Winnipeg Free Press

Winnipeg Free Press (Newspaper) - February 01, 2015, Winnipeg, Manitoba C M Y K PAGE A6 A 6 WINNIPEG FREE PRESS, SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 1, 2015 WORLD winnipegfreepress. com DEBALTSEVE, Ukraine - Outgoing heavy- calibre fire boomed incessantly, shaking the ground and rattling windows around the besieged town. Residents of Debaltseve, seemingly inured to the racket, listened impassively as they mustered at the town hall Saturday to be evacuated with as many belongings as they could carry. The government- held town has been without power, water and gas for at least 10 days, prompting many to flee from an intense artillery duel between government and Russian- backed separatist forces. Almost every one of the largely deserted streets in the centre showed signs of having been struck by projectiles. A month of relative quiet in eastern Ukraine was shattered in early January by full- blown fighting as the separatists attempted to claw back additional territory from government hands. Rebel leaders accused Ukraine of mobilizing its forces in advance of an imminent offensive. Efforts to hold talks on halting the escalating violence have to date been unsuccessful. Russian President Vladimir Putin, French President Fran�ois Hollande and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, in a telephone conversation, all expressed hope negotiations in Minsk, Belarus, will focus on a ceasefire and pulling out heavy weaponry from residential areas, the Kremlin said. However, representatives for the rebels, Russia, Ukraine and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe left the government compound late evening on Saturday after spending four hours behind closed doors. Ukraine's envoy, Leonid Kuchma, was quoted by the Interfax news agency as saying the talks were derailed after the rebel representatives " refused to discuss steps to bring a complete ceasefire and the withdrawal of heavy weaponry." Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk said Saturday 1,000 residents have been evacuated in the past days from Debaltseve. But the number of crammed civilian vehicles seen speeding out of the town's rutted, icy roads over the past few days suggests official figures may be on the conservative side. " Six buses shuttle ( refugees) from there and they constantly come under fire," Yatsenyuk said in comments carried by his press office. " As soon as they ( the rebels) see that we are evacuating the people, they open fire." Yatsenyuk has asked the defence ministry to help secure the evacuation and added none of the refugees has been injured. Vyacheslav Abroskin, head of police for the Donetsk region, said 12 people had been killed by shelling in Debaltseve, which hosts a strategic railway hub. He did not specify over what period the deaths had taken place. With the government apparently unable to handle all the people wishing to leave, volunteer groups are trying to fill the gap. " We are evacuating people from this hot spot, so they don't have to deal with what is going on, because this is not their war after all. This has nothing to do with them," said Andrei Vasilyev, a worker with a charitable organization based in the eastern city of Kharkiv. As Vasilyev's minibus was being loaded, a small child held in his mother's arms pleaded plaintively to leave as soon as possible. Infirm and elderly passengers needed to be lifted into the tightly packed transport. Leaving Debaltseve carries its own risks because of the encroachment of separatist forces on all sides. Roads running west and east are controlled by rebels, leaving the northbound road the only remaining corridor of relative safety. But fresh, scorched shell craters alongside that road testify that it is dangerous, too. Fighting inched toward Debaltseve this week when separatists burst through government lines to occupy part of the town of Vuhlehirsk. The towns are separated by 13 kilometres of road and railroad. When Ukrainian troops were overrun by formidably armed rebel attackers Thursday, some soldiers were forced to retreat to their positions in Debaltseve on foot. Despite claiming to rely solely on military equipment poached from the Ukrainian army, separatist forces have consistently deployed vast quantities of powerful weapons, some of which military experts say is not even known to be in Ukraine's possession. Since the conflict started in April, it has claimed more than 5,100 lives and displaced more than 900,000 people across the country, according to UN estimates. Ukraine's Defence Minister Stepan Poltorak said Saturday 15 soldiers had died and that another 30 were injured over the previous day's fighting. " This happened along the entire line of conflict, starting from the Luhansk region and ending in Mariupol," he said. The United Nations on Friday voiced concern about the deteriorating situation in Debaltseve and other densely populated areas where intense fighting is going on. Neal Walker, the UN humanitarian co- ordinator in Ukraine, has called for an immediate humanitarian truce to allow humanitarian assistance and evacuation of civilians. - The Associated Press R ICHARD von Weizsaecker, a one- time soldier in Hitler's army who used his largely ceremonial office as president of Germany to denounce his country's Nazi past and to condemn intolerance toward immigrants and other minorities, died Saturday. He was 94. His death was announced by the office of the current German president, Joachim Gauck, but no other details were available. Von Weizsaecker was elected president of West Germany in 1984 and held the office as the country's formal head of state for 10 years. During that time, he helped oversee the country's reunification with East Germany in 1990. In the German parliamentary system, the chancellor is the head of government and exercises more authority over the policies of the government than the president does. ( Helmut Kohl was Germany's chancellor throughout von Weizsaecker's tenure as president.) Nonetheless, the aristocratic, white- haired von Weizsaecker became perhaps the most popular political figure in Germany. He was, in essence, his country's chief ambassador and used his presidential office as a platform to promote important matters of national and moral principle. In an address to the parliament on May 8, 1985 - the 40th anniversary of Germany's surrender at the end of the Second World War - von Weizsaecker directed a cleansing spotlight on the country's greatest national shame when he challenged his fellow