed his camera and went to Checkpoint Charlie when he heard on the news the Wall was opening. But it took another hour or so before the first East Germans came through. ”It changed my life,” said Bensch, who decided on that night he wanted to be a photojournalist. Here’s his story.

Perhaps the most moving story is Peter Jebautzke’s. He grew up in East Germany and always dreamed of climbing in the Alps. But the Berlin Wall (3.5 metres high) kept him away from the 4,000 metre high peaks — until Nov. 9. Here’s what Jebautzke did when the Wall finally opened. 

There are many theories about what led to the Wall’s opening in 1989 — my personal favourite story is that Bruce Springsteen may have helped let the genie out of the bottle a year earlier when he held a concert in front of 160,000 people in East Berlin and said: “I came here to play rock ‘n’ roll for you East Berliners in the hope that one day all the barriers will be torn down.”

But colleagues currently working in Berlin have also weighed in with interesting examinations of what’s going on now, 20 years later.  Paul Carrel writes that the economy in formerly Communist East Germany has recovered in the last two decades in this story even if it’s not quite the “flourishing landscapes” everywhere that then-Chancellor Helmut Kohl had promised.

And Madeline Chambers shows that thousands of former workers at the loathed Stasi security police still have no remorse for the repressive regime they so ruthlessly kept in power. Here’s her story.

The German media have also had a lot of great stories. The ARD network had a fascinating documentary “Schabowskis Zettel” (Schabowski’s note) that ends with the head of the border guards at the first crossing point to open the Wall, Harald Jaeger, getting home early in the morning of Nov. 10 and telling his wife: “Honey, I just opened the Wall last night.” And then she said: “Erzaehl nicht so dummes Zeug” (Don’t come in here with rubbish like that).

The Berlin Wall fell 20 years ago on Nov. 9, 1989. A team of Reuters correspondents and multimedia journalists from Berlin and London will be covering the major event in a completely new way — Berlin Wall 2.0. The team from The Berlin Project are joining forces with the Reuters text, pictures and TV correspondents in Berlin to present real-time coverage and impressions of everything going on in Germany’s reunited capital city.

You can also view the best of Reuters’ content on our Berlin Wall global coverage page, follow the team in Berlin on Facebook and get a behind the scenes look at Berlin 2.0 by visiting The Berlin Project. Please send us your thoughts and memories by commenting on the live blog below.

By Sunanda Creagh

Just over a decade ago, Indonesians took to the streets to protest. Now they can make themselves heard without even leaving home.

A Facebook group supporting two senior officials from the anti-corruption agency, who many people think have been framed, has attracted almost half a million members in just four days.

This digital people power may well be one reason why on Monday, President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono launched a probe into the case.

It’s the second time Facebook has played such an important role in a public debate in Indonesia. Earlier this year, thousands “rallied” online in support of a woman who had been charged with defamation for complaining about her treatment in hospital.

Indonesia is the world’s seventh-biggest user of the social networking site, according to Inside Facebook, and 8.23 million of its 8.52 million Facebook addicts joined up in the last year. The new information minister, Tifatul Sembiring, is a daily user of microblogging site Twitter, and says he wants to use it to seek policy ideas.

After decades of authoritarian rule, Indonesia is now a flourishing democracy yet many individuals still feel frustration that their voices and opinions are seldom heeded by politicians. So will online social networking sites contribute to Indonesia’s political future or is this just a passing fad?

PHOTO CREDIT/REUTERS/Beawiharta

Not many people, least of all Germans, will have shared my sentiment; but when the Berlin Wall fell and Checkpoint Charlie, that fortress of barriers, steel gates and watchtowers, was swept away with it, I felt almost as if I was losing old friends.
As a young Reuters correspondent based in East Berlin in the 1980s, I passed almost daily through that conduit between two mutually hostile worlds. Those green-uniformed guardians of world communism may have unnerved Western tourists with their stony mien and intrusive searches. Over three years, though, I got to know them with the superficial familiarity that develops almost inevitably between people whose lives brush so routinely against each other, however lightly. I even gave them secret names; those I liked and those I didn’t.
I remember the middle-aged, rather matronly woman I dubbed “Oma” (Gran), who would inquire with a friendly, indulgent smile after my girlfriend in West Berlin. I might tell her about my mother’s visit to the “DDR”. Did she have a nice time, Herr Boulton? Was the Baltic coast beautiful? When my girl friend’s visits became less frequent and then stopped altogether, she was gently solicitous. “Haven’t seen Fraeulein K here for a while, Herr Boulton. Doesn’t she like us any more?” Doesn’t she like you any more was of course the true question; and I answered it, of course. There was something about those 50 second confessionals.
Reading my stasi file a few years later, I saw my comments cooly committed to official paper. Well, I don’t hold it against her. It was all very charming; and anyway, I found they had had their own secret name for me. I was “Lupus”. As for my mysterious 72-year-old mother, she basked in the code name “Bluete” (”Blossom”).

