War and Peace
Russian President Boris Yeltsin flew to Istanbul Wednesday to meet with Bill
Clinton at the European security summit with strong backing from his country's
press for the war in Chechnya. "Yeltsin must not listen to moralising in
Istanbul," warned a front-page editorial Tuesday in Novye Izvestia,
which ran above a color photograph of bodies of alleged victims of a NATO
bombing in Kosovo seven months ago. But to the Kremlin's embarrassment, the
tabloid Versia , on the same day, became the first Russian paper to print
a 1995 Swiss bank statement which appears to show that Yeltsin has a joint
account in Lugano with one of his key aides, Pavel Borodin. The Kremlin has
denied that the president has any foreign accounts or property.
New
hopes for a peace settlement in Northern Ireland dominated the British press
Wednesday. "Peace within their grasp" proclaimed the Guardian 's front-page
headline after David Trimble and Gerry Adams, the Unionist and republican
leaders, issued separate statements committing themselves to pursuing their
conflicting objectives by "exclusively peaceful and democratic" means. The
Guardian said the statements transformed the political landscape and
brought age-old enemies to the very brink of historic compromise.
But
the Times
and the Daily Telegraph both underscored the political risks that Trimble,
a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, is running by backing off from his party's
traditional "no guns, no government" stand--a policy of refusing to share power
with Adams' Sinn Fein Party in a devolved Northern Ireland parliament before
the Irish Republican Army hands over any of its weapons. The Times said
hard-line members of the Ulster Unionist Party are already plotting to oust
Trimble, and the Daily Telegraph , which is fiercely supportive of the
continuing union of Northern Ireland with Britain, came close to accusing him
of betrayal. In an editorial Wednesday, it called his new conciliatory stand an
"extraordinary gamble" and demanded he come clean about what, if anything, the
IRA is secretly offering to cause him "to take this leap in the dark."
Much
of the press around the world covered the calling in of the FBI to investigate
the crash of EgyptAir Flight 990 off the coast of Massachusetts in which 217
people died. "Was there a kamikaze in the cockpit?" asked Libération of Paris in a
front-page banner headline. In Turin, La Stampa fronted what it claimed to be the cause of
the collapse of an apartment building in the southern Italian city of Foggia
which killed 62 people. The building, the paper said, had been erected on top
of an artesian well--"that is, on water." Most people in the neighborhood knew
of the well, it said. "Only the city engineers didn't know about it and have
continued to deny its existence even after the collapse."
The
French papers also led with the decision by the European Commission in Brussels
to take legal action against France for refusing to lift its ban on British
beef. But the British press highlighted a statement by the European Union's
food safety commissioner that a Franco-British agreement to end the Mad Cow war
was only "a hair's breadth" away. In a front-page editorial, Le Figaro said the affair
could be seen as just an episode in "the eternal Anglo-French conflict." An
editorial in the Independent of London said its legacy would be "that extra
little suspicion of our European partners will be unfairly added to the great
heap of Europhobia patiently built up by the Little Englanders in the press and
in politics."
The
Israeli daily Ha'aretz claimed Wednesday that Israel and the United States
now agree that Iran is the principal sponsor of terrorism in the Middle East.
Writing on the eve of a speech on terrorism by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud
Barak at the Istanbul summit, commentator Aluf Benn called this an Israeli
"diplomatic achievement." He said the United States now says that its recent
attempts at dialogue with Iran have "achieved nothing," and it has promised
Israel that it will not defrost its relations with a country that is using
terror to try to undermine the Middle East peace process. The Jerusalem Post reported
"conspicuous silence" by the Israeli defense establishment in response to a
flat denial by China that it is buying an airborne radar system from Israel--a
deal which the United States has been trying to stop. Yitzhak Shichor, a Hebrew
University expert on Israel-China relations, told the paper that the Chinese
statement was probably a result of pressure from the Clinton administration.
"It's a typical reaction," he said. "In the 1980s we had deep ties with China,
and we also had meetings with diplomats and everybody knew about it, but they
flatly denied it. That's the way it is with them."
The
South China Morning
Post of Hong Kong warned Wednesday that China is already trying to
erect "roadblocks" to slow the influx of goods, services, and ideas after it
joins the World Trade Organization. "Opposition to WTO accession remains strong
among State Council ministries and most regional administrations," wrote Willy
Wo-Lap Lam in a comment on this week's Sino-U.S. trade agreement. He added that
"basic elements in the [Communist] party orthodoxy--such as tight party and
government control of major enterprises, enshrined by the Central Committee
plenum in September--are unlikely to change in the foreseeable future." In an
editorial, the SCMP expressed optimism about the U.S. Congress ratifying
the trade agreement. "Over time, U.S. politics gravitate towards the middle,
and extreme views seldom win," it said. "And a careful consideration of the
benefits of making China a member--plus the costs of not doing so--will
convince most Americans their best interests lie in opening wide the WTO door."
Le Monde of Paris
welcomed the trade agreement in an editorial Wednesday but lamented the fact
that "Europe, the world's first commercial power," had allowed the United
States to do its own private deal with China. "More aggressive economic
diplomacy would have allowed the European Union to defend its interests
better," it said.
In a diary in the current
issue of the British weekly the Spectator , actress Joan Collins
describes her first meeting with President Bill Clinton a couple of weeks ago
in the Oval Office. "He grasped my hands firmly," she writes. "He has beautiful
and expressive hands, by the way, and enormous feet ... I must admit I was
spellbound. The man has palpable sex appeal, and is much taller and slimmer
than I'd expected. He also has wonderful breath, but not from a surfeit of
mints or mouthwash."
