The deterioration of the Iraqi crisis, and the intensification of clashes in the Middle East, continue to monopolise the attention of the main international dailies. “Torture and acts of barbarity. Man humiliated”, is the headline, for instance, in the French Catholic daily La Croix of 13/5, which emphasises that “the unleashing of the horrors in Iraq and in the Gaza Strip has provoked a wave of international indignation”: hence the paper’s decision to conduct a wide-ranging survey on the “violence” and on the “use of images in the current conflicts”, accompanied with reflections, interviews and eye-witness reports from the conflicts that are staining the world with blood. “Atrocity comments Bruno Frappat in his editorial presenting the survey is timeless, and Europe has been particularly creative in this field. What is new is the immediate globalization of this criminality. But what is also new (…) is that we are witnessing a universal arousing of conscience: a globalization that rejects acts of barbarity. For, in man, what rejects hatred is stronger than barbarity. The horror experienced surpasses the horrors themselves”. “The adventures of Bush the Enlightened”: is the provocative title of an article signed by Carlos Fuentes on the front page of Le Monde (20/5), in which the writer ironically writes: “Since God does not have the means to respond through words to the absurdities of Bush, he does so through actions. A year after having declared the end of military operations in Iraq ‘mission accomplished’ -, Bush is having to tackle the harsh reality of the war he uselessly unleashed on his own initiative. Chaos reigns in Iraq. The Bush government was not prepared for the war after the war: the violent peace in an occupied and rebellious country“. The “alliance” between America and Europe is the subject of an editorial in the Herald Tribune (19/5), in which it is pointed out that “in the years to come the USA will have to tackle international crises in a collaborative manner, whether it’s a case of terrorism, organised crime, drug trafficking or the diseases that are spreading rapidly and globally (…). No American President ought to act, thinking he can do something without his ally Europe”. According to Luigi Geninazzi ( Avvenire, 20/5), “one lesson emerges from the scandal of Abu Ghraib: the battle for a sovereign, free and democratic Iraq can be won not with arms, still less with the weapons of torture and humiliation, but only with a sincere culture of life and respect for human dignity (…). There will be no democratic reconstruction, without the concrete witness of the ideals and moral values of what we continue to call and defend as Western civilization”. The mistreatment of Iraqi detainees is not an “incident” but an accurate reflection of the new climate created after 11 September. In the war against terrorism the old rules no longer apply. Or so at least the American journalist Seymour M. Hersh would seem to think. Writing in the weekly New Yorker (17/5), he reconstructs the whole affair of the regime that operated in the Abu Ghraib prison in which the tortures took place. “The innumerable declarations of apologies and explanations presented last week are not enough to disguise one fact: after the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, President Bush and his main aides felt themselves involved in a war against terrorism in which the old rules no longer apply… Not long after 11 September, with the launch of the war against terrorism, Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense, repeatedly expressed in public his contempt for the Geneva Conventions. According to what the Secretary declared at the start of 2002, the criticisms expressed about the treatment of prisoners represented only ‘isolated pockets of international hyperventilation’. The attempt to establish what really took place at Abu Ghraib has given rise to a series of interlinked investigations, some of them set up in a hurry; they comprise investigations on twenty-five suspicious deaths”. That the whole situation has got out of hand and beyond the control of the USA is clear. The words of Rumsfeld are indicative: “I had not realised how important the matter was”.———————————————————————————————————– Sir Europa (English) N.ro assoluto : 1298 N.ro relativo : 38 Data pubblicazione : 22/05/04
