European press review

With no single topic dominating the news, today's review is a seasonal bag of assorted journalistic nuts, ranging from yet another prediction of Slobodan Milosevic's political demise, to the problems of migration, with brief stop-overs in troubled Algeria and allegedly "medieval" Turkey along the way.

Please note that, due to seasonal circumstances beyond our control, there will be no European Press Review in the period from 25 to 29 December. Normal service will be resumed with redoubled vigour on 1 January 2001, the first day of the real Third Millennium.

Serbia: If I had a hammer...

The Hungarian liberal daily Magyar Hirlap believes that Saturday's elections in Serbia will mean the end of ousted leader Slobodan Milosevic's hopes.

"The September presidential election put the lid on Milosevic's coffin," the paper says. "Tomorrow's polls will bang in the nails."

However, "they will also finish off the Democratic Opposition of Serbia, swiftly and surely", it adds. Not just due to its leaders' mutual dislike and permanent bickering, it points out, but because, as the paper puts it, "Serbia's situation is one notch the other side of catastrophic, and whatever the new leaders do, it will hurt".

"Still," the paper concludes with an almost audible sigh, "the Milosevic regime is over and there will be no more troubles, just the torments of everyday life."

Israel: By the Left, quick march?

The Swiss Le Temps is unsurprised by Shimon Peres's "short-lived candidacy" for the coming Israeli elections, viewing it as a sign of "the state of disarray in the peace camp".

"A few weeks ago, the peace camp could be said to be deep in the mire, silent on the Palestinian Intifada, with no leader, no voice, no life", the paper says. "Now, here it is suddenly perked up, at least in appearance".

But "appearance" is the operative word, as the paper believes the perking up to be "essentially an optical illusion which deceives few people in Israel and even less in the Palestinian territories".

"Who is to the left of whom?" the paper wonders, seemingly struggling with another optical illusion.

Is current Prime Minister Ehud Baraq further to the left "who having ordered the Israeli army to shoot Palestinians is now negotiating a last-minute agreement as the electoral clock ticks on?"

Or is it "Peres the dove, who in 1996, just before losing the elections... launched Operation Grapes of Wrath which killed dozens of civilians in Lebanon?"

Algeria: Different initials, same bloodshed

The French weekly Le Nouvel Observateur notes that scores of people are still being massacred in Algeria despite President Abdelaziz Bouteflika's national reconciliation programme.

It says that the president's law of 'civil concord' has served to pardon "thousands of armed Islamic extremists" but "failed to restore peace in the country".

The paper acknowledges that most of the fighters of the Islamic Salvation Army, the AIS, took advantage of the presidential amnesty, but notes that their former strongholds are being taken over by another extremist group, the GSPC.

"Elected to end the civil war in his country", President Bouteflika "has so far only managed to end the war between Ethiopia and Eritrea thanks to his skills as a mediator", the paper says. And it points out that his frequent travelling recently prompted an Algiers daily to wonder when he would be making an official visit to his own country.

Cold Turkey

Madrid's El Pais says that the storming of 20 Turkish prisons by paramilitary police earlier this week was befitting of "a medieval system".

"The situation in Turkey's prisons has reached a point untenable for a state that wants to call itself modern," the paper says in an editorial.

"The European democracies are not in the habit of allowing the state to storm its prisons... to restore order in situations allowed to decay for many years," it points out. The action of the Turkish authorities "exposed the fragility of the cement holding together the country's human rights edifice".

"If Turkey really wishes to join the European democracies as a fully-fledged fellow member, it must end once and for all the contradictions inherited from history and from its geographic location," it concludes.

Vatican fears terrorism threat

The Vatican's L'Osservatore Romano is worried and unhappy with what it sees as the Italian authorities' inadequate response to the discovery of a home-made bomb on the roof of Milan cathedral, Italy's largest Gothic building.

"The Milan bomb was a disturbing episode once again sounding the alarm bell against terrorism," the paper says in a commentary. "Now everyone is acknowledging this reality... but this is a much belated realization of a truth that was clear for all to see: terrorism has not gone away."

The paper expresses "indignation and concern" over what it calls "the almost total silence" of the authorities over the fact that a document found with the bomb contained a reference to the Vatican's Jubilee Year celebrations now coming to a close.

"Has it been overlooked that the days leading up to the closure are likely to bring the greatest crowds of the whole Holy Year?" it asks. "We cannot but hope that the implications of the act of desecration (at Milan cathedral) will be fully realized."

Intolerant? Moi? Me? Ich? Yo? Eu?

Luxembourg's Tageblatt says that Denmark and Belgium are the two European Union states where alien religious beliefs are least welcome.

It quotes a report from the Vienna-based European Observatory of Racist and Xenophobic Phenomena as saying that the two countries have a clear lead in a league table of religious hostility drawn up on the basis of an opinion poll.

"In the European Union as a whole, about 15 per cent of the population feel a certain disquiet towards religions other than their own," the paper quotes the report as saying. But the percentages for Denmark and Belgium are 32 and 26 per cent respectively, it adds.

The results also revealed "an important impact on public opinion" by populist parties using religion in their political campaigns, the paper says.

Migrants: Migraine or boon?

Barcelona's El Periodico De Catalunya is worried by the government's announcement that, under the new immigration law, some 30,000 foreigners whose papers are not in order must leave Spain in the New Year, willingly or otherwise.

The paper points out that this news haS made the people in question "more vulnerable than ever to exploitation and to the need to turn to crime".

"The crowds that gathered in Almeria following (false) rumours that more immigrants would be allowed to stay, gave us an image of the despair that will from now on rule these people's lives," it adds.

"Threatening 30,000 immigrants with expulsion will cause more problems than allowing them to stay legally," the paper concludes.

Madrid's El Pais, for its part, finds it "curious" that, "the new immigration law has come into effect precisely at a time when Spain has seen its population pass the 40 million mark, thus managing to halt the decline of its birth rate, precisely thanks to the migratory influx of the past two years".

An everyday story of immigrant folk

A columnist in London's Independent writes of an immigrant couple, "with skills but no means", forced to flee their homeland with their single child.

The country where they sought refuge "conjured up bad memories for them" but "felt less threatening than their own". Visas were out of the question, but somehow they managed to stay several years until the danger in their own country had passed.

"These were the formative years in the life of a child who grew up to champion the excluded, and of whom it was said he was 'a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief'," the columnist points out in his reflection on the Nativity story.

"God knows what it's like to seek asylum in a strange and foreign land," he concludes.

The European press review is compiled by BBC Monitoring from internet editions of the main European newspapers and some early printed editions.