French press review 6 August 2015

The inauguration of the expanded Suez Canal opens a new era in global trade, and Americans feel no remorse 70 years after the Hiroshima nuclear bomb that ended World War II.

Several papers mark the 70th anniversary of Hiroshima with historical references about the atomic bomb that helped end the Second World War.

On August 6, 1945, a B-29 of the US Air Force code-named Enola Gay, flying at a high altitude over Hiroshima, dropped a uranium bomb with a destruction force equivalent to six kilotonnes of TNT, killing an estimated 140,000 people on impact and after the effects of irradiation. About 74,000 more Japanese were to die three days later when the US army released a plutonium bomb on the port city of Nagazaki.

These were the very first nuclear attacks in history and Le Monde says that 70 years after the cataclysm unleashed by the United States, Japan has still not yet overcome the nuclear trauma. The evening newspaper publishes a special supplement on the nuclear scar that won’t heal, including testimonies by rare survivors who have struggled for years to overcome the physical and moral nightmare suffered since the bombing.

L’Humanité is entirely concentrated on Hiroshima with the title “August 6, 1945: Hell”. The coverage is complete with the background accounts about the long battle of the hibakusha, or people exposed to radiation, so that the world should never forget. Most of the survivors in their late 80s and 90s were kids and miraculously survived the nuclear attack despite the fact that their parents, homes and schools were situated just 1,400 metres from the epicentre of the bomb.

The Catholic daily La Croix also carries an unbelievable testimony by nuclear attack survivor Mishiko Hattori, now aged 86, who says she was able to have three normal children.

The Communist party publication concludes its coverage with a damning message to the world. We can’t keep calling for peace while at the same time keep inventing weapons of mass destruction and creating the conditions of an apocalypse, it says.

Le Figaro says that the Americans have maintained the same vision of history they had when they treated the pilots as heroes on their return. For the conservative newspaper, Washington’s message at the time was clear – the courage of the pilots saved millions of American lives.

As Le Figaro recalls, public opinion remained unruffled even after the New Yorker published journalist John Hersey’s Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative report on the horrors experienced by the Japanese as well as several other highly critical reports about the Americans’ use of the nuclear weapon.

Le Figaro reports that up to 56 per cent of Americans polled by the PEW Center believe the nuclear bombing was justified while 79 per cent of the Japanese differ. The survey has helped shape the right-wing publication’s position that there is still no national remorse on this issue considered in the United States as a dogma.

The inauguration with pomp and pageantry of an expanded Suez Canal this Friday by Egyptian leader Abdel Fattah al-Sisi in the presence of several foreign leaders including Francois Hollande of France inspires a series of comments by the national dailies.

It’s a prestige operation for al-Sisi who dreams of becoming his country’s new Nasser, according to the Catholic daily La Croix. Gamal Abdel Nasser was the revered Egyptian leader (from 1956 to 1970) who restored national pride in his country by nationalising the Suez Canal.

But Egyptian political scientist Rabab el-Mahdi argues that there is a certain sense of nostalgia about the Canal even among people who weren’t born at the time, adding that a great part of al-Sisi’s popularity stems from his copying of Nasser’s record as the great builder.

For Libération, al-Sisi is banking on the waterway to attract foreign investors, fan the patriotic flame and establish his authority over the crisis-ravaged country.

Le Figaro joins the celebration of the “Egyptian exploit” of doubling the size of the 37km waterway in just about a year, a task which had looked like a “pharaonic” project. Traffic in the canal is due to increase to 97 ships per day instead of 49 prior to the works. Admiral Mohab Mamish, head of the Suez Canal Authority, says they are projecting on 13.2 billion dollars (12.1 billion euros) in generated revenue within the next 10 years against 5.3 billion dollars today.