Jonathan Steele's Blog

21 November 1985: Jonathan Steele reports on a new bill to curb immigration in Denmark

Copenhagen
Beside the Tivoli Gardens here a group of Iranians have set up a makeshift camp beneath the arches of the railway station entrance.

With police permission, they chose Denmark’s best known landmark for a week-long vigil which is designed to shock passersby. A placard shows a long arm with the red and white Danish flag on its sleeve handing an Iranian refugee into the jaws of Ayatollah Khomeini.

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First president of Romania after the fall of the Ceaușescu regime who was later charged with crimes against humanity during the revolution

Ion Iliescu, who has died aged 95, served three terms as the elected president of Romania, setting one of the best examples in Europe of how former communist leaders could support democratic reforms and maintain social stability in their countries when the old system of repressive one-party rule crumbled.

Iliescu had revealed himself as a progressive during the harsh dictatorship of Nicolae Ceaușescu. He was appointed head of the Communist party’s agitation and propaganda department in 1965, the year that Ceaușescu became party leader.

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Academic who played a major role in highlighting the repression of dissidents in the Soviet Union and in the founding of Index on Censorship

No one outside Russia did more to publicise the plight of Soviet human rights activists and political protesters than Peter Reddaway, a British American academic, who has died aged 84. Known as dissidents and numbering only in dozens, they played a major role in highlighting the repression of independent thinkers in the Soviet Union. Reddaway was one of their first foreign champions. Thanks to his position as a Washington-based expert on Soviet studies, he frequently gave evidence to US congressional committees and helped to make the issue of dissidents a key element on the agenda of east-west dialogue during the cold war.

Although the terror of Stalin’s murderous rule had been lifted under his successors, Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev, one chilling new practice became common: the misuse of psychiatry to send dissidents to closed mental hospitals. Reddaway and Sidney Bloch, an Australian medical colleague, campaigned to have the Soviet Union expelled from the World Psychiatric Association. The Soviet Union resigned in 1983 before they were thrown out.

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Formidable foreign correspondent for the Guardian who covered major global events from the 1960s to the 90s, and commanded great respect from world leaders

As one of the first female diplomatic correspondents in the British media, Hella Pick, who has died aged 96, was at the centre of the Guardian’s coverage of superpower summitry in the final decades of the cold war. Tall and elegant, she was a commanding presence at press conferences with world leaders, and also had a rare ability – based on her careful and intelligent reporting – to win the confidence of powerful politicians and get privileged access for interviews and background briefings.

Willy Brandt, as chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany in the early 1970s, became her friend, as did Mieczyslaw Rakowski, the last prime minister of Poland in the communist era. She was also trusted by Eduard Shevardnadze, who served as Soviet foreign minister at the height of Mikhail Gorbachev’s nuclear arms reductions and detente with the west.

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Russian anti-corruption campaigner critical of Putin and subjected to physical attacks and imprisonment

Alexei Navalny, who has died suddenly aged 47 while in prison, was Russia’s best-known campaigner against high-level corruption. For many years he was the leading critic and opponent of President Vladimir Putin and his political party, United Russia.

Repeated arrests, jail sentences and physical assaults did not deter Navalny from digging up financial scandals, which he published on his blogs and X feeds as well as YouTube. In a 2011 radio interview, he described United Russia as a “party of crooks and thieves”, which became a powerful and popular mantra on social media and at political protests.

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US secretary of state with peerless diplomatic skills, tireless energy and a ruthless desire to protect his country’s interests

Henry Kissinger, who has died at the age of 100, was the most controversial US foreign policy practitioner of the last half-century, the architect of American detente with the Soviet Union, the orchestrator of Washington’s opening to communist China, the broker of the first peace agreement between Egypt and Israel, and the man who led the US team in the protracted talks with North Vietnam which resulted in US forces leaving Indochina after America’s longest foreign war.

Feted for these accomplishments as national security adviser and later secretary of state under Richard Nixon, Kissinger achieved global celebrity status and in 1973 was awarded the Nobel peace prize. But it later emerged via leaked documents and tapes and former officials’ memoirs that behind his diplomatic skills and tireless energy as a negotiator there lurked an inordinate love of secrecy and manipulation and a ruthless desire to protect US national and corporate interests at any price. His contempt for human rights prompted him to ask the FBI to tap his own staff’s telephones and, more seriously, to give the nod to Indonesia’s military dictator for the invasion of East Timor, to condone the actions of the apartheid regime in South Africa in invading Angola, and to use the CIA to help topple the elected government of Chile.

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Finnish politician awarded the Nobel peace prize for his mediation work in Kosovo and Indonesia

Martti Ahtisaari, who has died aged 86, was a former president of Finland who won the Nobel peace prize for his role as an independent mediator helping to end conflicts in Namibia, Kosovo, Northern Ireland and Indonesia.

His efforts were particularly useful in 1999 in the crisis over Kosovo after a two-month bombing campaign by Nato had failed to get Serbia’s hardline president Slobodan Milošević to withdraw his troops and police from the disputed province and end the ethnic cleansing of Kosovo’s Albanian majority.

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13 July 1988: The predominantly Armenian enclave in Azerbaijan declares itself an autonomous part of the neighbouring republic of Armenia.

13 July 1988
By Jonathan Steele

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Flight recorders also recovered, Russian officials say; Alexander Lukashenko says he warned Wagner bosses to be aware of threats to their lives. This live blog is closed

Rishi Sunak has reaffirmed the UK defence ministry’s comments from Friday morning, saying intelligence suggested Prigozhin was “most likely” on the plane.

“We’re obviously monitoring the situation very closely, working with our allies to establish what happened,” the British prime minister told reporters.

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Multimillionaire Russian businessman and head of the Wagner mercenary army that played a key role in the war in Ukraine

Yevgeny Prigozhin, who has died aged 62 in a plane crash, was a multimillionaire militia commander who sparked the biggest crisis in the Russian president Vladimir Putin’s two decades in power. Once a close friend and confidant of Putin, in June 2023 Prigozhin led an armed mutiny against Russia’s military leadership after severely criticising the invasion of Ukraine as being unnecessary and based on false premises.

At the head of thousands of battle-hardened mercenary soldiers, known as the Wagner group, he took control of Russia’s southern military headquarters in Rostov-on-Don, the official command centre of the invasion, and demanded the resignation of the defence minister and the chief of staff. He then sent a column of troops and tanks up the main highway towards Moscow. The column was attacked by helicopters loyal to Putin and several were shot down.

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