German minister says mistakes were made in reunification (1st Lead)

Aug 31, 2010, 15:45 GMT

Berlin - Interior Minister Thomas de Maizere, a key negotiator of East and West German reunification, said on Tuesday that mistakes were made in the treaty signed exactly 20 years ago, but said overall it had been a success.

'It can come as no surprise, with such a comprehensive treaty, that maybe not every single ruling was ideal,' said the minister, who in 1990 was a government official charged with negotiating the West German terms of reunification.

'I am thinking, for example of the decision to immediately transfer almost the entire West German legal system to the so-called 'accession area',' he continued, in a festive speech marking the treaty's 20th anniversary.

Chancellor Angela Merkel was later due to address dignitaries, in the building where the treaty was signed. Guests included the last East German prime minister, Lothar de Maiziere, and the West German foreign minister at the time of reunification, Hans-Dietrich Genscher.

On August 31, 1990, the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) and the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) signed a hastily- agreed treaty which effectively absorbed the communist East German state, under a new capital, Berlin.

The 1,000-page document was drawn up within less than two months, as officials were eager to disband the East German state before its 41st anniversary, on October 7, 1990.

The rapid negotiations downplayed criticism within East and West Germany at the notion of effectively annexing East Germany - despite the separate political, economic and social developments of the previous 40 years.

In a survey published Tuesday, a third of all western Germans said they had lost more as a result of reunification than they gained.

Of the 2,090 people questioned, 11 per cent said they would ideally like the wall dividing East and West to be rebuilt.

The study, by a Berlin-based sociological research institute, showed that 42 per cent of eastern Germans said they had benefited from reunification. Just 37 per cent of westerners said the same.

Yet de Maziere, a cousin of Lothar de Maiziere, said the reunification treaty marked an important step at a critical time.

'We all knew the door was now open and we needed to walk through it now. Nobody knew how long this good historic opportunity would last,' he said.

The agreement, drafted less than a year after the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, followed a series of agreements covering economic, social and currency unification between East and West Germany.

Signed by the West German interior minister at the time, Wolfgang Schaeuble, and East German secretary of state Guenther Krause, the treaty paved the way for German reunification on October 3, 1990.

'The treaty was - and is - both the anchor and the compass for the unification process in Germany,' de Maiziere concluded.