He is the head of the mountain-rescue service in real life if there is such a
He is the head of the mountain-rescue service in real life, if there is such a thing in this alpine Beverly Hills. IN THE rococo splendour of Pilate's House, I spy Jesus Christ conducting a wedding ceremony. The captain of the Roman legion trundles past in the mayor's car, spraying tourists and apostles with slush. Upon the snowy peaks rising above the clouds, the other Jesus watches over us. Although Serbia declared the elections were illegal, the authorities did not prevent them from taking place.. TENS of thousands of Serbs demonstrated yesterday in Pristina, capital of the province of Kosovo, as Albanian separatist feelings continues to grow.
"We will give up our lives - but we will never give up Kosovo," chanted the protesters, who waved Serb flags, sang national songs, and showed the three-fingered Serb salute. Albanians, who form a 90 per cent majority in the Serb ruled province, feel they are the victims. Under the rule of Slobodan Milosevic they have been stripped of many of the rights that they previously enjoyed.Police brutality has become frequent. Dozens of Albanians, including women and children, were killed recently by Serb forces in massacres in the Drenica region, west of Kosovo's capital, Pristina.But the Serbs feel themselves a beleaguered minority and fear that Kosovo - "the heart of Serbia", as many slogans yesterday described it - may be slipping away. The Serbs say they are ready to fight to stop that happening.One target of the protesters' anger was a concession by the Serb authorities in Pristina, which yesterday agreed to let ethnic Albanian students resume university places.In recent years the Albanians have, in effect, been banned from higher education. Many Albanians feel that the new agreement does not go far enough. But Serbs fear that it is the thin end of the wedge, and could be the first of many Serb retreats.Albanians mostly stayed off the streets of Pristina, fearing violence. In the event, the march passed off almost entirely peacefully.Albanians and Serbs alike share the deception - only partly justified by reality - that the world is ready to come to the Albanians' aid.
Slogans yesterday criticised the American "support for terrorism", a reference to the fact that Robert Gelbard, the United States' special envoy to the Balkans, has had sympathetic talks with the main Albanian leader, Ibrahim Rugova, and because Western politicians have sharply criticised the recent Serb crackdown.There was a large turn-out for unofficial elections the Albanians held in Kosovo on Sunday, which returned Mr Rugova as president of the unrecognised republic of Kosovo. This comment has been interpreted in the British press as a snub; in France, it is seen as a statement of the obvious. The French public has been pleased by the Prime Minister's command of their language in the brief television interviews he has given since he came to office last year. Mr Blair worked in France as a student and has spent several recent family holidays in the south west of the country.He will be only the fifth foreign head of state or government ever to address the National Assembly. His predecessors are the King Juan Carlos of Spain, President Clinton, King Hassan II of Morocco and the Italian Prime Minister, Romano Prodi All but President Clinton spoke in French.. It is possible he will make some riposte to the remarks made by the French finance minister, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, on British television at the weekend, in which he said Britain could not be a leading player in the European Union while remaining outside the single currency.
TONY BLAIR will become the first British Prime Minister to address the French National Assembly today and will, as expected, speak in French. Mr Blair is said to have been working on the speech for some time. He is writing it in English but it will be translated before he addresses the lower house of the French parliament this afternoon. The theme has not been divulged but he is expected to speak about his reform plans for Britain and about Britain's relationship with Europe. President Jacques Chirac, still the titular leader of the centre-right, was to make a televised appeal last night to his supporters, and to France, to refuse all appeasement of ultra-nationalism and racism.. There were set-backs for the NF in two other areas however.In the greater Paris region, the Ile-de-France, a Socialist president seemed likely to be elected after centre-right councillors refused to accept NF support.
In Midi-Pyrenees, a centre-right president was elected with NF votes but immediately resigned on principle.There was no disguising, none the less, the disarray of the traditional right, split between a faction willing to deal with the NF and a faction refusing deals. He pointed out that in five other regions last Friday NF councillors had elected five centre-right presidents (against the orders of the leaders of their own parties). The political bill for that support was due, he said.The Provencal rebels from the Gaullist RPR and liberal UDF alliance had expected one of their own to benefit from ultra-right support, like in the other regions. They refused to commit such a high-profile act of apostasy as voting for Mr Le Pen. The upshot was to make all the centre-right rebels look not just unscrupulous and dishonest but stupid: hardly the basis for a functioning alliance with the NF in any region.To muddle the situation even more, Mr Le Pen took his revenge by calling for the resignation of the former defence minister, Charles Millon, one of the centre-right rebels elected with NF support in the Rhones-Alpes region last week.