Excerpts of editorials from newspapers around the world:
Turkish Daily News
Greek Cypriot hubris
ANKARA, Turkey — Did the Greek Cypriots realize what they were getting into when they rejected the [Kofi] Annan plan and shut the doors to a settlement on Cyprus? …
Now the Greek Cypriots see that the advantage of getting into the [European Union] and leaving the Turkish Cypriots in the cold is backfiring. …
The Greek Cypriots will have to get used to being pushed around in the EU as second-class people. Look at the way their foreign minister was treated at the foreign ministers’ meeting in Luxembourg and you can see what the future has in store for them. It is clear the EU ministers wanted the world to know what was discussed at their closed-door meeting Monday and how they verbally battered their Greek-Cypriot colleague. So they leaked the minutes of their lunch to Reuters and showed how they will treat the Greek Cypriots from now on. …
La Stampa
Threatening to kill hostages
TURIN, Italy — The confirmation couldn’t have been any clearer: The terrorists holding our countrymen hostage in Iraq demonstrate that they understand very well the mechanisms of Italian politics, and how to exploit them with cruel cynicism.
The kidnappers aim to achieve a purely political goal. Neither money nor the releases of detainees will persuade them to free [the hostages]. First they tried to separate the Italian government from the United States, now they want to separate it from its citizens.
In fact, the blackmail extends to all Italian citizens, attempting to strike the most important value of our democracy, the freedom of thought and the freedom to express that thought.
The hope is that the “political leadership” of the group that directs the kidnapping is able to understand how the assassination of the three Italians would constitute more than just infamy on the human level, it would lead to the most dramatic defeat of their cause.
Periodico Catalunya
Spain’s pullout from Iraq
BARCELONA — When [Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez] Zapatero announced the fulfillment of his campaign pledge regarding the Spanish troops in Iraq, the U.S. responded scornfully by denying any military impact on the withdrawal of the one percent of the soldiers deployed, which the withdrawal of the Plus Ultra really entails.
Certainly, the bellicose weight in Iraq, adding the ones from Honduras and Dominican Republic, which have also announced their withdrawal, has not been significant. But the problem that the Spanish withdrawal raises is not so much military as political.
For [President] Bush, the problem is not our withdrawal but the evidence that the people in Iraq reject their troops.
The Guardian
Blair’s EU referendum call
LONDON — It is nearly a week since [British Prime Minister] Tony Blair called for battle to be joined on the European constitution. These are early days, but there is not much sign of anything of that kind happening yet. …
It is time to refocus the argument where it ought to be, not on process, but on the issue that really matters: Britain’s place in Europe. It is high time there was some optimism about Europe, but there could hardly be a better time to rekindle it. At the end of this very week, a new form of European Union will come into existence. Ten new member states, most of them from the former communist eastern part of our continent, will join together with the 15 nations of western Europe. …
As Professor Vernon Bogdanor pointed out in the Observer yesterday, the new EU can be seen as marking the fulfillment of the war aims of 1939: a secure and independent central Europe living at peace alongside a liberal Germany. By any standards, that makes this a great moment. The question that faces us in the referendum is whether we wish to be part of that European settlement, a guarantor of it, and one of the shapers of the way it develops, or whether … we prefer to stand aside from it.
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