European press review

"Balkans syndrome" is still the main story in many European papers, but mad cow disease runs it a close second with ministers in trouble in Germany and Spain. Elsewhere, the Slovaks are tuning into every enjoyable minute of the Czech TV crisis and the ghost of Tiananmen Square has returned.

Depleted "credibility" syndrome

With fears of so-called "Balkans syndrome" spreading across Europe, Austria's Der Standard says allegations that there is no scientific evidence to suggest that the use of depleted uranium ammunition can cause leukaemia are "like saying that BSE has got nothing to do with CJD".

The paper notes that the number of Nato soldiers who served in the former Yugoslavia and are now falling ill with, or dying of, blood cancer is in stark contrast to official statements by US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and General Wesley Clark, who have ruled out any links between these deaths and illnesses and the use of nuclear weapons.

"The US military and Nato now have a duty to prove that the nuclear ammunition used in the Balkans poses no danger to civilians as well as their own soldiers," it warns.

The Spanish daily El Pais says Nato's "credibility is at stake" and that "it is important to restore it ahead of possible future military peace-keeping or crisis-handling actions".

It warns that the alliance could "go down with its usual illness: secrecy" and urges it to take "the best medicine against alarmism: transparency and information".

Germany's Frankfurter Rundschau says whether the US adopts Europe's more cautious position on the uranium issue will be a test of the Nato partnership.

"The furore about the uranium munitions is an example of the conflict within the Nato Alliance", it says, warning that the dispute could come to a head with the Bush administration's planned missile defence system. "What would happen if the USA insists on the use of depleted uranium munitions and on stationing missile systems regarded almost unanimously by the European Nato partners as a medical or political threat?"

In sarcastic form, the Hungarian daily Magyar Hirlap says the row over uranium-depleted weapons merely reflects humanity's knack for coming up with better and better "killing techniques".

"It is a true sign of progress that in January 2001 we are no longer arguing about the dangers posed by the nuclear bomb 55 years ago but about those posed by depleted uranium bombs", one of its commentator sighs. "Not to the enemy, of course, but to our own soldiers".

Germany's BSE "Chernobyl"...

Germany's Die Welt believes the resignations of the German health and agriculture ministers over the BSE scandal were long overdue in view of their complacency about consumer concerns. It says that as a Green politician, Health Minister Andrea Fischer saw her own failure to tackle the issue as a particular disgrace.

The financial Handeslblatt, however, has some sympathy for the health minister.

It says it was highly significant that she admitted at her press conference that she had never been 100-per-cent certain that Germany was free of BSE.

"This throws light on the whole essence of the BSE scandal. For years consumers in Germany were led to believe that they lived on an Island of the Blessed, while all round them in countries such as France, the Netherlands and Switzerland, cattle fell ill with BSE in their droves."

The paper believes the dangers should have been spotted and dealt with much sooner and that the strong farm lobby had a lot to do with the failure to do so. The only way to restore confidence, the paper believes, is to set up a reformed Agriculture Ministry which sees itself as representing consumer interests.

The Sueddeutsche Zeitung says German Chancellor Schroeder has not emerged from the affair with any credit either.

"Why did Schroeder stick with an agriculture minister who stubbornly insisted on an orthodox farming policy and could not, or would not, see that BSE would signal a turning point in agriculture policy just as Chernobyl did in energy policy?" the paper wonders.

...and Spain's BSE cooking tips

It looks like the next government scalp claimed by mad cow disease will belong to Spanish health minister, Celia Villalobos. Opposition and pro-government papers are all calling for her head after she advised Spanish housewives not to cook with beef bones.

In an editorial headlined "Indignation over Villalobos", Diario 16 says it is time for Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar "to take up the affair personally and clearly establish what his cabinet's strategy is for tackling the disease and who the right people are to implement it - and it is clear that Celia Villalobos shouldn't be among them".

"What consumers need and demand is reliable and exhaustive information about what it is happening and not housewives' tips that do not become a minister", the paper says.

ABC says that "the minister is forgetting that serving in government requires prudence and deliberation, virtues that do not appear to be cultivated by a health minister with an impassioned talk-show guest tone."

Noting that the German agriculture and health ministers have already quit over their handling of the problem, the paper notes that "her loquacity is spreading the panic...food market queue tips, like the ones Celia Villalobos whispered into a radio microphone, will not do".

Slovaks tune in to Czech TV crisis

Clearly enjoying the serious crisis which has been rocking the Czech Republic's state-owned TV channel, or CT, since Christmas Day, the Slovak daily Novy Cas writes that Czech MPs' apparent inability to put an end to the TV scandal is "the hardest slap in the face a Czech parliament has ever got".

"Why do the Czechs actually have their parliament? Anyone following the Czech TV crisis must be inevitably asking this question," it says, alluding to the Czech MPs' decision to approve a resolution urging Jiri Hodac, the new CT head, to resign. The paper points out that the resolution has so far been ignored by both Hodac and the CT Council which appointed him.

It warns that the new management's news bulletins, broadcast terrestrially, "are alarmingly reminiscent of communist-era broadcasts, full of half-truths and distortions of reality".

The paper concludes by saying that the whole affair is a vicious circle and is not likely to die down in the near future.

Tiananmen ghost stalks Chinese leaders

"Silence was no longer an option" is how the French daily Le Monde leads its report on the Chinese Government's belated attack on the publication in the US several days ago of secret documents which claim to describe in detail what happened within China's communist leadership during the violent suppression of pro-democracy demonstrators in Tiananmen Square in 1989.

"The fact that the official reaction comes from the foreign ministry indicates that it is aimed exclusively at international opinion," the paper says in a dispatch from Beijing. "Chinese public opinion isn't supposed to have been informed about anything because the official media haven't said a word about it."

On Monday, the paper's correspondent points out, the website of the US journal Foreign Affairs suddenly became impossible to access from China, and traffic on the Internet in China was particularly sluggish.

"These attempts at muzzling the media show how worried the party leadership is to see ghosts resurface from a past that has been kept hidden," the paper adds.

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