14 NEWS Best columns: Europe
FRANCE
“Where’s Steve?” That phrase appeared in graffiti
all over the city of Nantes for a month, says Pascal
Riché. It was also a Twitter hashtag (#OuEstSteve).
It refers to 24-year-old Steve Maia Caniço, who—
along with 13 other late-night revelers at a music
festival on the banks of the Loire—was attacked in
June by police hurling stun grenades, and fell into
the river. Steve couldn’t swim; his body washed
away and was found only last week. It’s a shocking
case, but far from unique. This sort of police bru-
tality has become commonplace since the Yellow
Vest protests started late last year. Officers routinely
charged at demonstrators and blasted them withtear gas, causing numerous injuries and the death
of an elderly woman. At a peaceful climate change
rally in Paris recently, activists shouting “Go easy,
officers, we’re doing it for your children” were
also sprayed with tear gas. Yet far from being held
to account, officers involved in such incidents get
promoted. President Emmanuel Macron denies the
abuses, saying it’s wrong to use the term “police
violence.” How different from the student riots of
1968, when there were no deaths, not least because
Paris’ police chief warned that to hit a fallen dem-
onstrator was to “strike yourself.” Today’s cops
have no such scruples. “Brutality is a choice.”Having largely fulfilled its pledge to bar Muslim
migrants from the country, Poland’s ruling Law
and Justice party has found a new way to fire up
supporters: gay bashing, said Ewa Siedlecka. The
new focus began as a backlash to Warsaw’s lib-
eral mayor, Rafal Trzaskowski, who wants LGBT
issues to be addressed in school sex education
classes. Party leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski called
the plan an “attack on the family,” denouncing
“LGBT ideology” as a threat to Polish identity.
Now 30 cities and districts controlled by the party
have declared themselves LGBT-free zones. The
bigots aren’t prevailing everywhere: When the
right-wing weekly Gazeta Polska included “LGBT-free zone” stickers in a recent issue, a distribution
company refused to deliver the magazines, saying
the stickers fueled discrimination. Enraged gov-
ernment supporters are calling this a “violation
of free speech.” That’s pure bunk—it’s doubtful
Law and Justice supporters would champion a
magazine’s right to distribute “Catholic-free zone”
stickers. If anything is being violated, it’s Poland’s
anti-discrimination laws. Still, it’s futile to hope
that government-appointed prosecutors will act.
If they’re willing to turn a blind eye to far-right
marchers singing “Zionists will be hanging from
the trees instead of leaves,” as they did two years
ago, then they won’t do much about this, either.GettyRussia and the U.S. are “shedding
no crocodile tears” over the demise
of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear
Forces Treaty, said François Ernen-
wein in La Croix (France). Signed
by President Ronald Reagan and
Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in
1987, the INF banned both coun-
tries from developing, possessing,
and deploying all ground-launched
cruise and ballistic missiles with
ranges from 300 to 3,400 miles.
Such missiles have short flight
times and are hard to detect; in the
1980s, the U.S. and the USSR each
deployed hundreds of the weapons
to Europe, ready to vaporize cities on the opposite side of the
Iron Curtain. The INF was a great breakthrough for peace, but
Moscow and Washington now consider it a Cold War relic.
Russia has been “mocking it for years,” building and develop-
ing the 9M729 cruise missile, which has a range of 1,250 miles.
President Donald Trump used that breach to justify America’s
withdrawal from the INF in February—a pullout that took effect
last week. But Trump has other reasons for wanting to scrap the
pact. Beijing wasn’t a party to the original deal and so has been
free to assemble an arsenal of midrange nukes. With the INF
dead, Trump can now “modernize the American arsenal to con-
tain China’s ambitions” in the Pacific.Welcome to “the new arms race,” said The Guardian (U.K.) in
an editorial. Moscow says it will deploy new midrange weapons
only if the U.S. does so first, but since NATO believes the Rus-sian military has already moved
missiles into the field, the claim
rings hollow. Worse still, the last
remaining arms control treaty
between the U.S. and Russia, New
START, expires in 2021. Trump
has already hinted that the pact—
which limits the number of nu-
clear warheads each country may
possess—will not be extended.
Trump claims that both Russia
and China would be willing to
join a new, replacement treaty, but
that is extremely unlikely. Beijing
has some 260 warheads, “a frac-
tion of the size of Washington’s or
Moscow’s stockpile,” and it has no incentive to limit itself.Why isn’t the European Union shrieking in protest? asked Chris-
toph von Marschall in Der Tagesspiegel (Germany). The INF
treaty was the result of protests across Europe by “millions of
people” who didn’t want to see their cities incinerated. But now
“a new generation has grown up that no longer takes seriously
the threat of nuclear war.” Such complacency will be our undo-
ing. The U.S. is already mulling stationing midrange missiles in
Japan or South Korea, said the Global Times (China). But any
Asian nation that welcomes American missiles will be standing
against China and Russia, “directly or indirectly, and will draw
fire against itself.” Japan and South Korea depend on China for
trade, and it will “be their nightmare if they follow the U.S. to
start a new cold war.” China can afford to build “a super weap-
ons arsenal”—and, if provoked, we will do it.The shameless
violence of
French police
Pascal Riché
L’Obs
POLAND
Gorbachev and Reagan sign the INF pact in 1987.The bigots
creating
‘gay-free zones’
Ewa Siedlecka
Polityka
Europe: A world without arms control