“Al Qaeda guilty of the explosions in the Saudi capital”. that’s the banner headline dedicated by the Herald Tribune ( 14/5) to the kamikaze attack in a residential quarter of Ryad which caused scores of victims and injured of various nationalities, including many Americans, on the night between the 12 and 13 May. “The terrorists come back with a vengeance”, writes Brian Knowlton, according to whom the first anti-American attack after the war in Iraq “destroyed any sensation that groups like Al Qaeda have been incapacitated from organizing devastating attacks and underlined their capacity to recover even after a series of victorious signals in the global war on terrorism”. The post-Iraq situation is also analysed by Le Monde, which in its edition of 13/5 contains a long interview with French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin. The UN Security Council, argues de Villepin, “must not shrug off its responsibilities or surrender its prerogatives” in the reconstruction of Iraq after the toppling of Saddam Hussein. In the post-war situation in Iraq, points out the French foreign minister, “two opposing feelings are being expressed: the hope that springs from the fall of the regime of Saddam Hussein, but also the great anxiety that springs, as in any war, from its collateral effects of suffering, tragedy and injustice. There are two or three views of the war: that of the Americans, centred on their military commitment; that of the Europeans; and, lastly, that of the Arab-Moslem world, where the violence of the images has fuelled frustrations”. The draft American, Spanish and British sponsored UN Resolution represents, in Villepin’s view, “a point of departure for building peace”, but every effort will then have to be made to “re-establish security and ensure the political and economic reconstruction” of Iraq; and there’s “still a long way to go” to achieve that . “Iraq from women’s point of view”: that’s the title of the dossier dedicated to the situation of women in post-war Iraq in La Croix ( 10-11/5). “Iraq is not the Afghanistan of the taleban”, writes Agnès Rotivel in her introduction to the dossier: “Iraqi women have fortunately not suffered the same as their Afghan counterparts. But the secularism of Iraq, so often invoked by people in the West as a sign of modernity to justify support for the regime of Saddam Hussein, does not stand up to examination”. The “re-found freedom”, concludes the author of the article after having listed the main reasons for the retrogression of the women’s question in Iraq, may perhaps “help Iraqi women to reconstruct a society that may finally guarantee them the equality, liberty, peace and prosperity to which they aspire”. In a front-page editorial on the terrorist attack in Ryad, entitled “War between cultures and terrorism” in the Faz of 14/05, Wolfgang Günther Lerch argues that “ the appearance of a transnational terrorism in the name of Islam over the last twenty years, which has had practically the whole world as its theatre and whose cells are scattered all the way between the Maghreb and Mindanao, makes it clear that all is not well in relations between East and West, that there exists a contrast between them that can only be imperfectly expressed by the word ‘incomprehension'”. “ The [German] Constitution getting rusty – the basic law blocks reforms” is the cover headline of the weekly Spiegel of 12/05 which begins a new series on the issue. “ The threat of consensus“, an article signed by Thomas Darnstädt and Hans Michael Kloth, says “ the basic law has long represented a stroke of good luck for our history, but after 54 years it is losing its shine. The experts maintain that this regulatory framework is responsible for blocking urgently needed political and social reforms“. “Let us not allow the economy to enslave society”, writes Ramòn Jàuregui in El Paìs of 12/5, in a reflection on the problems and role of civil society. “It was society that mobilized itself against the war, demonstrating that there exists a public opinion capable of conditioning the means of communication, influencing governments and re-establishing the foundations of our democratic convictions and our faith in a revitalization of the mechanisms of participation offered by the information society. It’s a society that has been expressing itself for years, at Seattle or at Porto Alegre, in university forums or in thousands of NGOs, saying that an alternative world is possible…The parameters of the economic debate cannot be extraneous to the social consequences because economic success must be a means to find solutions to the social organizations and their problems. The economy must be at the service of society and not vice versa”.———————————————————————————————————– Sir Europa (English) N.ro assoluto : 1205 N.ro relativo : 35 Data pubblicazione : 16/05/2003
