The German press is once again devoting its attention to other issues of international politics apart from its continuing reportage of developments in the war in Afghanistan. One very prominent issue that receives widespread coverage is Rugova’s victory in the elections in Kossovo, a country that, according to an editorial in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of 19/11/2001 entitled “Elections in the protectorate”, “had at first disappeared from view in the shadow first of Macedonia, and then of Afghanistan. Now continues the Frankfurt daily the parliamentary elections have refocused the spotlight of the international media on the whole area”. Another influential daily that devoted attention to the Balkan question is the French Le Monde which in its editorial of 20/11/2001 recalls that “two and half years after the end of the war that halted the repression of the Milosevic regime, on Saturday 17 November, Kossovo was endowed with democratic institutions. It elected a parliament that will in turn elect a president. The Serbs who had boycotted the municipal elections in October 2000 voted in the parliamentary elections and will have twenty or so representatives in the assembly”. At this point, continues the editorial, the international community “must interrogate itself on the future of Kossovo. The question of independence remains taboo, for fundamental reasons: the destabilizing consequences of a new alteration of the frontiers in the Balkans, and for tactical reasons: Russia would oppose her veto to the separation between Kossovo and Serbia”. “ The most plausible solution consists in playing a waiting game to give the people of Kossovo a chance to gain practice in democracy”. Even though, concludes the French daily, “the question of independence will not vanish as if by magic”. Remaining in the field of foreign policy, the Herald Tribune of 21/11/2001 devotes a comment under the title “A Mideast initiative” to the US initiatives to resume the dialogue in the Middle East, considered a strategic zone also for the solution to the conflict in Afghanistan. The American involvement is one that “ Bush initially tried to minimize” but which following the terrorist attacks of 11 September “he has had to review”. Moving from issues to foreign policy to those of culture, writing in the Spiegel of 19/11/2001, Ulrich Schäfer, in his article “ Theft of cultures“, draws attention to the anti-patent march that was held in India in recent days and that “ attracted over 100,000 demonstrators” led by the charismatic Vandana Shiva, a 49 year old Indian woman activist, and graduate in physics, “ who has assumed personal responsibility for the struggle against the multinationals which, she claims, intend to rob the peoples of their cultures“. The Spiegel forecasts that Shiva’s battle “ will continue starting out from the defence of a variety of rice, the ‘Basmati’, on which a patent of the American firm RiceTec is currently pending” . The same magazine, the Spiegel, also reports a particular case of cultural and religious exchange. “ Spiritual green-card” is the title of the article by Konstantin Korosides on the lack of priests in Germany and on the utilization of priests from other countries, the majority Poles and Indians. Those who derive advantage from this exchange are, he says, not only “ the Germans, short of personnel“, but also the immigrants’ Churches of origin; the situation, apparently, does not promise imminent improvements, though the fact that there are “ some surplus candidates to the priesthood” was hailed by Rainer Birkenmaier, of the Centre for the Apostolate of Vocations in Freiburg, as a positive sign: “The first shoots of green gladden the heart he writes , even though account must be taken of the fact that the winter is not yet over.” “The eloquence of Assisi” is the title of the comment that the French Catholic daily La Croix of 19/11/01 dedicates to the Pope’s initiative of inviting the various religions to pray together at Assisi on 24 January next year: “This announcement is extraordinary, at a time when the forces in the field in Afghanistan seem to be turning to the disadvantage of the Taleban and Bin Laden”. “By choosing the symbol of Assisi the Pope is giving a high profile to the response of believers” and trying to “to avert the equation between violence and religion”.
