Brazil Is Burning
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Le Monde's main front page story
and sole editorial were devoted Sunday to the devastation caused by forest
fires in the state of Roraima, in northwestern Brazil. Describing the loss of
an area the size of Belgium as an "ecological crime," the Paris newspaper said
20,000 Yanomami Indians, members of one of the last great indigenous tribes in
the Americas to have preserved their ancestral way of life, are now threatened
with starvation because of the fires.
In its
hard-hitting editorial, Le
Monde acknowledged that El
Niño-related drought had played a part in causing the fires. But "this
ecological catastrophe--for it is an immense one--is above all the result of a
misguided government policy," in effect since the early 1970s when a military
dictatorship was in power, that sought to populate the Amazonian forest with
poor peasants from northeastern Brazil. The goal: to prevent the region's
"annexation" by foreigners. "Condemned to destroy the forest, because a cleared
area provides at best only two years of crops, the 'settlers' are the first
victims of a perverse policy that unfortunately hasn't changed one jot since
the re-establishment of democracy," the editorial said. "The Amazon continues
to act as a safety valve for the social tensions generated by the unjust
allocation of land in the rest of the country." It added that Asian forestry
companies, meanwhile, are illegally installing themselves "en masse" in
Amazonia "with the blessing of the authorities."
Afront page cartoon in Le Monde made an improbable
link between the Brazilian forest fires and the 30 th anniversary of
the murder of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. It showed Yanomami Indian
children reading the words "I have a dream" from a book of King's speeches, as
one uniformed Brazilian official, putting a match to the forest, asks another,
"Maybe we should burn books as well?" In a full page tribute to King, the paper
concluded, "The black American community has never again found a leader of his
stature." In another front page piece, titled "Clinton the African," Le
Monde put a positive spin
on the president's African tour, saying 1) the United States finally
appreciates Africa's potential economic importance and 2) "what remains to be
done by President Clinton's administration is to persuade American investors,
too, to dip their toes into Africa."
The conservative Jerusalem Post caused a furor
Sunday by claiming in its lead story that Hamas bomber Mohiyedine Sharif
was murdered not by the Israeli secret service, as had been widely suggested,
but by Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority. A report from Jerusalem Monday in
La Repubblica of Rome
said that the Jerusalem
Post 's source, Hamas Gaza
leader Abdel Aziz Rantisi, denied making the statements attributed to him and
that a "furious" Arafat threatened Rantisi with arrest and interrogation by the
Palestinian police.
Israeli newspapers, in the
meantime, were unanimous in accepting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's word
that Israel had nothing to do with Sharif's murder. The Palestinian papers
focused, by contrast, on the plight of the peace process, blaming the United
States for the present impasse. Al-Quds said the United States hasn't come close to striking a
middle ground between Israeli and Palestinian positions on Israeli withdrawals
from the West Bank; Al-Ayyam accused it of "imposing the Israeli position on us,
wrapped in shiny American wrapping paper."
The
Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz led its front page Monday with the imminent Arab general strike
over the demolition of three Bedouin homes in the "unrecognized" western
Galilee village of Um al Sehali, and its editorial urged
an improvement in mathematics teaching in Israeli schools, citing poor student
results. Egypt's Al-Ahram , on the eve of the Islamic "Festival of the
Sacrifice" for the deprived, called for an end to the slaughter of rams in the
streets. "Rather than turn our cities into slaughterhouses," the paper said,
the authorities should set up "ad hoc organizations to collect money, butcher
the rams in appropriate places, preserve the meat in a hygienic manner, and
distribute it in a fair way among all those who actually need it."
In Britain, the Financial Times published a front page interview with
Japan's central bank governor, Masaru Hayami, in which he called on his
government to cut income and corporate taxes in its promised emergency package
to banish the "dark prospects" hanging over the country's economy. The rest of
the British press was mainly concerned with its two favorite topics--pedophilia
and the late Princess Diana. In lynch mob mode, the country's best-selling
tabloid, Rupert Murdoch's Sun , invited its millions of readers to hunt
for a convicted pedophile and child killer as he was released from prison after
an eight-year internment. "If any do-gooding liberals protest about prisoners'
rights, we'll throw up," it said in an editorial.
The fate of love letters
written by Diana to her former lover, James Hewitt, and stolen from him by his
Italian mistress, who recently tried to sell them to the London Daily Mirror, which instead
handed them over to her executors, has preoccupied all the London newspapers
for several days. The tabloid Daily
Mail 's Peter McKay said
Monday the letters should be published immediately; the broadsheet Daily
Telegraph said in an
editorial that they should be returned to Hewitt, their lawful owner, but that
he should agree to keep them sealed in a bank for the next 100 years. Amid some
evidence of a press backlash against the princess--top Sun columnist
Richard Littlejohn last week called her "a flawed, privileged young woman who
filled in time between exotic holidays and shopping for clothes by putting in a
bit of work for high-profile charities"--an opinion poll published Monday in
the same newspaper said half of Britain is still in mourning for her.
In Switzerland, the weekly
Sonntagszeitung ( Sunday
Newspaper ) reported a
Swiss-American company called White Star Line Ltd. is to build a safe but
otherwise exact replica of the Titanic to make its maiden voyage from
Britain to New York in the year 2002.
