Other Views: The Guardian, Straits Times, Montreal Gazette - Print Version

Other Views: The Guardian, Straits Times, Montreal Gazette

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 4, 2005

LONDON Sarkozy's reaction to the turmoil

LONDON: The latest bout of rioting in the suburbs of Paris is a toxic mixture of alienated ethnic minority youth and heavy-handed response by the French security forces. It has also raised troubling questions about the government's role, and especially that of Nicolas Sarkozy, whose position as interior minister has put him at the center of this story. His language is always forthright, but it has been intemperate too. Overreaction can have grave consequences, and Sarkozy was right to admit that a police tear-gas grenade mistakenly hit a mosque. It is heartening too to hear of Muslim community elders ordering youths home. France's mood is not revolutionary, but it is ugly. Sarkozy talks of "zero tolerance" of crime, but in the long term it will take equal opportunities in education, housing and employment to keep the riot police off the meanest streets. (The Guardian)

Japan-U.S. security ties and China

SINGAPORE: Last week's ''upgrade'' of the security arrangement between Japan and the United States comes at the most bruising stage in Japan-China relations in a decade. As for the impact the allies' growing military integration might have on the U.S.-China relationship, the only certainty is that Beijing is watching with interest — and furrowed brows. It is an interesting transformation for Asia as a whole when a security pact that originally permitted American bases and forces to be located in Japan for its defense has morphed into something else: China inevitably regards itself as a target, whereas U.S. planners regard expansion of the Japan connection as integral to its global control strategy, specifically tracking China. What Asia needs most is a strategic balance between China and the United States that would allow the continent time and space to grow and prosper. (Straits Times)

Startling common sense in Zimbabwe

MONTREAL: Sylvester Nguni, Zimbabwe's deputy minister of agriculture, has courageously acknowledged the obvious: that seizing 22 million acres of the most productive farmland in one of Africa's most fertile nations and turning it over to gangs of thugs and kleptocrats is not the best basis for sound policy. In fact, President Robert Mugabe's vindictive pogrom against white farmers has led to mass hunger. Zimbabwe once fed itself, but now imports up to 80 percent of its cereals. It even has to import maize, the staple on which most of its people rely. Mugabe has blamed all this misery on drought, neocolonial plots, the World Bank, missionaries and anything else he can think of, which makes Nguni's attack of common sense even more startling. Either the man is suicidal or some faction of Zimbabwe's government is finally waking up. Let's hope it's the latter. (Montreal Gazette)