European press review

The main European dailies have plenty to say about the release of an audio tape purporting to carry the voice of Osama Bin Laden.

A French weekly traces the current chill in French-British relations to Winston Churchill, while another suggests that the old label of "sick man of Europe" strengthens Turkey's case for European Union membership.

Europe under threat

The French Liberation hopes that the latest recorded message purporting to be from Osama Bin Laden will, as the paper puts it, "open the eyes of those who still want to believe that France can escape the Islamist threat", when, it says, France "features prominently" among its chosen targets.

The message also referred approvingly to the war in Chechnya, and Moscow's Izvestiya says Osama Bin Laden "could not have done Russian propaganda a bigger favour".

Henceforth, the paper says, Russian President Vladimir Putin has a cast-iron defence when debating with his Western colleagues, many of whom differentiate between Chechen terrorism - which they see as directly solely against Russians "and therefore not so dangerous" - and the international variety.

But the leading French daily Le Monde takes western leaders to task for, as the paper sees it, unquestioningly accepting what it calls "Russia's great lie" of portraying all its Chechen enemies as "Islamist terrorists fighting Christianity".

"If attacking civilian populations for political ends is terrorism", the paper says, then "the atrocities carried out in Chechnya by the Russian army... fit perfectly into the category".

Channel crossings

The French L'Express says the cool relations with Britain since details emerged of the row between President Chirac and British Prime Minister Tony Blair are a sign of France's political frustration.

After the Saint-Malo summit of 1998, it notes, Paris was counting strongly on the alliance with London to bring about its ambitious plan for European defence,

But Britain it says, was determined not to risk alienating the United States and "drew back" from its French ally "without openly saying so".

France suspects that the British ally has not changed much since the days of Churchill who, it says, was always keener to look across the Atlantic than over at the European mainland.

Whose 'sick man'?

Former French President Valery Giscard d'Estaing, who heads the European Convention charged with plotting Europe's future course, tells Le Point about his opposition to Turkey joining the European Union.

Turkey has secularized Islam and proved its compatibility with democracy

L'Express

But L'Express, has a stinging rebuke for Mr Giscard d'Estaing's views.

For the past couple of centuries, it says, Turkey's elites "have turned towards us, towards our culture, our ideas, our industry".

"It was not for nothing", the paper notes, that in the death throes of the Ottoman Empire, Turkey was dubbed "the sick man of Europe", not the "sick man of Asia".

European values are so significant to Turkey," it argues, that it has secularized Islam, brought it forward to the present century and proved its compatibility with democracy.

"Are we going to tell the Turks that we are terribly sorry but we actually agree with Bin Laden and the (Algerian Islamists of the) GIA who define the new century's borders as religious ones?" it asks.

The Swiss Le Temps notes that the leader of the Islamist-based party set to form a new government in Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, was received in Rome on Wednesday "practically as a head of government".

The paper notes that Mr Erdogan, who is on a European tour to put the case for Turkey joining the European Union, argued that Ankara's membership would show the other Muslim countries that democracy and Islam could coexist".

Mr Erdogan is quoted as saying Turkey sees joining the EU as "the most important modernization move since the proclamation of the Turkish Republic."

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