TWO HUNDRED GERMANS HAVE LEFT GEORGIA: BERLIN
AFP
Khaleej Times
11 August 2008
United Arab Emirates
BERLIN – Around 200 Germans have left Georgia because of the current
conflict and 100 more are due to leave by bus later on Monday for
the Armenian capital Yerevan, the German foreign ministry said.
Some 300 German citizens were still in Georgia and the German embassy
was taking steps to contact them to give them a chance to leave
the country if they wished, ministry spokesman Jens Ploetner told a
news conference.
Ploetner stressed that the Germans were not being "evacuated" but were
leaving voluntarily. He added that the German embassy in Tbilisi was
also ready to help citizens from other European citizens.
"There is no reason for panic but we are calling on all German
citizens… to contact the embassy," he said.
Russian planes bombed radars at Tbilisi airport and hit civilian
targets in the city of Gori near the border with South Ossetia on
Monday, a Georgian interior ministry spokesman said.
The UN refugee agency said that up to 80 percent of Gori’s population
of 50,000 have fled the city — the main Georgian city near to South
Ossetia — because of Russian attacks.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel spoke by phone with Georgian President
Mikheil Saakashvili on Monday morning and repeated her call for an
immediate end to all violence, her spokesman Thomas Steg said.
Merkel also fully supports the decision of French President Nicolas
Sarkozy, whose country holds the rotating EU presidency, to go to
Moscow, Steg added.
Merkel said it was "essential that there is an immediate and
non-conditional ceasefire and for all armed forces to withdraw to
the positions held before the conflict" and that "the territorial
integrity of Georgia should be respected," Steg said.
He added that a meeting between Merkel and Russian President Dmitry
Medvedev in Sochi on the Black Sea would take place on Friday as
planned, but that contrary to the original agenda "practically the
only topic" of discussion would be the current conflict.
German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier has also spoken
several times by phone with his Russian and Georgian counterparts,
and also took part in a conference call on Sunday with other EU
foreign ministers, Ploetner said.