It was the rituals that forged bonds. Driving through the slalom of concrete barriers, surrendering my border pass, waiting to get it back, I would chat with the guards about some football match, the weather, the loud screeching noise emanating from my car. They would raise the barrier, salute crisply and I would be swallowed up into the other world.
The Wall was of course a tragedy. It split families and destroyed lives. Over 130 people were shot dead trying to flee across the Berlin Wall. Would these, my occasional acquaintances, shoot if it came to that? It was a question I asked myself more than once and which I could never really answer. Nor, I suppose, did I want to.
There was the less sympathetic blond haired youth who never smiled, never showed a glimmer of human warmth. I named him, with unashamed malice, “Hitler-Youth”. I fancied he would draw his sidearm without hesitation, but maybe I misjudged him. My favourite, though, was always the dark-haired young woman with the comely gap between her front teeth and a flirtatious manner that must surely have violated some regulation or another.
“Gap-tooth” and I had a game. Leaving of an evening, I would slap my passport into her outheld hand and we might spend 10 seconds or so discussing where i was going; to the theatre, to a bar, to a restaurant in a half of the city she would never in her life see; or so we both believed. I might ask her if she wanted to come along, show her two tickets folded in my pass. She would smile and say she would love to but she had to work through the night. Maybe another time. I wonder sometimes what became of her. She presumably had a life beyond Charlie, though I could never imagine it.
What became of some of the others, I found out, to my surprise, a few years later.
I was flying into Berlin from Moscow, where I was working, and arrived at Schoenefeld Airport — once the main airport of Communist East Germany and now an entry point to the newly-united Germany.
The set-up there was much as I remembered it from the ‘Olden Days’. Passengers were channelled towards a narrow, brightly lit passageway where they stood before a cabin with a glass window; behind it a faceless uniformed official. I slipped my passport into the cabin through the gap and waited, looking straight ahead, for the guard to scan my face for a resemblance.
I sensed him look up at me, then back at the passport; then back to me and then to the passport. Why this hesitation? He coughed and leaned towards me.
“Herr Boulton?”
As I looked, he tipped the peak of his cap up to reveal his face. I remember the words exactly.
“Herr Boulton, Ich glaube wir kennen uns schon…” I think we’ve met before.
Dressed now splendidly in the uniform of the West German Federal Border Guard, sat someone I had last seen in the green uniform and winter shapka fur hat of the East German border guard. I think my astonished reply must have been something like “what are you doing here?”
He smiled mysteriously and signalled me to pass on into the baggage hall. As I waited for my bags, he emerged with two other familiar faces; both, like him, alumni of Charlie, both wearing the uniform of what had not so long ago been the enemy.
It was a brief encounter and one of the strangest of my life. The circumstances in which we had known each other were so peculiar and those of our reunion so utterly unexpected. We shook hands warmly, laughing at the absurdity of it all. Like old frontline soldiers in a phoney war, we had discovered we were old friends

