Muslims take to the streets of Paris in protest at new French law
banning the wearing of niqabs and burqas in public
Angelique Chrisafis in Paris
Tuesday April 12 2011
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/apr/11/france-bans-burqa-and-niqab
Kenza Drider stood defiantly outside Notre Dame, adjusting her niqab
to reveal only a glimpse of her eyes. Scores of police with a riot van
and several lorries stood by as she and another woman in a niqab
staged a peaceful protest for the right "to dress as they please". On
the first day of France's ban on full Islamic face-coverings, this was
the first test.
"I'm not here to provoke, but to defend my civil liberties as a French
citizen," said Drider, a 32-year-old mother-of-four from Avignon,
accompanied by around 10 supporters. Japanese tourists and Spanish
schoolchildren fought their way through TV crews to get a picture of
the spectacle. Then police swooped.
Drider had not been stopped on her train journey into Paris. But as
she spoke to journalists at Notre Dame, she was led off by
plainclothes police and driven away along with two protest organisers.
Next a woman in a niqab in her 40s from a Paris suburb was grabbed by
a plain clothes officer, who gripped her tightly and frog-marchedher
to another police bus. Officers said the women were not detained for
their niqabs but because their protest had not been authorised.
Under the law promoted by Nicolas Sarkozy, any Muslim woman wearing a
face veil is now banned from all public places in France, including
when walking down the street, taking a train, going to hospital or
collecting her children from school. Women in niqabs will be
effectively under house arrest, allowed only inside a place of worship
or a private car, although they risk being stopped by traffic police
if they drive.
But several French police unions yesterday warned that the law was
almost impossible to enforce and that they would not make it a
priority to stop women in full veils walking down the street.
Halima, a 53-year-old mother from Villeneuve-Saint-Georges, who wears
a normal headscarf, was detained by police for standing silently with
the niqab-wearers at Notre Dame. She said: "This is the first time
I've ever protested over anything. I'm not in favour of the niqab, I
don't wear it myself. But it's wrong for the government to ban women
from dressing how they want. Islamophobia is on the rise in France.
First it's the niqab, then they'll ban the jilbab, then it will be
plain headscarves outlawed."
Rachid Nekkaz, aproperty developer and rights campaigner from the
Paris suburbs, was detained outside the Elys?e palace with a woman in
a niqab. Nekkaz, who organised the Notre Dame protest, had offered to
pay niqab wearers' fines for breaking the law. He said police had not
wanted to formally caution the woman for wearing a niqab.
Women in face veils risk a ?150 (?132) fine or citizenship lessons.
Police cannot forcibly remove face coverings in the street but can
order women to a police station to check their identity. The
government estimates between 350 and 2,000 women cover their faces in
France, out of a total Muslim population between four and six million.
Some niqab-wearers ? many of them French converts ? vowed to continue
going out and to take their cases to the European court of human
rights if stopped by police. Others have moved abroad, while just one
woman told French papers she had permanently removed her face
covering.
Another niqab wearer said women she knew would wear bird-flu-style
medical face masks and say they were ill in order to get round the law
against covering your face.
Shop-owners said luxury fashion boutiques near the Champs Elys?es were
unlikely to call the police to detain female tourists in niqabs from
the Gulf. This would create a two-tier system between rich tourists
and poor French people, one trader complained. Emmanuel Roux from the
police union, Syndicat des Commissaires de la Police Nationale, said
the law would be "infinitely difficult to apply" and "infinitely
little applied".
Sarkozy, whose polls are at record lows with next year's presidential
election looming, has been accused of stigmatising Muslims to boost
his support among far-right voters. Since he declared in 2009 that the
burqa was "not welcome in France", women in all forms of veils and
head coverings said verbal abuse against them had increased. Recently
the interior minister, Claude Gueant, suggested the growing number of
Muslims in France was a problem. Religious groups have likened current
Islamophobia in France to anti-Jewish feeling before the second world
war.
France has a strict separation of church and state and banned
headscarves and all religious symbols in schools in 2004.
Samy Debah, head of the French Collective against Islamophobia, said:
"The niqab law is a pretext to reduce the visibility of Muslims in
public spaces. It exposes an old French colonial reflex, that "Arabs
and blacks" only understand force and you can't talk to them."
guardian.co.uk Copyright (c) Guardian News and Media Limited. 2011
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