We still don't know who'll win the global battle for free speech | Timothy Garton Ash

Threats such as the fatwa on Salman Rushdie may have eased, but elsewhere fanatics and oppressive states are still trying to exert control

Twenty-five years ago, four big things happened that still shape our world. The Berlin Wall came down, and with it the empire that Vladimir Putin would love to restore. The Tiananmen Square massacre launched China on a completely different trajectory, which has made it what it is today. A then little-known British boffin called Tim Berners-Lee invented what would become the world wide web. And Ayatollah Khomeini delivered his fatwa on Salman Rushdie.

Last Sunday I sat down with Rushdie in New York, at the American PEN World Voices festival, to discuss the consequences of those events for freedom of expression around the world. I asked him how he had experienced the velvet revolutions of 1989 and where he had been when the wall came down. He could not exactly remember some safe house presumably and he confessed to having felt a tinge of envy at watching others, including Nelson Mandela a few years later, walking to freedom while he was still in durance vile.

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