    Spending a whole day with Bolivian leftist president Evo Morales requires a great deal of stamina.
    Morales, an Aymara Indian who has introduced a battery of controversial reforms to give Bolivian Indians more power and has put the state in the driving seat of the economy, is hyperactive, to say the least.
    He tends to start the day meeting diplomats or government officials at about 6 a.m. and often wraps up after midnight.
    In the three years I have been living in Bolivia he has not been on vacation, and it is not unusual for him to visit three or four far-away places in a day.
    Today is one of those days.
    Morales, who herded llamas as a child, lost four siblings to poverty and never finished high school, became the country’s first Indian president in early 2006. He is revered by poor Indians, who identify with his moving underdog story and are benefiting from heavy social spending.
    But he is frowned upon by the middle classes who fear he may try to install a Cuban-style socialist regime in the country.
    Critics see Morales, an ally of Venezuelan leftist President Hugo Chavez and Cuban revolution leader Fidel Castro, as a dangerous socialist.
    The day we spent together, he was wearing jeans, a wrinkled short-sleeve shirt and unbranded sports shoes. He was good humored and cared little for protocol; addressing me as “comrade” or “brother” and once simply with a “What’s up, boss?”
    “I don’t know how he does it. I can’t keep up sometimes. I’ve got soroche — high altitude syndrome,” said a close Morales’ aide, when I asked about the president’s hectic schedule, which often includes trips from the Andean plateau to the lowlands and back.
    I met Morales, a clear favorite to win a presidential election in December, at a campaign rally at 7 a.m. in El Alto, a sprawling shantytown in the outskirts of La Paz.
    “Evo governs and plays but does not get tired,” chanted hundreds of supporters while he played soccer after the rally.
    Then we took a plane to the country’s constitutional capital, Sucre, to catch a helicopter to Tinguipaya, a tiny Quechua village of adobe houses in the central Potosi region, where no Bolivian president had ever visited before.
    After a campaign event in Tinguipaya we flew to the southern town of Tarija, where he presided over an award ceremony for a soccer tournament, and then off to the northern town of Cobija.
    On the plane Morales bragged about a penalty he scored in an impromptu kick about.
    “I fooled the goalkeeper. Did you see?,” he said.
    By 4 p.m. we had visited four places all over Bolivia — a country of 10 million that is roughly the size of France and Spain combined — traveling by car, plane and helicopter. At one point I tried to take a nap but Morales woke me up listening to loud Bolivian pop music on his cell phone.
    At times during the day he looked over papers handed to him by a military officer and he also had private meetings with the defense minister and a governer during our travels.
    Morales, a bachelor with a mop of thick black hair and copper skin, was going to turn 50 the day after our trip.
    “How are you going to celebrate your birthday?” I asked.
    “I can’t,” he said. “It’s forbidden. I’ve got to work. I have a meeting at 5 a.m. … you have to be there, let’s see whether you can keep up with me.”

   “I don’t think I can. I’m already exhausted,” I told him.
    Morales ate little during the morning and early afternoon, just drinking water and popping propolis lozenges, a health food made of resin from beehives. I told him I was hungry, that I could not believe he agreed to take us around for a day but failed to offer us food.
    He called a flight attendant, who brought out a take-away plastic container with lukewarm chunks of beef and potatoes.
    In no time Morales, Reuters’ photographer David Mercado, an army official and myself were all picking food from the container with our fingers. It was a working-class feast inside a presidential plane.
    In Cobija Morales met government officials, dined with supporters and presided over a second sports ceremony.
    After 14 hours of traveling throughout the country Morales, a keen soccer fan, was still going strong and decided to play soccer with a local team.
    On the flight back to La Paz he finally dozed off for an hour or so. We arrived in El Alto after 1 a.m.
    “Comrades, I see you at 5 a.m. at the presidential palace. Don’t let me down,” he said before waving goodbye.

(Photograph by David Mercado/REUTERS, October 25, 2009)

Just as the World Trade Organisation is organizing an intensive push to complete the Doha round trade talks, the atmosphere among negotiators is as pessimistic as it ever has been. 

“Gloom” and “frustration” are just two of the more printable words circulating at the WTO’s headquarters by Lake Geneva.

Even WTO chief Pascal Lamy says that Doha – already the longest running trade round  – will not meet the latest 2010 deadline set by G20 leaders unless governments really instruct their negotiators to make the necessary compromises, and negotiators start to put those compromises down on paper.

Lamy, who suspended the round in 2006 but has led a renewed push for the last three years, and others point to the enormous progress made towards a deal in eight tortuous years.

The rules-based trading system umpired by the WTO also offers a powerful contrast to the lack of global order in international finance, and a possible model to improve it.

But many experts are asking whether the round – officially known as the Doha Development Agenda (DDA) – can ever be completed given the changes in the world economy and international agenda since it was launched at the end of 2001 to prise open markets and help developing countries benefit from more trade.

