Reuters/AFP/Madrid/Berlin


Merkel and Zapatero
European happiness with the death of Osama bin Laden was tempered yesterday by details showing he was unarmed when shot dead and qualms about whether torture of prisoners helped US forces track him down.
Al Qaeda leader bin Laden – the world’s most wanted man – was shot in the head in a US special forces raid on his walled villa hideout in Pakistan on Monday.
In Germany and Spain, legislators questioned Chancellor Angela Merkel and Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero over their enthusiastic praise of US President Barack Obama.
“It’s likely that bin Laden sought his own destiny,” Zapatero told parliament yesterday after Gaspar Llamazares, deputy from the small leftist party Izquierda Unida, questioned his congratulating Obama.
Zapatero said “any democrat” would have preferred bin Laden stood trial, but that he understood how the operation ended in the way it did for “one of history’s bloodiest criminals”.
Islamist militants set off bombs simultaneously in four packed commuter trains in Madrid in March 2004, killing 191 people and wounding more than 2,000, in attacks they said were inspired but not ordered by Al Qaeda.
In Germany a senior member of parliament from Merkel’s conservative Christian Democratic Union, Siegfried Kauder, criticised her statement on Monday which said she was “glad that killing bin Laden was successful”.
“I wouldn’t have used those words. That is a vengeful way of thinking that one shouldn’t have. That’s mediaeval,” he told the Passauer Neue Presse local daily.
“A random killing is not permitted according to international agreements. If one concludes that bin Laden was no longer active (running Al Qaeda operations around the world), the killing could be seen as random.”
Merkel’s spokesman defended her, saying: “This sentence should not be treated in isolation.”
Steffen Seibert told a regular briefing: “The motivation for her being pleased was that this man no longer poses a danger. The world will hopefully be a bit safer now.”
He added that Merkel “appreciates that someone hearing just this one sentence – and on television it was often only this sentence that was broadcast – maybe found ‘death’ and being ‘pleased’ in the same sentence as inappropriate”.
Several figures distanced themselves from the Cchancellor’s comments on Monday, including some from within her own conservative party, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU).
“From a Christian point of view it is definitely inappropriate to express pleasure about the deliberate killing of someone and their death,” Ingrid Fischbach, deputy CDU parliamentary head, told the Berliner Zeitung daily.
Fischbach is also a member of the Central Committee of German Catholics.
“As a Christian I can only say that a targeted killing is no reason for celebration,” Katrin Goering-Eckardt from the opposition Greens, head of the Protestant Church synod and a deputy speaker of parliament, told the paper. “You can be pleased that Osama bin Laden is no longer able to be a terrorist leader. But you cannot be pleased about his death.”
Even Guido Westerwelle, deputy chancellor and foreign minister, voiced caution in the Die Welt daily about the West appearing excessively joyous about bin Laden’s death.
“While it is understandable being relieved, we have to be careful about sending pictures out into the world of our reactions in the West that contribute to encouraging or making heroes of Al Qaeda,” he said.
Television and radio hosts zeroed in Washington’s revision of certain details of the operation, such as the fact that bin Laden was not armed and that the woman killed had not been used as a shield, saying that his death looked more now like an execution.
Speakers on a Spanish talk show questioned the official version of the burial at sea of bin Laden’s body and said Obama’s image would suffer among Europeans who would rather have seen a capture and trial.
Europeans also jumped into the renewed debate over torture and so-called enhanced interrogation technique after US officials said that key sources of initial information that led to bin Laden came from at least one prisoner that was tortured.
“What stands out to me is the White House attempt to whitewash Guantanamo. They are saying that information that led them to bin Laden came from there and that it was obtained through torture,” Manuel Erice, deputy director of Spain’s ABC newspaper said on a talk show on TVE state television.
Many Europeans struggled to understand the open celebrations in the streets of New York and Washington earlier this week.
“While many nations suffered from Al Qaeda’s terrorism and few in the world will mourn bin Laden’s death, the US is the only place where it sparked spontaneous outpourings of raucous jubilation,” wrote columnist Gary Younge in Britain’s left-leaning Guardian newspaper.
“The initial euphoria in the US may be quite difficult for people in Western Europe to take, but in one sense is understandable in the context.
“The 9-11 attacks were perhaps more visceral than most people expected. The impact on the US was more deep-seated,” said Paul Rogers, professor of Peace Studies at the University of Bradford.
Al Qaeda militants flew hijacked airliners into New York’s World Trade Centre and Washington’s Pentagon building on September 11, 2001, killing nearly 3,000 people.
Some commentators said Obama could lose his lustre in Europe, where he has been widely admired for taking a more multilateral, collaborative approach to foreign policy than that of his predecessor George W Bush.
But the left-wing French daily Le Monde said in an editorial that Obama had struck the right tone, saying that he had announced the news in a sober speech, without sounding triumphant.
“Nothing of the ridiculous ‘mission accomplished’ of ... Bush, dressed as a fighter pilot, to proclaim in 2003 ... the US ‘victory’ in Iraq,” said Le Monde.
Germany’s Sueddeutsche Zeitung newspaper expressed misgivings about the legality of the killing.
“Which law covers the execution of bin Laden?” wrote Heribert Prantl, a senior editor at the left-leaning daily.
“US law requires trials before death penalties are carried out. Executions are forbidden in countries based on rule of law. Martial law doesn’t cover the US operation either. The decision to kill the godfather of terror was political.”