Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, October/November 2000, pages 50, 83

The European Press View the Middle East

 

Collapse of Middle East Peace Talks “Predictable,” Says Times of London

 

By Lucy Jones

The collapse of the Middle East peace talks was described by the London Times of July 27 as “predictable” and “conclusive.” But, the newspaper said: “The truth concealed by the formal fact of the breakdown is that, perhaps for the first time since the 1993 Oslo accords, the mutual probing of Israeli and Palestinian positions now once again deserves to be described as a ‘process.’”

Poland’s Rzeczpospolita on July 26 took the line that the collapse of the talks does not mean that Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian President Yasser Arafat have met for the last time, as “the new generation of Palestinians and Israelis do not want any more wars or conflict.” Trouw in The Hague said the same day that the outcome of the Camp David summit could be seen as not necessarily disadvantageous to either side. “A deal over Jerusalem at this particular time would have resulted in tumult among Israelis and Palestinians,” the Dutch newspaper observed. “But at least we’ve seen that it’s possible to talk about the city and that gives hope for the future.”

In Germany, Rhein Zeitung said on July 26 that both sides did too little prior to the summit to prepare their peoples for substantial compromises. “If this doesn’t change, then any future summit will end the same way.” Meanwhile, Moscow’s Nesavissimaya Gazeta on the following day saw an emerging role for Russia as a mediator. Washington had been weakened, said the liberal newspaper, which cleared the path for Russia to play a part.

 

Israel’s Choice of President “Bitter Snub” for Peace

By the first week of August, the European press had turned its attention away from the failure of the Camp David summit and toward Barak’s fight for survival at home. London’s Financial Times said the Israeli prime minister has staked his future on a peace deal with the Palestinians. The fact that he survived a post-Camp David motion of confidence in the Israeli parliament is, therefore, welcome. That his victory was due to the absence or abstention of several members, however, shows what a mountain he still has to climb.

The selection as president of Moshe Katsav, rather than Barak’s preferred candidate, three-time Prime Minister Shimon Peres, was widely regarded as a further blow to Barak. Katsav’s election was described as a “bitter snub” by Tageblatt of Luxembourg on Aug. 3. “A depressing commentary on the prospects for peace after the collapse of the Camp David summit,” said Britain’s Independent the same day. The resignation of Foreign Minister David Levy only added to Barak’s misery, said the Aug. 3 Le Temps of Switzerland. (Fourteen of Barak’s 22 ministers had quit in six weeks, and 11 positions remained open.) “[Barak] is a one-man band in an almost nonexistent government. The ship of state looks more like a ghost craft,” said the paper. The Swiss daily Berner Zeitung concluded on Aug. 2 that the adversaries of peace had it their way in the Israeli parliament. There is no other course of action in this critical situation, the paper noted, than to ask the Israelis to go to the polls again to clear the political atmosphere and decide which path to follow.

 

European Press Comments on 10th Anniversary of Gulf War

The 10th anniversary of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait led many European newspapers to reflect on the war. Copenhagen’s Berlingske Tidende said Aug. 2 that one has to concede that the Iraqi dictator still is very much in control. This does not mean that the U.N. failed completely, it continued, as it was also U.N. policy to contain Iraq and prevent the country from ever again becoming an aggressive regional power able to threaten its neighbors. Today Iraq’s military is seriously weakened, and Saddam no longer poses a threat to Kuwait and other Gulf neighbors.

However, The Guardian in London wrote the same day, the invasion of Kuwait by Iraq 10 years ago was a “geostrategic disaster for the West from which it has yet to recover.” The U.S. and British policy of arming Saddam Hussain as a foil to revolutionary Iran lay in tatters. The Arab world was deeply divided. Iran and Iraq, which fought a bitter war in the 1980s, were forced into a temporary alliance of expediency. The bombing of Baghdad deeply divided European opinion, as well. Whatever the historic verdict may be, the paper concluded, the many consequences of the Gulf war, of this spectacular policy fiasco, remain with us today.

 

Libya’s Role in Hostage Crisis

The role of Libya in the release of hostages held by Muslim rebels in the Philippines was widely reported in the European press in August. “Colonel Qaddafi has reinforced his image as a moderate and credible political leader,” wrote Italy’s La Republica on Aug. 28. The same day, however, Ouest-France said it would be difficult to forget that the Libyan regime was behind many acts of violence that had a much worse end than the separatists’ actions in the Philippines. “If Libya managed to negotiate with the rebels, it was only because it has backed all the world’s terrorist movements for decades—irrespective of whether they were Islamist groups or not.” The Aug. 28 Der Bundof Switzerland described Qaddafi’s help as “questionable.” “If it turns out to be the case that Qaddafi has continued his earlier financing of the rebels, only this time under the mantle of humanitarian aid for the West,” the paper said, “then he certainly doesn’t deserve his new glowing reputation.”

