June 17, 2003	Tuesday	Rabi-us-Sani 16, 1424

BERLIN: Germany marks the 50th anniversary on Tuesday of the 1953 uprising in former East Germany, an event widely accepted as the first major people’s revolt in communist eastern Europe.

A workers’ dispute over increased production targets turned into a mass uprising against the East German state, drawing more than a million people onto the streets until Soviet troops and tanks crushed the resistance, leaving around 100 dead.

Many historians view the events as a precursor to later and better-known uprisings — the 1956 Hungary revolution, the 1968 Prague Spring and Poland’s Solidarity movement in 1980-81.

June 17, 1953, has for years raised radically different emotions and deepened divisions between West and East Germany.

The heated exchanges that ensued halted a slight thawing of the Cold War that had followed Soviet leader Josef Stalin’s death in March 1953 and ended the prospect of Germany reuniting for a further 37 years.

In the East, the communist leaders denounced the demonstrators as fascists, arresting around 10,000 and sending about 1,500 to prison.

For West Germany, the day became a national holiday in memory of the victims of totalitarianism and a platform to denounce the east while calling for German unity which only actually occurred in 1990.

Indeed, the street that led through Berlin’s central Tiergarten park to the Brandenburg Gate that divided east and west was renamed “June 17 Street” in defiance of the communist state towards which it ran.

Left-leaning groups in the west were in an awkward position and only recently recognized the day as one of national unity.

An objective view has been hard to come by, but a consensus that it was more than just a labour dispute has grown, aided by the opening of documents since reunification in 1990.

Hans-Hermann Hertle, a researcher at the Potsdam Centre for Contemporary History, said evidence in the last decade had shown many protesters were young people and women and that the scale of demonstrations was much greater than originally thought.—Reuters