Stuart Harbinson, who presided over the launch of Doha as chairman of the WTO’s general council, wonders in a new paper published by think-tank ECIPE whether DDA should stand for Death-Defying Agenda or just Don’t Do It Again.

“The round may refuse to die but it also apparently refuses to haul itself over the finishing line,” Harbinson says.

“It is hard to avoid a feeling that an elaborate dance is being performed. Commitment after commitment has been made to bring the dance to a conclusion, but the music plays endlessly on.”

Harbinson says it would be a huge pity to abandon the hard work of the past decade. Wiping the slate clean and beginning again, or inserting new topics, are probably non-starters given the difficulty of  agreeing on the parameters of a negotiation, while many issues that have so far proved stumbling blocks would re-appear.

But if governments move on and Doha just fades away, there is a real risk of damage to the credibility of the WTO and its valuable work in trade dispute settlement, and monitoring trade policy for protectionist trends.

AITIC, an intergovernmental organization that promotes trade-led growth in poor countries, says that 2009 probably holds the record for high-level international gatherings ending with ringing endorsements of the need to do a Doha deal – but with nothing on the specifics of what needs to be done.

(Watch for another call at the APEC Nov. 14-15 summit in Singapore.)

“The harsh reality is that the substance of the differences between the major players… has not changed for over a year, arguably for three or four years,” AITIC says in a new report – Concluding Doha in 2010 – A Serious Commitment or Baseless Hope?

Everyone agrees a Doha deal, at the very least, would reinforce defences against job-destroying protectionism.

Some studies, such as one by Washington’s Peterson Institute for International Economics, say a deal could boost the world economy by hundreds of billions of dollars a year (other economists disagree).

Developing countries are desperate for a deal which would remove some of the disadvantages they suffer in the global trading system, especially in agriculture.

A trade deal would demonstrate the global community’s ability to work together as it tackles other problems like climate change.

But there are few votes to be had pushing trade in the United States or many other countries nowadays, and many businesses seem to have turned their back on Doha.

Is it going to happen? Does it matter?

PHOTO CREDIT: Tightrope walker REUTERS/Mathieu Belanger

PHOTO CREDIT: WTO headquarters REUTERS/Denis Balibouse

PHOTO CREDIT: Pascal Lamy REUTERS/Denis Balibouse

After spending the last four years trapped in a loveless grand coalition with the centre-left Social Democrats, Germany’s conservative chancellor Angela Merkel is looking forward to happier, more productive days in a cosy new centre-right coalition with her preferred partners, the pro-business Free Democrats.

However, rather than smooth sailing with her new, more like-minded coalition partners, it’s turned out to be one turf battle after another between Merkel’s conservative Christian Democrats and their Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union, on the one side and the Free Democrats on the other.

Weeks of unseemly arguing over tax cuts, healthcare, conscription and other issues in coalition talks has earned the new coalition the nickname Fehlstart” (false start) in the German media.

That awkward beginning was confirmed in a most embarrassing fashion for Merkel on Wednesday when at least nine deputies in her own coalition withheld their support.

Merkel was easily re-elected chancellor with 323 votes in the 622-seat parliament, 11 more than she needed. The nine deputies who either abstained or voted against her in the secret ballot served as a tangible reminder that the CDU/CSU and FDP might not be the marriage made in heaven some had expected. It was a political kick in the shins that Merkel did not need.

Four years ago she got 397 of the 612 votes, 51 less than the CDU/CSU and SPD had together. That, however, was not surprising because the grand coalition had an enormous majority in parliament and because the two camps had long been such arch enemies. This time around it was nine deputies in her own preferred coalition who stabbed her in the back. Is that a harbinger of things to come?

“Let’s try forget about this,” said Volker Kauder, CDU parliamentary floor leader. Several conservatives are already picking holes in the coalition deal, which is only a few days old. Kauder said he was sure all the CDU/CSU deputies voted for Merkel. The FDP’s parliamentary floor leader, Birgit Homburger, said the same of her party.

At least one of them was wrong. 

PHOTO: Merkel reacts after her re-election on Wednesday by a narrower than expected margin in parliament. REUTERS/Kai Pfaffenbach