Kofi Annan's successful
diplomacy in Baghdad failed to convince many newspapers abroad that the threat
of war had been lifted, and pressure on the United States to back down
continued across Europe and the Middle East. In Iraq itself, Annan's presence
did nothing to inhibit the anti-U.S. rhetoric of the government-controlled
press. "UNSCOM is not an international commission directed by the United
Nations but an American commission directed by U.S. intelligence services whose
orders it executes," said the official daily Al Thawra Sunday. Another
Iraqi daily, Babel , which is published by Saddam Hussein's son Uday,
said there was no difference between "American imperialism" and "German
Nazism." It also accused the United States of hijacking the United Nations and
"taking for itself rights that the international community has not accorded
it."
In
Europe, anti-U.S. opinion remained strongest in France, where the conservative
daily Le Figaro said in
a front-page editorial Monday that the U.S. double standard in the Middle
East--merciless toward Iraq for breaking international commitments but supine
toward Israel when it does the same thing--"was bound to scandalize their Arab
allies." At the same time, failure to strike Iraq after weeks of warlike
rhetoric could have cost the United States its credibility, Le Figaro
said, adding that "by saving himself, Saddam Hussein has also saved Bill
Clinton." An opinion poll commissioned by the newspaper showed that 55 percent
of French citizens wanted France to remain neutral in any U.S. attack on Iraq,
but the same percentage thought that the prime objective of any U.S. strike
should be "to eliminate Saddam Hussein."
In Israel, the liberal daily Ha'aretz attacked the
Israeli government for supplying citizens with gas masks, antibiotics against
germ warfare, and various kinds of self-protection advice while at the same
time insisting that the risk of an Iraqi attack was remote. In choosing the
maximum level of preparedness, it said in an editorial, "the government has dulled the edge of Israel's
deterrent capability, has made the possibility of nuclear warfare more
tangible, has frightened away tourists, has generated huge expenditures, and
has increased doubts as to whether Israel can provide the Jewish people with
real security."
London's
evening paper, the Evening Standard, was outraged by the photographs of Annan
shaking hands with Hussein. Under the headline "Repulsive Handshake," it said
in an editorial: "It is the business of the U.N. to conduct evenhanded
diplomacy. But to exchange public greetings with a mass murderer accords him a
legitimacy which should repel most people." The Israeli weekly Jerusalem
Report claimed that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had recently
considered putting into operation a secret plan to murder Hussein that was
drawn up, then shelved, in 1991. The German weekly Der Spiegel carried a story to
the same effect, while Le
Monde of Paris reported Sunday on its front page about another plan to murder a
dictator (Hitler)--one for which a 25-year-old Swiss man named Maurice Bavaud
was decapitated in Berlin in May 1941. Bavaud's martyrdom had been shrouded in
silence by the Swiss authorities during the war, but it was now to be
commemorated with a plaque on the house in Neuchâtel where he was born.
The conservative Jerusalem Post, owned by the
Roman Catholic Canadian media mogul Conrad Black, published an opinion piece
titled "The Killing Season," which turned out--only at the end--to be
about Northern Ireland. Its author, Oxford historian Bernard Wasserstein,
fiercely attacked the "mischievous and irresponsible role" of a certain
nation's "diaspora" who, "[k]nowing little of the complexities of the conflict,
... project their insecurities, obsessions, and unfulfilled dreams on to the
distant national hearth." The Republican-sympathizing Irish News of Belfast
led
Monday with the news that Sinn Fein "may spurn chance to re-enter peace talks,"
but the Irish Times
of Dublin quoted Sinn Fein President Gerry Adams as saying he was still
"totally wedded" to the peace process.
The Times of London's main
editorial Monday, headlined "Japan in the Dock," congratulated the other
participants in the Group of Seven finance ministers' meeting in London over
the weekend on the "acrimonious" dressing-down they gave the Japanese
representative. If new Finance Minister Hikaru Matsunaga "was shocked by the
hostility he encountered in London, that shock should be salutary and has come
not a moment too soon," the Times added. All the British press
speculated Monday on the reason why the British government had intervened to
stop Sean Connery's being awarded a knighthood by the queen: Was it his
Scottish nationalism, or was it his attitude on violence toward women? The
Sunday Telegraph of London reported that Princess Diana's memorial fund
is to open an office in New York because of "the strength of interest from
America."
The Pioneer of
India described the Indian election as "comparatively peaceful," because there
were only 11 dead in Bihar, six in Andhra Pradesh, three in West Bengal, and
one in Orissa. But in an editorial it deplored the fact that "whether it is
enlisting the services of goons ... or terrorising innocent citizens with guns,
all methods are deemed to be good as long as, in the perception of the
candidate, they lead to his victory."
