Pissed Off About Off <EM>Piste</EM>
The top international story
is that the Kosovo peace talks ended Tuesday without a signed agreement. Talks
will reconvene in mid-March, and NATO has apparently agreed not to bomb Serbia
in the interim. No agreement was reached because Serbian delegates refused to
accept any plan enforced by NATO troops. Albanian delegates, on the other hand,
pledged at the last minute to sign the proposed peace agreement--they will
finalize their decision after consulting with advisers back home. Most
international newspapers focus on the Serbs' intransigence and call the peace
talks a failure. This is in contrast to, for instance, the New York
Times , which focuses on the Albanian delegates' pledge to sign the
agreement and concludes that the talks were a "limited success."
The Irish Times calls
Slobodan Milosevic "the undisputed winner" of the Rambouillet summit and NATO's
credibility "its first casualty." The paper's main complaint is that Milosevic
faces no serious consequences for his unwillingness to compromise. If anything,
he's learned that NATO lacks the political will to punish him. The paper
predicts that "killing in Kosovo is not likely to stop." Britain's Daily
Telegraph
agrees, saying: "No one has gained from the chaotic 'peace conference.'... No
one except Slobodan Milosevic, who has been given a few more weeks to kill
Kosovo Albanians before there will be any more talk of unleashing Nato on him."
The same editorial also says that Albright's "humiliating climb-down" will hurt
her credibility in future international crises. London's Independent
listlessly concludes that "triumph was not on the agenda at Rambouillet
yesterday, only weariness and relief that the show had been kept on the road
after 17 days of discussions at which the two antagonists did not once
negotiate with each other directly."
Many European papers give prominent coverage to news that
another avalanche roared through a village in the Austrian Alps Tuesday.
Sixteen people were killed, and more than 20 are missing. Recent avalanches in
France, Austria, Italy, and Switzerland have killed dozens of people. An
estimated 20,000 tourists are currently stranded in snowed-in resort towns
throughout the Alps.
The Times of London reports
that three Britons are being tried in a French court for recklessly endangering
rescuers' lives by going "off piste " (off the marked trail) at a ski
resort near Albertville. The lost Londoners contacted the authorities on a cell
phone and were brought to safety without injuries to skiers or rescuers. The
trial is attracting attention in English papers because some of the Alpine
avalanches this winter have been attributed to irresponsible off piste
skiers. (Astonishingly, the brief Times story finds room to list each
defendant's income, as in "Mr Fairley, a father of two, earns about £46,000 a
year as European sales manager for a medical equipment firm.")
A Ugandan paper, the New Vision, has
scored the first interview with deposed dictator Idi Amin in over a decade
("An Audience
With Big Daddy Idi," reprinted in South Africa's Daily Mail & Guardian ). The profile
sketches "Big Daddy" as a playful old duffer--e.g., "to punish the Ugandan
media for running false stories that he eats dozens of oranges a day, [Amin]
refuses to have his picture taken." The interviewer notably refrains from
asking any hard questions about, say, the 200,000 Ugandans thought to have died
under Amin's rule. Perhaps this is because before the interview Amin told the
reporter that "his people" in Uganda "say they know you, the place you stay and
when you get home." Amin lives in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, on a Saudi pension; he
has five satellite dishes, drives a white Cadillac, and enjoys fishing in the
Red Sea.
