To Foreigners, Blast Confirms U.S. as Violent

A few days before a bomb rocked the Atlanta Olympics, editors and reporters at Munich’s respected Sueddeutsche Zeitung newspaper found themselves in a friendly back-and-forth over the prospects for a secure Games in the United States.

Sports Editor Michael Gernandt led the charge for the majority on the cosmopolitan staff, who thought the Atlanta Olympics seemed made for disaster--a drive-by shooting, an assault-rifle attack by a crazed gunman, a terrorist bomb blast or some other horror.

“[Gernandt] went down the list: Waco, [cult leader] David Koresh, the Unabomber,” recalled senior foreign affairs columnist Kurt Kister, ticking off a depressing roll call of American wackos and fringe elements. “He said that if something is going to happen at a modern Olympics, it will be at the Olympics in Atlanta.”

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Kister, who lived in the United States for five years, argued--to no avail--that the United States is much more complicated than its stereotyped foreign image: an anything-goes land blighted by gun-worshiping members of the National Rifle Assn.

When word reached Europe that the Atlanta Games had, in fact, been lethally stained by a crude nail bomb, Kister knew he had really lost the argument.

For his co-workers, at least, the bombing would only reinforce their sense of the United States as violent and vulnerable--a place even riskier, perhaps, than some of the countries Americans are accustomed to hearing, and shuddering, about on the evening news.

From the mean streets of Moscow to the shelled-out apartment blocks of Sarajevo, foreign observers are reacting with dismay and sympathy--but also with “I-told-you-so’s”--to word of the Atlanta blast, which came on the heels of the still-unsolved destruction of TWA Flight 800.

“The United States, Ireland, Israel--we are all in the same boat,” said Gabi Sheffer, a professor of political science at Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

“All sides have been hit equally by terrorism,” agreed Bosnian politician Ibrahim Spahic, writing in the Sarajevo daily Oslobodjenje.

Some see the Atlanta attack as merely the latest step in the United States’ inevitable initiation into a world of seemingly pointless terror that Europeans, Latin Americans and Asians have known for years.

But others, like Gernandt, were quick to see a link between the recent terrorist violence in the U.S. and other threads of the American social fabric: its unresolved racial tensions, its costly support of Israel, its resistance to unchecked powers for the police, and, most particularly and enduringly, its constitutional guarantee of the right to bear arms.

“We have our own problems with terrorists now, because of the war in Chechnya, but at least we don’t say everyone should be free to carry weapons and threaten others,” said Alla Smirnova, a 36-year-old office worker enjoying the sunshine on a park bench Sunday along Moscow’s leafy Boulevard Ring.

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To an American, the thought of a visit to present-day Russia probably conjures up lurid pictures of Mafiosi, subway bombings and political instability. But to Smirnova, the average Muscovite is far safer than his or her counterpart in the United States.

Civilian handgun ownership is still proscribed in Russia. And while possession of contraband weapons has spread since the return of the expeditionary army from Afghanistan in the late 1980s, spontaneous police searches and seizures offer a modicum of control that is absent in the U.S.

Thus, while Smirnova called the Atlanta bombing a tragedy, she said it was hardly unexpected.

“What will be a real tragedy is if our transition [from communism] brings all the negative elements of the Western lifestyle to our country, along with the good,” she said.

So, too, was the reaction in Beijing: Observers sympathized with America’s horror, but some also sneered at a superpower’s willingness--and seeming eagerness--to protect a lunatic fringe constitutionally.

“It’s awful,” 25-year-old hotel manager Li Shen-tong said of the Atlanta blast. “Thank God no Chinese people were hurt. The U.S. has too much democracy and freedom. It gives democracy and freedom to everybody, including the terrorists.”

From Argentina, however, came a special appreciation for the United States’ attempts to make public security compatible with civil liberties. In the Argentina of the 1960s and ‘70s, a spinning cycle of left-wing insurgency and right-wing repression produced an elaborate state-sponsored campaign of murder, kidnapping and torture known as the Dirty War.

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Argentine journalist and terrorism expert Sergio Kiernan recalled those times, saying people wouldn’t even leave their homes to buy a loaf of bread without their identification cards for fear of being stopped and arrested, even “disappeared,” by the police. The emotional public response to terrorism can encourage excessive responses by the state, he warned.

“In the passion of the moment, you tend not to think about your liberties,” he said. “That’s what happened here. The Latin American lesson is that you cannot break the [democratic] system in order to catch one terrorist.”

Britons, who have suffered 25 years of bombings at the hands of the Irish Republican Army and, to a lesser extent, its Protestant paramilitary counterparts, took a regretful, “Join the club, America,” stance upon hearing of the Atlanta bombing.

For most Fleet Street commentators, the blast was seen as the latest in a lengthening list of terrorist incidents in the United States: 1993’s World Trade Center bombing in New York, last year’s Oklahoma City federal building atrocity and, possibly, the TWA jetliner.

They did not say en masse, however, that the violence was the product or index of some underlying failure on the part of American society. (On the contrary, the British media have reserved their worst for the made-in-the-U.S.A. disorganization on offer at the Atlanta Olympics.)

“The American brand [of terrorism] seems to be a particularly virulent strain,” noted James Langton of the Sunday Telegraph. “At least the British government knows that the IRA wants a united Ireland when it lays waste a Manchester shopping center. . . . The threat to America is still nameless and faceless. An age of innocence is over.”

But whether they thought terrorism was new to the United States or merely a freakish manifestation of a strain of violence that had been there all along, observers abroad agreed that the U.S. should brace itself for more to come.

“Any society is open to terrorism,” said Kiernan, the Argentine. “I think you are in for a wave of terrorism, and you had better get used to it.”

Times staff writers Juanita Darling in Santiago, Cuba, Maggie Farley in Beijing, Tyler Marshall in Brussels, Sebastian Rotella in Buenos Aires, Mary Beth Sheridan in Mexico City, William Tuohy in London, Craig Turner in Toronto, Tracy Wilkinson in Vienna and Carol J. Williams in Moscow contributed to this story.