BERLIN: Surrounded by relics of the Cold War, US Secretary of State John Kerry and his German counterpart warned on Wednesday against a return to the bitter divide between east and west over the current crisis in Ukraine. Under gloomy skies and a steady rain, Kerry and German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier visited one of the few remaining sections of the Berlin Wall.

They emphasised that the West does not seek confrontation with Russia and implored Moscow to move quickly to fulfil the terms of an agreement to end the fighting in eastern Ukraine between the government and pro-Russian separatists.

Ukraine accuses Moscow of aiding the separatists, a charge that Moscow denies. Ahead of next month’s 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Kerry and Steinmeier met German high-school students about the age that Kerry was when he lived in divided Berlin after World War II while his father served as a US diplomat.

Though the Wall had not been built when Kerry rode his bicycle into the Soviet zone of the city as a 12-year-old, he recalled the stark contrast between east and west, visible in the clothing and demeanor of Berliners as well as the conditions.

“As a young child I saw the difference, I felt the difference,” he told reporters after he and Steinmeier met the students and, with the wall behind them, chatted with a woman who had escaped East Germany by driving her Trabant car to Hungary.

“It frightened me enough that I turned back fairly quickly,” Kerry said of his bicycle ride. “It was a difference between hope and despair, between light and darkness. You noticed it.”

Published in Dawn, October 23rd, 2014