Hesse, which he has governed since 1991, is reputed to be the best-run Social Democrat region.Like Mr Schroder, Mr Eichel works hard to keep business happy and lobbies energetically for new investment. He intervened to ensure that Opel, one of the region’s biggest employers, injects new capital into its Hesse plants.Mr Eichel is serving his last month as Hesse Prime Minister after losing the regional elections last month. His defeat owed little to his record and more to the campaign by his Christian Democratic opponents against plans by the Bonn government to extend German citizenship to long-term foreign residents.Unlike his predecessor, Mr Eichel holds no strong views on tax harmonisation, currency speculators or European interest rates. He is a strong fan of the euro, and a supporter of the European Central Bank, which is based in Frankfurt..

LESS THAN 10 years after freeing themselves from Communism and leaving the military orbit of the Soviet Union, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland yesterday completed their accession to the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation in a ceremony shot through with symbolism and emotion. In the modest auditorium of the Truman memorial library, on the edge of the former president’s Missouri hometown of Independence, delegationswatched with undisguised satisfaction and pride as their foreign ministers signed the final documents of accession.
The US Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, whose parents were Czech immigrants, added her signature, extending at a stroke the full security guarantees of the Western alliance to the three Central European countries. Officers from the three new Nato armies then added their flags to those of the existing Nato states, executing sharp salutes as they left the platform.The venue was said to have been chosen by Ms Albright to illustrate the line linking the original treaty, which came into being under Truman’s watch 50 years ago, and the accession of states that had found themselves excluded by the Iron Curtain. Churchill had given his “Iron Curtain” speech a little more than 100 miles away, also in Missouri, at Fulton.A more cynical view was that the selection of out-of-the-way Independence was dictated less by historical symbolism than by Washington’s desire not to irritate Russia. Unhappy about Nato expansion, it has sulked about the extension of Nato into Central Europe and warned against further growth.Yesterday’s hastily arranged (and slightly chaotic) ceremony undercut a planned prime ministerial ceremony in Brussels, which was postponed until next week. It also ensured Nato’s expansion would not be flaunted in front of Russia at next month’s 50th anniversary summit of Nato in Washington.That event, as Ms Albright stressed, would celebrate inclusiveness, partnership and the future, not the division of Europe. The implication was that Washington did not want the references to Hungary 1956, Czechoslovakia 1968 and Poland 1981 that proliferated yesterday to spoil the party next month.Nothing, however, could detract from the delight of the Czech, Hungarian and Polish foreign ministers yesterday – all of whom gave their speeches in English – or their determination to do well by their new allies.

For the Czech Republic, Jan Kavan said his country would “be a full part of Nato’s collaborative defence system” and was “determined not to become a burden”.For Hungary, Janos Martonyi said its experience meant “we know the value of freedom”. Joining Nato was “not just about security, but about returning Hungary to her natural habitat .. to those who share the same .. values and goals. Hungary has come home; we are back in the family.”Bronislaw Geremek, for Poland, said that it was “with joy and pride” that Poles “celebrate the end of the bipolar world symbolised by the Iron Curtain”.. UNTIL SHE was 16, Malika Oufkir was an adopted princess, a pampered child in a clandestine world of concubines, despots and slaves.

She lived in a world beyond time, a world of the most unimaginable luxury. At the age of 19, she and her entire family, including her two- year- old brother, and her sisters aged six and nine, were thrown into prison for 20 years.
She spent ten years of that time, growing to adult womanhood, in a remote and barbaric desert jail, isolated from her mother and oldest brother, often close to starvation. She was once again in a world beyond time, but now a world of the most unimaginable cruelty and squalor.In her first life, her adopted “father”, the king, was her loving, sometimes severe but always affectionate benefactor. In her second life, the same man was her pitiless jailer, her distant torturer, the man who robbed her brother and sisters of their childhood Her only crime and that of her family was their name. Her real father, General Mohammed Oufkir, once the king’s most trusted adviser, had tried to assassinate the monarch.

The general was executed and his family banished, walled away from the world without trial or charge, until 14 years later, when Malika and three of her siblings tunnelled to temporary freedom with their bare hands.It could be a tale from The 1,001 Nights, except that it happened in the Seventies, Eighties and Nineties and not in some mythical kingdom but in modern Morocco, a country with which the West enjoys friendly – even obsequious – relations. The king in question was Hassan II, one of the West’s favourite Arab potentates. While Malika and her family were in prison, King Hassan was negotiating the release of the US embassy hostages in Iran and trying to broker peace with Saddam Hussein before the Gulf War.Three years ago, Malika Oufkir and her family, after a final nine years of house arrest and restricted freedom in Morocco, were permitted to emigrate to France.She has now written her life story in a book called La Prisonniere which has shot to the top of the non-fiction best-sellers list in France An English-language edition is planned. The title of the book applies almost as much to the first part of her life, in gilded but enforced royal adoption, as the second part, in prison.It is an extraordinary book, co-authored by the French journalist and writer Michele Fitoussi: a fascinating insider’s account of life in a modern harem in the early pages; a moving chronicle of suffering and courage and endurance in prison; and then a heart-stopping thriller when Malika and her siblings escape.At times the book touches greatness.