Germans to take responsibility for the horrors of the Holocaust. He dismissed the commonly held notion that ordinary German citizens were not aware of the actions of the Nazi regime. " There were many ways of not burdening one's conscience, of shunning responsibility, looking away, keeping mum," he said. " When the unspeakable truth of the Holocaust then became known at the end of the war, all too many of us claimed they had not known anything about it or even suspected anything. " Who could remain unsuspecting after the burning of the synagogues, the plundering, the stigmatization of the Star of David, the deprivation of rights, the ceaseless violation of human dignity?" Von Weizsaecker, who spent seven years as an infantry officer in the German army during the war, was a potent symbol of national reflection and reconciliation. " Anyone who closes his eyes to the past," he said, " is blind to the present." He called on Germans to view May 8 not as a day of national surrender but as " a day of liberation. It freed us all from the system of National Socialist tyranny." Von Weizsaecker's forthright speech echoed around the world, and he was widely hailed as his country's moral conscience. He travelled to Israel in 1985, attended the German premi�re of the film Schindler's List with the Israeli ambassador and, in 1993, visited the U. S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. " President Weizsaecker has had a major, positive influence in enhancing Germany's role and reputation on the world stage," U. S. ambassador to Germany Richard Holbrooke said in 1994. Weizsaecker repeatedly spoke out against intolerance toward immigrants and other minorities and attended memorial services for Turkish victims of neo- Nazi violence. He also took a leading role in preparing Germany for reunification after the country had been divided at the end of the Second World War. As the mayor of West Berlin in the early 1980s, von Weizsaecker was the first leader from the democratic western part of the country to cross the border and conduct talks with his counterparts in the communist- controlled eastern sector of Berlin. As early as 1985, he urged Germans on both sides of the divide to think of themselves as one nation, and he was among the first leaders to call for the national capital to return to Berlin. Richard Karl von Weizsaecker was born April 15, 1920, in a family castle in Stuttgart, Germany. He was from an aristocratic family of statesmen, theologians and scholars and had the inherited title of freiherr, or baron. His father, Ernst von Weizsaecker, was a senior official in the Nazi foreign ministry and served as the German ambassador to the Vatican. An older brother, Carl Friedrich von Weizsaecker, was part of a team of German scientists that tried unsuccessfully to develop a nuclear bomb during the Second World War. Von Weizsaecker studied in his teens at the University of Oxford in England and the University of Grenoble in France. He entered the German army in 1938 and took part in the German invasion of Poland on Sept. 1, 1939, the act that touched off the Second World War. Two days later, his older brother, Heinrich, was killed in battle, which deeply affected von Weizsaecker's view of the war. Stationed on the eastern front in Russia in 1943, von Weizsaecker later recalled, he and other German officers shot holes in a portrait of Hitler. Several of his friends participated in a failed plot to assassinate Hitler in 1944. After the war, von Weizsaecker studied law at Germany's University of Goettingen and joined his father's defence team during the Nuremberg trials, when his father was charged with war crimes. Ernst von Weizsaecker was sentenced to prison and released after 18 months. Von Weizsaecker received a doctorate in law and worked for a German industrial conglomerate before being elected to the German parliament in 1969. He was mayor of West Berlin from 1981 to 1984. Survivors include his wife of 61 years, Marianne von Kretschmann; and three children. Von Weizsaecker wrote several books about history and politics in which he advocated a moderate, centrist approach for Germany as it entered the 21st century. When he left the presidency in 1994, he reflected on the powerful speech he had delivered nine years earlier, in which he asked Germans to own up to the legacy of the Holocaust. " I wouldn't take back a single word of that speech today," he said. - Washington Post Former soldier helped heal Fought bigotry from position as German head of state OBITUARY RICHARD VON WEIZSAECKER By Matt Schudel BOBBI Kristina Houston Brown, daughter of the late singer Whitney Houston, was taken to a hospital Saturday morning after she was found unresponsive in a bathtub at her Georgia home, authorities said. Brown, whose father is R& B singer Bobby Brown, was discovered in the bathroom by her husband, Nick Gordon, and a friend about 10: 20 a. m., Lisa Holland, spokeswoman for the Roswell Police Department, told the Los Angeles Times . The 21- year- old Brown, who is Houston's only child, was taken to North Fulton Hospital in Roswell, a suburb of Atlanta. She is currently " still alive and breathing," Holland said. Police were obtaining a search warrant to look through Brown's home and are talking to friends and family, Holland said. Feb. 11 will be the third anniversary of Houston's death. The singer had ruled the pop charts in the 1980s and 1990s before drug abuse and her tumultuous marriage to Bobbi Kristina's father took its toll. Houston was found unresponsive in the bathtub of her room at the Beverly Hilton on the eve of the Grammy Awards in 2011. She was 48 at the time of her death. Brown, who was 18 when her mother died, was hospitalized a day after Houston's death, reportedly for stress. In a March 2012 interview with Oprah Winfrey, Brown said she was still dealing with the grief of her loss. " Sometimes it's so surreal," Brown said in the interview. " I still walk into the house like, ' Mom?' But I've accepted it." Brown inherited her mother's entire estate. - Los Angeles Times Besieged Ukraine town evacuated Government- held Debaltseve a hot spot By Peter Leonard MICHAEL SOHN / THE ASSOCIATED PRESS FILES Former German president Richard von Weizsaecker compelled his country to face its Nazi past and helped national reconciliation. Houston's daughter found unresponsive, hospitalized DAN STEINBERG / THE ASSOCIATED PRESS FILES Whitney Houston ( left) and daughter Bobbi Kristina in 2011. A_ 06_ Feb- 01- 15_ FP_ 01. indd A6 1/ 31/ 15 11: 53: 48 PM ;