press review" "
The international press dedicates a lot of space to Bush’s “mission” in the Middle East with the two meetings at Sharm-el-Sheikh and Aqaba to verify the first steps of the “road map”. “Fresh hope in the Middle East”, is the headline of the Herald Tribune (5/6), according to which “President George W. Bush’s meetings produced some of the most encouraging agreements ever seen in that troubled part of the world. … After two and a half years of battle that seemed to have opened an insurmountable abyss between Israelis and Palestinians, the true novelty of these meetings, and of the sudden personal involvement of President Bush, is the gratifying sign that the possibility of peace has not been entirely stifled”. A summit meeting “to build peace”; that is how Patrick Jarreau, writing in Le Monde on 5/6, defines Bush’s encounter with the Israeli and Palestinian premiers. For the French daily, the “road map” is seen by Middle East leaders as “welcome”, but “with some diffidence. In the eyes of Arab leaders, what counts is the creation of a Palestinian State, and the conditions imposed by the current plan must not serve to distance that objective”. “Does the new Palestinian government have the means to impose itself against Hamas?”. Gilles Paris raises this question in the same edition of Le Monde. He notes how “previous attempts to dismantle ‘wildcat’ colonies resulted in failure”. La Croix (4/6) also gives consideration to Bush’s “plan” for the Middle East with an article in which Agnés Rotivel highlights the fact that “the greatest difficulty for Bush is that of relaunching the negotiations and obtaining from the two belligerent parties progress worthy of note without involving himself in the question ‘minute by minute’, as his predecessor Bill Clinton did”. “The Middle East en route to peace”, is the opening headline of Avvenire of 5/6. The Italian Catholic daily notes how a “there has emerged a substantial adherence to the American plan for peaceful coexistence between the two peoples and between other countries in the area”, even if “the fundamentalist movements refuse the slightest hypothesis of agreement” and the colonists “come out onto the streets”. A different theme is covered by the English Catholic weekly, The Catholic Herald (30/5) which dedicates its comments to Zimbabwe on the occasion of the visit to England of the archbishop of Bulawayo, Msgr. Pius Ncube: “The bishops of Zimbabwe have pointed the finger at the corruption and abuses committed by the Mugabe government. When will our bishops make their voice heard?” A brief article in the Spiegel of 2/6, “a click rather than a surgical mask”, mentions the Internet boom in China that coincided with the SARS epidemic. “SARS has created an Internet boom”, says the article . “In the month of April when the terrors of an epidemic peaked, the number of private Internet users in Hong-Kong, the area most affected by the disease, rose by 13%. The Chinese portal sohu.com received a question about SARS every three minutes but”, it continues “the highest percentages were recorded by on-line sales outlets and banks; in other words, all the business that could be done on-line from the safety of one’s own room”. In the same publication from 4/06, “summit of symbols” is the title of an editorial article from the pen of Klaus-Dieter Frankenberger on the subject of the Evian meeting. “The group photograph of the first day of the summit had a strong symbolic value” in as much as it “placed close together not only the rich and powerful of this world, but also the less rich and the semi-powerful, even the poor”, in other words, “the colourful and multifarious world of opposites”. Nonetheless, the “fascination of colour is misleading: when everybody is moving towards intercultural dialogue, the borderline with indifference is not far away”. The Spanish daily El País regularly publishes the views of intellectuals from different countries concerning the role that Europe must adopt in the current world situation. The 4/6 edition contains a text written by the philosophers Jurgen Habermas (German) and Jacques Derrida (French). Having invited the old continent to “use its weight in order to counterbalance the unilateral hegemony of the United States”, the two thinkers, expressing their hope in a different procedure for administering the powers of State, affirm that “Europe emerges today as a system of government that has surpassed the national sovereign State”. They also highlight international law and the value of such institutions as the UN.
