User:Charles01/SandboxMargotHon

English wiki version:

Honecker then fled to Moscow with her husband to avoid possible criminal charges in 1991. However, after the fall of the Soviet Union, the new leadership in Russia forced her and her husband to leave.

Problems


 * 1) It's vague on (1) timeline and (2) events
 * 2) It appears to be inaccurate
 * 3) It purports to be based on two source notes which do not, in fact, support what it says

Solution

Rewrite the para, starting with the German wiki para of which it might have been a quick 'n dirty summary in the first place. The German wiki version appears to respect the chronology as far as I remember it (which I don't).

German wiki version:

Nachdem im Dezember 1990 erneut Haftbefehl gegen Erich Honecker ergangen war, wurden die beiden im März 1991 vom Flugplatz Sperenberg nach Moskau ausgeflogen. Aus Sorge vor Auslieferung nach Deutschland flüchteten sie dort im August 1991 in die chilenische Botschaft. Erich Honecker wurde im Juli 1992 doch nach Deutschland ausgeliefert und in Berlin vor Gericht gestellt; Margot Honecker reiste weiter nach Santiago de Chile zur Familie ihrer Tochter Sonja Yáñez Betancourt, geb. Honecker, die dort mit ihrem damaligen chilenischen Ehemann Leo Yáñez Betancourt und ihrem Sohn Roberto Yáñez Betancourt y Honecker wohnte. Nach der Einstellung seines Prozesses und seiner Freilassung aus deutscher Haft im Januar 1993 folgte ihr der damals bereits schwer erkrankte Ehemann nach Chile, wo er im Alter von 81 Jahren am 29. Mai 1994 in Santiago de Chile an Leberkrebs starb.

A new arrest warrant against Erich Honecker was issued in December 1990, but there was no immediate arrest. In March 1991 the couple were flown in a Soviet military jet to Moscow from the Sperenberg Airfield near Berlin. As soon as they arrived in Moscow, Margot's husband was taken directly to a Red Army hospital where his cancer was diagnosed. The two of them were then installed in a government dacha and treated as honoured guests, while one by one their Kremlin comrades fell from power. Boris Yeltsin was already busy building up his power base Moscow, and Erich Honecker's desperate last letter to President Gorbachev went unanswered. As more of the old Soviet certainties collapsed, and fearing that they might find themselves handed over to the German authorities, in August 1991 the Honeckers took refuge in the Chilean embassy where now, for nearly a year, they lived out of a suitcase in a small room. They had hoped to be able to fly directly from Moscow to a Chilean exile, but the German government had other ideas. The Russian leadership refused to become involved: it fell the the German Chancellor, Helmut Kohl and the Chilean President, Patricio Aylwin, to negotiate a future for the Honeckers. There was public and political pressure in Germany for the East German leadership to be held accountable for the killings of people attempting to escape over the Berlin Wall between 1961 and 1989, while Chile had itself only recently emerged from dictatorship: Margot's own son in law was just one among and thousands of Chilean political dissidents from the Pinochet years who had reason to be grateful to the old East German political establishment that had welcomed them as political exiles during the 1970s and 1980s. Formally, the negotiations between Kohl and Aylwin were defined by tensions between the Chilean determination to uphold the Honeckers' right to political asylum and Germany's legal agreements on extradition: for some months the discussions were characterised by mutual intransigence. In the end, on 29 July 1992, Erich Honecker was sent on a special flight to face trial in Berlin, but his wife did not accompany him. Margot Honecker now flew to Santiago to join her daughter Sonja and her family, who had been living in Chile since 1990. In January 1993 Erich Honecker's trial, which some felt had by that stage already descended into farce, was cut short because, it was said, of the rapidly deteriorating health of the accused. He left Berlin for the last time on 13 March 1993, bound for Chile.

Problems


 * 1)  It's embarrassingly short on source notes