Peter Preston

Este archivo solo abarca los artículos del autor incorporados a este sitio a partir del 1 de noviembre de 2006. Para fechas anteriores realice una búsqueda entrecomillando su nombre.

EspañaAspectos Generales

It is the last trip of the holidays. Turn right off the motorway and wind down rutted, tree-shrouded roads for an hour into the heart of nothingness. My son-in-law has promised to show us the village where he was born. Take a giant stride back in time. Pre-Cranford, you'd say, if the BBC existed here. But this is Galicia, and the world looms far harsher than crinoline England. Great rolling hills, deep valleys, tiny hamlets clinging to daunting slopes: humanity struggling for survival.

The political buzz word of the moment is "community" of course: as in Notting Hill community slates Canary Wharf community for greed, or Hazel Blears grovels to Salford community.…  Seguir leyendo »

EspañaTerrorismo

Through the long, weary years of the Troubles, Spain's media reported obsessively on Northern Ireland's ordeal. It saw Madrid's own struggle against Basque terrorism reflected in an Irish mirror. Even the numbers of dead – a thousand here, 850 or so there – seemed to march in bloody parallel. But then Belfast found peace while Eta bombed and bombed again. And now Spain, searching desperately for one murderous gang in Mallorca and picking through the rubble of police headquarters in Burgos, is seemingly left alone with a nightmare that neither force nor negotiation can end.

What do the 50 years of Eta amount to (apart from that pile of corpses)?…  Seguir leyendo »

EspañaModelo de EstadoModelo TerritorialEuropaUnión Europea, , ,

They were weeping as they collected their runners-up medals, strapping men wiping red eyes on their red-and-white shirts. Barcelona, on the night of the Copa del Rey, had been magical as usual, Athletic Bilbao didn't stand a chance once. But this was an especially hard defeat, met with pure grief.

For Bilbao continue to do something that the rest of Europe – nay, the rest of the sporting world – has long since abandoned. Through 80 years in La Liga, through eight league championships and 12 cup triumphs, they've basically only recruited from the Basque country. They are the team of a nation in waiting, a repository of faith beyond chequebook and slightly manufactured patriotism.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoOriente Próximo

It is "the most dangerous place in the world", according to Barack Obama. It's also where 90% of our own home-front terrorist threat comes from, according to Gordon Brown. Forget scratched heads and reddening faces over Manchester's missing weapons of destruction. No anxious leader can forget Pakistan - or fail to remember one lethally complex thing. Pakistan's crisis is political as well as religious, economic as well as tribal, personal as well as endemic. Call Jinnah's pure state a failed state now and expect ritual resentment. But ask in return what equals "success", and hear silence descend. The misty, murky road from Operation Pathway is not so long after all.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoOriente Próximo

Listen, for far in the distance one can hear the sound of a great tin cup rattling. The president of Pakistan tells the newest president on the block (via the Washington Post) that his country could be "the most critical external problem" facing the US. And he wants "aggressive, innovative action" against the forces of darkness. But for Pakistan to defeat the extremists, it must be stable - and economically viable. So give us the money, and necessary military hardware, too. Then together we can try to do something about Afghanistan and our collapsing region - your slightly desperate friend, Asif Ali Zardari.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoÁfrica

Democracy involves much more than throwing the old (white) rascals out. Democracy depends on what comes next - on the growth of a settled system that means governments can change amid constitutional calm. India long ago reached that point. Compare and contrast Zimbabwe. And, meanwhile, fear for South Africa.

The ousting of Thabo Mbeki isn't some sudden convulsion. He was on his way out anyway. But the manner of his dispatch is altogether more menacing. A president made to pay for dirty dealing? It can be made to sound like some heroic African Watergate. But there's nothing heroic about the fratricide that grips the African National Congress now.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoOriente Próximo

Forget labels. In reality, two giant parties struggle perennially for power in Pakistan. One is the politicians' party, whose candidate, Asif Ali Zardari, has just been elected president. The other is the army party, which prefers bazookas to ballot boxes. Democracy in this pivotal country is a frail blossom. And Zardari is as frail as they come.

