European press review

The tragedy of the St Gotthard tunnel fire is front page news all over Europe.

For the second day running, the IRA's decision to do away with some of its guns prompts much positive comment, although it is mixed with warnings against premature peace celebrations.

And the British prime minister is singled out for high praise in a French daily.

Different tunnel, different fire, same Alps

Many front pages all over Europe carry the same picture, all the more horrifying for being in colour, of a lorry engulfed in flames inside the St Gotthard road tunnel in Switzerland after a frontal collision started a blaze on Wednesday morning.

"Just like Mont-Blanc", reads the headline in France-Soir, in a reference to a similar disaster in March 1999 in which over 30 people were killed in the tunnel linking Italy with France.

Still in France, Liberation, which besides the front page picture devotes a double-page spread to the disaster, points out that the reopening of the Mont-Blanc tunnel will now take place "in an even more charged atmosphere".

For the Swiss Le Temps, this was "the tragedy we all feared".

"The provisional figure on Wednesday evening was of at least 14 dead," the paper says. "But the magnitude of the fire and the collapse of several sections of the vault prompt fears of a heavier toll."

An olive branch in Ireland...

A day after the IRA's announcement that it was disabling some of its weaponry in line with the Good Friday agreement of 1998, London's Independent warns that extremist splinter groups on both sides of the Northern Ireland divide will, as the paper puts it, do "their barbarous best to destroy the peace process".

"Even as we welcome the IRA's statement," the paper says, "we know there are some who are so addicted to violence they will never willingly give it up."

Slovakia's Hospodarske Noviny links what it sees as a "new hope" for Northern Ireland to "the emergence of a global antiterrorist coalition" which, in its view, "is acting in various parts of the world as a catalyst in changes for the better".

However it too warns that "there are armed groups in both camps against the Good Friday Agreement" and they "will try to attack it with further acts of terrorism".

In Germany, Tageszeitung says that peace is now the only option for the Republicans because Catholic support for the armed struggle has evaporated.

"Nevertheless," the paper notes, "the IRA will find it difficult to keep its footsoldiers in check, especially as for months Catholic areas in Belfast have been besieged by Protestant gangs and attacks with stones, bottles or firebombs."

The paper blames Loyalist organisations. "They will not hear of disarmament," it says, "so it would be premature to speak of the end of the conflict. This is merely an intermediate step."

The financial daily Handelsblatt echoes this cautious assessment. "Northern Ireland," it says, "still stands at the beginning of a long process involving not just the scrapping of Semtex and Kalashnikovs, but also the much more difficult disarmament inside people's heads."

It will "take years, if not decades to eradicate the religious and tribal hatred from people's minds", it adds, but at least "the cork which for years blocked this great task has been removed".

The Austrian Der Standard welcomes the IRA's move, irrespective of how many weapons are actually involved.

"We shouldn't be bean-counters," the paper says. The number of weapons, it adds, is "a matter of complete indifference" because "what is decisive is that the taboo has been broken".

"For the first time, the IRA has subordinated itself to the political needs of its close ally Sinn Fein to save the coalition government in Belfast. That's what is totally unheard of."

...but none in Spain

The IRA's decision has evoked great interest in Spain, which has its own problems with the armed Basque separatist group ETA.

"Any future political solution," says Madrid's El Mundo, will require ETA "to follow the IRA's lead". The fact is, the paper adds, "negotiation is impossible when one of the sides has the advantage of the bullet to the back of the head".

La Razon says there are "many differences" between ETA and the IRA. One, it says, is that in Northern Ireland "there is a peace process between opposing groups with similar terrorist methods", while in Spain "there is terrorism against the state and no opposing group with which to negotiate".

Barcelona's La Vanguardia sees a direct link between the state of the world since the 11 September attacks, and the situations of both ETA and the IRA.

"An IRA in the process of disarming," the paper points out, "will no longer appear in any international lists of terrorist organisations." As for ETA, "it is visibly increasingly isolated". Its attacks, it adds, "will eventually lose all the political gloss" to be regarded by the world as "mere crimes" and be the target of "international cooperation".

A man for hard seasons?

The prominent role being played by Britain alongside the United States in the war against terrorism is highlighted in a lengthy profile of the British prime minister in the French Le Monde.

"Ambiguous and often hesitant in the everyday routine of politics," the paper says, Tony Blair "knows how to rise to the occasion when the occasion is exceptional".

Mr Blair, it notes, "is temperamentally suited to bringing people together in a common cause, and prefers situations which raise him above party politics". His current 88% support in the opinion polls "shows that he is in tune with the country on how the war on terrorism is being conducted".

The prime minister of the "land of foot-and-mouth disease, rail crashes and decrepit hospitals" has managed to "restore some of his compatriots' self-esteem", the paper believes.

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