Saeed Naqvi on being the first journalist to interview Nelson Mandela after his release from jail

The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 signalled the end of the Soviet Union. This, in its wake, unfroze conflicts across the globe that were sustained by the West in the Cold War. I remember how Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and other Commonwealth leaders failed to persuade Britain’s Margaret Thatcher at a 1986 summit in London to stiffen sanctions against apartheid. Thatcher’s reaction was rigid because the Soviet paranoia still plagued the West. That is why she advanced a lame excuse for not weakening the White apartheid regime.

“More sanctions would hurt Black workers,” she argued.

Likewise, Italy’s Christian Democrats were kept in power despite unspeakable corruption, much of which came to light only after the Soviet threat had ended in 1991. Under one of its most popular leaders, Enrico Berlinguer, the Italian Communist Party had distanced itself from Moscow and adopted a more moderate line, but remained a formidable electoral threat to the Christian Democrats. In the years that followed, Yugoslavia would break apart and the five Central Asian republics of the Soviet Union would emerge as independent states. The old order was beginning to splinter when Arundhati “Chuku” Ghose, then Joint Secretary for Africa, called me to her room in February...

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