The crude apology for a party system in Pakistan is 60 years old and shows scant sign of changing. First, the politicians have an election and govern for a while. When they falter, the generals take over. Ayub Khan, Yahya Khan, Zia ul-Haq, Pervez Musharraf - they come and go, punctuated briefly by elected prime ministers (mostly called Bhutto).…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoOriente Próximo

America has seen enough John Ford movies to get the point. Britain, too, had its fill of John Wayne. So why are we all so infernally slow to realise that borderland Pakistan is the old west reincarnated - except that we're not talking Apaches or Sioux now, just Bugti, Swati, Jadoon and Tareen in the realms of the Pashtuns and Baluchis?

Such parallels bound out only a few miles from Peshawar. If this were Nevada, you'd find casinos down some desert road, run as a matter of restitution by the tribes. That big, lushly watered house on the hill would be where the chief lives, counting his cash.…  Seguir leyendo »

EuropaUnión EuropeaAmpliación, ,

Boris Tadic is a handsome, charismatic and rather courageous politician. If he belonged to the Labour party, cabinet "loyalists" would be queueing at his door, asking him to knife Mr B in the back. But Tadic already has a job. He is president of Serbia. It is he, and his young, reforming appointees, who tracked down Radovan Karadzic. It is he - the hymn from London, Paris, Berlin, Washington et al last week - who "chose Europe" (not a nationalistic, neo-fascist, sub-communist swamp, with only Moscow for a chum). Which is great: except, will Europe choose him?

Everyone loves a horror story, so the capture of Karadzic, the pursuit of Mladic and the stomach-turning bestiality of Srebrenica can soon be turned into big headlines again.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoÁfrica

It is a matter of principle, surely. Here's an ageing dictator using every means to hang on in power. His people are starving. Hundreds of thousands flee to a safe haven in the democratic country to the south. Elections are a malign joke. And what does the west do about it? Why, pile in with food aid, trade deals and sweet promises. Prop up the dictatorship for all its worth. Because for the moment we're talking North Korea, not Zimbabwe: and Pyongyang has (or perhaps had) a little bomb that turned idealism on its head.

Of course it was galling to see Robert Mugabe's spokesmen hailing a "great victory" this weekend.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoOriente PróximoInternacionalTerrorismo Internacional,

Francis Fukuyama posed the basic Afghan dilemma as the supposed triumph of western invasion began to fall apart. Afghanistan has never been "modern", he observed, chillingly. "Under the monarchy that existed until the beginning of its political troubles in the 1970s, it largely remained a tribal confederation with minimal state penetration outside Kabul". And the subsequent years "of communist misrule and civil war eliminated everything that was left" of that feeble entity. History wasn't dead, in short; Afghans were dead.

And now, many killing fields later, we can put that even more starkly. Afghanistan isn't a "failed" state, because Afghanistan has never been a successful one.…  Seguir leyendo »

EspañaSocial

It was a gathering of the dispossessed. The blonde girl in short shorts had put her bag between her feet while she paused to eat. When she looked down five minutes later, it was gone. The harassed lady on the corner stool, toiling over her form-filling, was in charge of an entire school trip. Her bag contained everything - cards, identities, insurances. Tap! tap! went a man at the restaurant window. She glanced up from her food to see what he wanted - whereupon that bag went, too. And then, of course, there was us.

Location, location; distraction, distraction. If you've travelled the world for half a century and only been mugged three times, that sounds tolerably impressive.…  Seguir leyendo »

ReflexionesSocial

It is the eyes that haunt you: young, wide eyes full of innocence and hope; narrowed, blank eyes filled to the brim with despair. They are the eyes of times past, but still they follow you round the room of a remarkable new exhibition (in a remarkably unlikely place). They are the eyes of a continent betrayed.

In 1961, fresh down from university, my friend Tom Sharpe (creator of Wilt and Porterhouse Blue) left England to work and teach in apartheid South Africa. Thank God for TB, they told him in Jo'burg: so many blacks were dying in the squalid sea of shanty towns around the city that white rule looked set to go on and on.…  Seguir leyendo »

ReflexionesSocial,

You can write much of the script for London 2012 already: the tube strikes, the cost over-runs, the security computers that won't work and the Kazakh weightlifters lost in Terminal Five. Factor fat helpings of familiar chaos. But the real problem for the Olympic games we thought we wanted to host is beginning to emerge from the smog over Beijing. Boycotts, boycotts everywhere, and never a pause to think.

Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, has given in already. She won't be going to China this summer, like the Polish prime minister and Czech president. Mr Sarkozy is wandering down the same lightly principled path.…  Seguir leyendo »

EspañaAspectos GeneralesEuropaUnión Europea

Every picture reminds you of a story: and here's one of the then editor of this paper (me) standing in front of some printing presses with other editors from all over Europe. The presses belong to El País in Madrid. The editors flew in because the newspaper asked them to do so. Come and help us defend our independence (at a time, not three decades ago, when berserk Franco colonels were staging florid, failed coups). So there we line up, heavy metal at our backs, implicitly saying that Spain is part of the wider world now. Get your guns out of parliament and your sticky fingers out of the printers' ink.…  Seguir leyendo »

EuropaMundoOriente Próximo,

Take one huge, troubled country, a land of lawless provinces, criminal chieftains and constant tension. Its history is full of destruction and conflict. Today, It falls prey again to the most violent terrorism. A strong man rules, but nobody who lives in his shadow can rule out corruption or state-sponsored assassination. There's an election coming, yet its probable outcome is regarded with deep cynicism. Democracy has shallow roots in this soil. And, just for luck, let's toss nuclear capability into the mix. What could be more alarming?

Possibly another country in much the same condition. Alternative B, Pakistan, is ruled by President Musharraf, and the "world community" is desperate for him to hold an election.…  Seguir leyendo »

EuropaUnión EuropeaAmpliación

Here is a sad little tale with a big, sad conclusion. It begins a decade ago, when I did some Guardian Foundation work with the British Association for Central and Eastern Europe (Bacee) and joined its governing body. It organised seminars all over the newly free countries of Europe, brought study groups to Britain, and helped train politicians, judges and journalists in the rhythms of democracy. When central Europe was EU-embraced, it moved on to the parts that Brussels hadn't reached yet: the Balkans and beyond.

But then, suddenly, a minor mandarin arrived announcing that priorities had changed, that the Foreign Office grant that helped make Bacee possible was going, gone.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoOriente Próximo

When, last year, America's heavyweight Foreign Policy magazine moved Pakistan into its top 10 of failed states - at No 9, just ahead of Afghanistan - assorted Islamabad ministers clambered on to the highest of horses. The charge was insulting, ludicrous ... But, baby, try it again now.Here is a huge Islamic nation, nuclear bombs primed not promised, plunged once more under full monty martial law. The army chief of staff who doubles as president has just sacked his supreme court and turned off TV stations. Taliban supporters are launching ever more vicious suicide attacks. There is scant prospect of holding elections.…  Seguir leyendo »

ReflexionesSocial

You begin to feel strangely sorry for the Portuguese police. A golden-haired little girl was left untended while her parents dined. She had vanished when they came back: every mum and dad's nightmare. But this particular mum had fantastic cheekbones, and dad was a top doctor, too. They were articulate, photogenic, resourceful and desperate. They resolved to let waves of their anguish roll across Europe in the hope that someone would spot their daughter. And the press, of course, rolled in.

Now, blame games come easy. If you want to blame the tabloids, the broadsheets and a three-ring circus of TV crews, then be my guest.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoOriente Próximo

She says he's "naive" and can't do "tough". So how does Barack Obama respond to Hillary Clinton's scorn? With worldly-wise super-tough. Either Pakistan roots out foreign terrorist cells, cans the Taliban and seals its borders, or embryo President Obama will cut off aid to Musharraf's army. And if his US has evidence of al-Qaida leaders lurking in some cave over the frontier from Afghanistan and Islamabad refuses to act? "Then we will." He'll send the marines in. Obama does ignorant and stupid too, it seems. Draw a deep breath and hope that, somewhere, somehow, calmer counsels prevail.

Would the beleaguered Musharraf we see today like to silence his religious militants?…  Seguir leyendo »