The German media comment on the decision of the Merkel government to send reconnaissance planes to Afghanistan. Arnd Festerling writes in the Frankfurter Rundschau (8/2) as follows: “ There’s a war going on in Afghanistan…. In this war the German armed forces have so far participated only in a very limited way…. With the sending of Tornados that participation becomes a little more active… not with combat aircraft, but with reconnaissance planes, to be carried out by mandate only for the ISAF peacekeeping forces in countering the Taleban and not for the units of Enduring Freedom that are fighting in the south, especially the Americans… But in Afghanistan, must the pilots hold their tongues before the troops of Enduring Freedom, even if they should discover planned ambushes against American or British forces? Should they lead those troops to their destruction? Or should they not intervene by opening fire, if the life of their allies on the ground were to be threatened?”[…] “We are going into war. In a passive way, how is it possible to do so with renaissance planes? A little bit of luck will be needed if our presence is not to become active“. An editorial in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung comments: “ The Tornados will have the mission of discovering the enemy so as to be able to combat him. The terrorist with the ground-to-air rocket launcher on his shoulder will not be able to understand the subtle difference between good reconnaissance planes and bad bombers called by the reconnaissance forces […] It is even grotesque to imagine that the results of the reconnaissance can be concealed from the allied troops that are directly combating the terrorists due to the need to respect the limits of the mandate. In the long run, these constraints may compromise the basis of any kind of alliance. In Afghanistan it’s not just a case of keeping under control a danger that is already threatening Germany. The destiny of NATO will also be decided in the Hindukush“. “The concealing of the memory of martyrdom by the strategy of persecutions”, says Dariusz Karlowicz in an interview published in the Polish Catholic weekly GOSC NIEDZIELNY (4/2007), replying to the question why reports about contemporary martyrs are being silenced. “The century that was a hecatomb for Christians has ended. Both the totalitarian systems that devastated Europe had an attitude hostile to Christianity. Destroying the Church was one of the most important objectives of Communism. One might have imagined that the enormity of the crimes committed [under Communism] would have led to the end of the age of persecutions. But that has not happened. And, what is even more strange, the persecutions of today are being accompanied by a stupefying indifference on the part of the media in Europe. This is an important proof of how selective and anti-Christian the sensibility of the Europeans can be”, comments Karlowicz. And, in reply to the question why so little is said about the persecutions of Christians perpetrated in our own time, he replies: “It ought to be recalled that diminishing and diverting attention from the witness of such persecutions is an undoubted priority for the diabolic policy of information” intent on silencing such witnesses and hiding the reality of persecution from us . The front page of the British daily THE GUARDIAN (06/02) is dedicated to the trauma caused by the war on Iraqi children. “Growing up in a war zone takes its toll as young play games of murder and mayhem – observes Michael Howard , commenting on the children in Baghdad who play by engaging in a “murderous game of make-believe”, aping the violence they see all around them. A three-month inquiry conducted by the paper among parents, teachers and doctors has underlined “ the distress signals sent out by the young people in their care— muteness, panic attacks and violence towards other children, sometimes even to their own parents“. “the mental and emotional turmoil experienced by Iraq’s young is going largely unmonitored and untreated“, comments Howard . According to the API (Association of Iraqi Psychologists), “the violence has affected millions of children”. There is therefore an urgent need, says Howard, for “ the international community to help establish child psychology units and mental health programmes” otherwise there is a serious risk that children “will internalise the violence and then reproduce it later”. The trial of the weekly “Charlie Hebdo” opened in Paris on 7 February; the magazine is being prosecuted for the publication in February 2006 of the caricatures of Mahomet. “It’s too simple to hide behind the sole right to freedom of expression – says Michel Kubler in an editorial in the French Catholic daily LA CROIX (07/02) -. That right must be considered a foundation of democracy… but account needs to be taken, at the same time, of another right: freedom of opinion, including that in the field of religion, cannot be divorced from freedom of expression”. In Kubler’s view the difficulties begin “when these two liberties conflict, as happened, violently, in the case of the caricatures of Mahomet…the response to this conflict between two rights does not consist in the disqualification of the one to the benefit of the other, but in the identification of a lesser evil, for the sake of which the one right will be asked to renounce, for a time, its prerogatives”.
