Sentenced To Live

BY THE TIME BERLIN'S CONSTITUTIONAL COURT handed down its decision on Tuesday, Erich Honecker had become an object more of pity than of wrath. He was frail, 80, and ravaged by liver cancer that German doctors say will kill him within six months. Prosecution under such circumstances "violates respect for human rights," the court said in releasing him to join his wife Margot in Chile.

Broken and pitiful, perhaps. But Honecker was one of the hardest of the hard-liners who ruled the Soviet bloc before communism collapsed. As East | Germany's security chief, he supervised construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961. He supported the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion of neighboring Czechoslovakia. And newly publicized Kremlin documents show that Honecker wanted to do the same against Poland. A letter from Honecker to Brezhnev on Nov. 26, 1980, denounced the Solidarity movement and appealed for a Warsaw Pact invasion to prevent "the death of Socialist Poland." Brezhnev, embroiled in Afghanistan, refused -- a decision that may have begun the unraveling of communism.