press review
The Anglo-American attack launched against Afghanistan on 7 October, in response to the terrorist outrages of 11 September, has monopolized the attention of the main international dailies ever since the day following the first strikes. “The war against Al-Qaeda has begun”, headlines for example Le Monde, “The attacks on Afghanistan have begun”, echoes La Croix, and ample coverage on the “attack on Afghanistan” is also given by the Herald Tribune. According to James D. Wolfensohn ( Le Monde, 9/10), “the terrible events of 11 September lead many of us to reflect on the means to be adopted to construct a better and safer world (…). the most serious problem, in the long term, for the world community (…) is how to succeed in combating poverty and promoting social inclusion everywhere in the world”. “The counter-attack”: that is the headline of La Croix on 9/10. “The destiny of the world is at stake”, writes Bruno Frappat in an editorial; in his view, “conscience oscillates, after 11 September, between recognition of a need (the ‘response’ to the massacre of 11 September is legitimate) and fear that the reply will only fuel further tragedies to come (…). What degree of brutality is needed before a legitimate ‘response’ becomes abusive?”. With regard to the alleged “superiority” of Western culture, about which Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi recently spoke, Umberto Eco signs an article on the front page of Le Monde (10/10), in which he observes: “To decide whether one culture is better than another, it not enough to describe (in the way that an anthropologist does). We need, rather, to have recourse to a system of values which we believe we cannot renounce. It’s only on these terms that we can say that our culture is, in our view, better”. Today, however – Umberto Eco points out – “there are in the Islamic world fundamentalist and theocratic regimes that do not tolerate Christians and Bin Laden was not merciful with New York”. Western culture, for its part, “has developed the capacity to freely expose its own contradictions”. Eco cites just one example: the debate on globalization, and in particular on “how to make a degree of positive globalization supportable by avoiding the risks and the injustices of perverse globalization (…). We continuously place our parameters in question. The Western world is made in such a way that it accepts that its own citizens may deny any positive value to the parameter of technological development and choose to become Buddhists, or go to live in a community in which the members refuse to use tires, even for horse-drawn wagons”. Reportages and technical analyses predominate in the German dailies and periodicals that comment on the Anglo-American attack on Afghanistan. In its editorial of 9/10, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung poses several questions about in particular the role of Germany; the paper wonders how “reassuring is Chancellor Schroeder’s affirmation that Germany’s contribution to the military action is linked to German combat capabilities and hence limited”. The Frankfurt daily also emphasizes the fact that “all Bush’s European partners have adopted the same tone of declarations, even sharing the style and the words they use”. The Swiss Basler Zeitung warns “of the risks that a military action, however precise, may involve”. It would be difficult, concludes the Swiss daily, to offset “the deleterious consequences that the images of destroyed houses and civilian victims would have in the Islamic world”. The German weekly Spiegel (8/10) examines the aspect of religious fanaticism. “Murder and Terror do not belong to the moral doctrine of the monotheist religions. Despite that, believers repeatedly kill by following the dictates of religious fanaticism, whipped up by fanatical priests”.
