Is there going to be a wall round Chechnya? In the name of the Berliners Wowereit should advise against it

The respected Israeli newspaper ‘Jerusalem Post’ of 8th November reports that the Russian Chechnya commissar Dmitri Kozak announced after a meeting with Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in Israel that he is recommending to the Kremlin that a wall be built around Chechnya on the lines of the Israeli walls built around parts of the West Bank.

The Society for Threatened Peoples has thereupon issued the following statement:

"In Berlin today, on the 16th anniversary of the fall of the wall, a celebration is being held to recall the memory of those who died at the wall, but also to recall the reunification of the German capital. We ask the Mayor of Berlin Klaus Wowereit to advise the Russian President Vladimir Putin in the name of the residents of Berlin against building a wall in Chechnya. Russia must not shut off from the world a region in which the Russian Army has since 1994 killed 180,000 people.”

The GfbV Eastern Europe expert, Sarah Reinke, condemned acts of terror on the part of Chechnyan extremists against the Russian population just as much as the Russian genocide against the Chechnyans. She pointed out that in the past month 116 persons have ‘disappeared’ in Chechnya, among them being ten women, three members of the militia, two children aged seven and twelve, five teenagers under the age of 16 and one 70-year old. Two of the disappeared persons have been found dead. 20 persons have been murdered by persons unknown, among them seven women, a boy and two old men.