The EU and Africa meet in Lisbon

Lorenz Jäger considers it notable that on the occasion of the EU-Africa summit European and African writers and intellectuals have come together to pen an open letter criticising the "political cowardliness" of statesmen for not talking about the humanitarian crises in Zimbabwe and Darfur. Jäger writes: "Even the fact that this letter addresses these two conflicts at the same time is a novelty. What we see in Zimbabwe is the failed experiment of a national and initially left-leaning freedom movement in which the expropriation and expulsion of white landowners has created massive food shortages, so that the country is now dependent on international aid. The fact that leftist intellectuals like Günter Grass, Jürgen Habermas, Dario Fo and Nadine Gordimer have signed the letter along with the more conservative British playwright Tom Stoppard and novelist John M. Coetzee, and that African writers like Wole Soyinka and Ben Okri also signed gives the open letter greater authority."

» to the homepage (external link, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung)
More from the press review on the subject » International Relations, » Africa, » Europe