 

Chechen Elections Described as “Farce”

The Moscow Times of Aug. 21 described the elections in Chechnya as “an ugly farce.” Noting that 30 servicemen and two civilians died in election-related violence, the paper said: “As with the Kursk fiasco [the submarine disaster], officialdom again casually writes off innocent lives in the name of abstract prides.” During the December 1999 general elections for the Duma, Russia’s federal parliament, voting in Chechnya was postponed because the territory “was not sufficiently under federal control.” Although little has changed since then, 13 pro-Moscow candidates contested the election. That day’s Moscow Times editorial stated: “This is why we are now charging forward with another election: As a way of insisting, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that Chechnya is a normal part of Russia. But it’s not.…No doubt, hundreds more—at minimum—will end up uselessly killed in the name of fake ‘democracy’ before the Kremlin admits otherwise.”

 

Bomb Attack in Moscow Blamed on Chechens

In the wake of a bomb explosion in a Moscow metro station, the Russian President Vladimir Putin warned against prematurely blaming the Chechens. However, many Russians are doing exactly that, commented the European press. “The hellish bombing at Pushkin Square has reminded the entire world that Russia finds itself in a war with Chechnya that it cannot win,” said Germany’s Hannoversche Allgemeine Zeitung on Aug. 10. “What should the strong man do? Destroy Grozny once more?” asked Munich’s Süddeutsche Zeitung Aug. 9. “This path of blind violence has proven to be unsuccessful, and hasn’t offered protection from terror but rather spurred it on. The one sign of hope is Vladimir Putin’s reticence to prematurely blame the Chechen people,” said the paper.

 

Kashmir Cease-fire Brings Hope for Peace

More than 100 people were killed in six different Kashmiri villages at the beginning of August. The Indian government said the attacks were perpetrated by Kashmiri militants. While the violence was apparently intended to jeopardize recent peace initiatives, however, it may instead have improved the chances of a settlement. Shortly after the deaths, Hizbul Mujahedeen, the largest separatist group, declared a cease-fire, and India ceased its military operations against it. London’s Financial Times of Aug. 3 said the violence should not be allowed to derail the peace process, which has its best chance of success in many years, though both sides must make concessions. “India will have to overcome the constitutional constraint that describes Kashmir as an inalienable part of India,” the paper editorialized. “Pakistan will have to find a way around its long-standing policy of insisting on a self-determination referendum in the territory.”

 

Iranian Reform Collapses

Six months after a loose grouping of reformists won Iran’s election, The Economist of Aug. 19 asked whether they had made any headway. President Muhammad Khatami and his followers run the government and are a majority in parliament, the magazine noted. But the power of both institutions is circumscribed, since their decisions can be overruled by the clerical establishment, personified by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s “supreme” leader. The main reformist message was spread by an explosion of free-speaking newspapers. But hard-liners, recognizing their most effective enemy, cracked down on the press ferociously, continued The Economist. “Disillusion with Mr. Khatami and his softly-softly approach is bound to swell,” the Economist predicted. “Iranians have been allowed to vote for what they want, but were then stopped from getting it. People are now much more alert than they were to what is going on…If the clerical system cannot be reformed, their minds will turn to the disintegration of that system. If gentle voices are gagged, less gentle ones will take over,” the magazine concluded.

 

Clinton, Mubarak Meet in Cairo as Peace Deadline Looms

President Bill Clinton held talks with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in Cairo at the end of August in an attempt to break the deadlock in the Middle East peace process. “Time is short,” Clinton had said before going into the meeting at Cairo airport—a reference to the Oslo accords’ Sept. 13 deadline for resolving all outstanding Israeli-Palestinian disputes. Vienna’s Kurier of Aug. 29 took a cynical view of Clinton’s 11th-hour bid to save the talks.

“It is as if the outgoing American president had casually changed the itinerary of his trip around Africa,” the paper observed, calling Clinton’s improvised, albeit carefully planned move the U.S. president’s last great opportunity to render his services to the peace process. Mubarak has a great standing in the Arab world, the Austrian paper continued. If he were to approve a U.S.-propagated solution to the Jerusalem question, Arafat could play along without losing face, the newspaper concluded.

The BBC on Aug. 29 reported that Cairo has made it clear it is not prepared to pressure the Palestinians into concessions on the issue of Jerusalem, the main stumbling block in the talks. “The Egyptians’ stand had caused anger in the U.S.,” a BBC correspondent reported, and had led to accusations that the U.S. was getting little in return for its $2 billion in annual aid to Cairo.

Lucy Jones is a free-lance journalist based in New York.

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