Basqueing in That Kosovo Attitude?
In
Spain, the Basque separatist group ETA called off its 14-month cease-fire last
Friday, prompting public outrage. The liberal El País reported that the country's conservative president, José María
Aznar, told Congress that Basque separatist political leaders "are closer to
the Europe of Kosovo, which represents exclusion and ethnic cleansing, than the
Europe of the euro, which represents integration and pluralism." The mainstream
Basque Nationalist Party (PNV) recently formed a coalition with extreme
separatist parties, prompting Aznar to compare the party's attitude with that
of the British and French prime ministers in 1938, who tried, unsuccessfully,
to stop Hitler with [territorial] concessions to avoid World War II."
An
editorial in the right-wing ABC supported the invocation of Kosovo, damning the
nationalists' focus on "ethnicity, linguistic imposition, collusion with ETA
terrorism, dishonest rewriting of history, and social exclusion." In Catalonia,
another Spanish region with separatist ambitions, La Vanguardia of Barcelona
decried the president's attack on the PNV, using the Basque term "Euskadi" for
the region rather than the Spanish equivalent.
El
Correo , a daily from the Basque city of Bilbao, condemned Aznar's pronouncements, warning that the growing
chasm between Basque public opinion and that of the rest of the country could
generate "a verbal escalation whose final objective couldn't be other than to
deepen the abyss" between people "likely to take Basque nationalism to the
ballot box and those who would like to prevent a sovereignty debate."
Surprisingly, none of the editorials connected the president's attack on PNV
with his announcement the same day that a general election will be held in
March 2000.
A
leader
in the Financial Times
responded to the findings of an investigative commission that linked 54,000
Swiss bank accounts to victims of Nazi persecution and concluded that some
financial institutions made "deliberately misleading statements" to Jews who
sought family assets lost in World War II. The paper said, "Switzerland must
come to terms with this uncomfortable past. It was not alone among neutral
countries in profiting from the war, and Nazi persecutions. There is clearly
resentment amongst Swiss voters at their country being singled out for special
attention by Jewish groups. That was one factor in the recent electoral success
of the right-wing Swiss People's Party. … As far as humanly possible, it must
be righted."
A
commentary in the South China Morning Post of Hong Kong reveals that
China's leaders are obsessed with "the legacy thing." The president is putting
the finishing touches on the multi-volume Selected Works of Jiang Zemin ,
which will "lay the theoretical foundation for Mr Jiang's status as the equal
of Mao and Deng." But Jiang's track record will be "marred by serious flaws,"
specifically his refusal to "heal the wounds" of the Tiananmen Square massacre
of 1989 and his "singularly inept" handling of the Falun Gong sect. The piece
says that Prime Minister Zhu Rongji's "quest for a place in the
Communist-Chinese pantheon is informed with a poignant urgency. At 71, the
premier is a man in a hurry." Zhu, too, is judged harshly, since most of his
social reform pledges have remained unfulfilled, but the economy is on an
upswing, and the "WTO breakthrough" is a boost to his hopes. Zhu has said that
when he leaves office he will write a study "on how to make a go of a
'Chinese-style socialist market economy.' " The piece concludes that Zhu "will
have more than kept faith with his Communist-Chinese forebears if he can leave
for posterity tips for the near-impossible task of reconciling market reforms
with a one-party dictatorship."
The silent Mars Polar
Lander led to a rather arch leader in the Times of London Tuesday.
Enumerating the long list of failed Mars missions--and a few "spectacular
successes"--the Times concluded, "It now seems that not everything was
fully tested before the mission started. But this is surely what comes of
cutting costs. … The chances of failure are, alas, much greater, and two in a
row look like carelessness." By contrast, an editorial in the Age of Melbourne,
Australia, said that the likelihood of disappointment with such
ambitious efforts "is not sufficient reason not to take the risk. NASA's
scientists have a better understanding of what they are doing in exploring Mars
than … Columbus had when he sailed westwards to find the East Indies and
stumbled on to the Americas. There were contemporaries of Columbus who thought
his voyages a waste of money. But, despite all the subsequent suffering of
indigenous peoples, who now wishes he had not made them?"
