Excerpts of editorials from newspapers around the world:
Hindustan Times
Sino-Indian relations shift
DELHI — There’s a subtle but sure shift taking place in Sino-Indian relations: from political grandstanding to a sort of quiet pragmatism. Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee’s six-day sojourn in China last year was clear indication of this. And now the visiting Chinese Defense Minister Cao Gangchuan thinks aloud about China and India becoming “eternal good neighbors, good partners and good friends.” And establishing defense ties. …
China’s wish for a multipolar world where it occupies prime position in a unipolar Asia was never a best-kept secret. So the post-9/11 U.S. war on terrorism must have made Beijing uneasy. Beijing must also be concerned by the growing Indo-U.S. military partnership.
China must be banking on military cooperation with India to be a counterweight in such an eventuality. And, Gen. Cao may add, even if there’s little political progress made, trade relations that include defense establishments never hurt anyone.
Egyptian Gazette
Postponed Arab summit
CAIRO — Surprised at a unilateral Tunisian decision to scrap an Arab summit hours before its scheduled opening, Egypt, being the country of the Arab League’s headquarters, has stepped in to offer to host the deferred gathering. The Egyptian offer has drawn warm welcome from an Arab world disappointed at the inability to convene a prescheduled summit under such crucial circumstances.
Contacts are under way between Cairo and other Arab capitals to set the scene for this urgent conference, which will be aimed, among other things, at undoing the damage wrought by the sudden decision to postpone the Tunisian gathering indefinitely. The Palestinian-Israeli dispute, Iraq and a controversial U.S. plan for reforms in the Arab world topped the agenda of the aborted Tunisian event.
The Palestinian problem was moved to the top of the agenda after Israel’s cold-blooded slaying of Sheik Ahmed Yassin, the spiritual leader of the resistance movement Hamas. The killing of the wheel-chair-bound Sheik Yassin in an air strike in Gaza last week fired up sentiment across the Arab nation.
East African
The challenges for Rwanda
NAIROBI, Kenya — Rwanda next week commemorates 10 years since the 1994 genocide in which more than 800,000 people were killed in the space of 100 days. The government will spend $7 million on the weeklong festivities that will see several heads of state and government converge at Kigali from April 7. …
In the past 10 years, the country has made giant strides toward economic revival, which even critics of President Paul Kagame’s government cannot ignore. …
However, we urge the government in Kigali to use the celebrations to reflect on the challenges ahead. Among these are the high level of poverty, which currently stands at 60 percent; the incidence of HIV/AIDS, which is estimated at more than 13 percent; unemployment; and the issue of returning refugees from neighboring countries like Tanzania and Uganda.
Daily Telegraph
Ireland’s smoking ban
LONDON — Most of the articles written about the ban on smoking in the workplace, introduced in Ireland [March 28], have been lighthearted in tone. They have focused on the sheer incongruity of imposing such a ban in the homeland of James Joyce and Flann O’Brien, where the smoke-filled bar is so much a part of the national culture.
Britons would be foolish, however, to laugh too heartily about the ban. What has happened in Ireland is a very serious assault on the civil liberties of a substantial minority of the population. Many hundreds of thousands of smokers — a quarter of the adult population, according to the Irish government’s own figures — are being denied one of the great pleasures of their lives by nannying politicians who have paid not the slightest heed to their wishes.
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