France: Head scarf law to stay

2004-08-30 17:13

Paris - France vowed on Monday to press ahead with a controversial law banning Islamic head scarves in schools, despite demands by militants holding two French journalists hostage in Iraq.

Government spokesperson Jean-Francois Cope told Canal Plus television France would not compromise its values to win the release of the journalists.

Militants claiming to hold them demanded the law be overturned within 48 hours - a deadline that expires late on Monday.

"The law will be applied," Cope said, rejecting the militants' warning.

The head scarf law goes into effect when school resumes this week.

It forbids public school students from wearing "conspicuous" religious apparel.

Jewish skullcaps and large Christian crosses will also be banned, but the true target of the law are head scarves - seen by authorities as a sign of rising Muslim fundamentalism in France.

The journalists, Christian Chesnot and Georges Malbrunot, were last heard from on August 19, just before driving from Baghdad to the southern city of Najaf.

In a video aired on Arab TV station Al-Jazeera on Saturday, militants calling themselves the Islamic Army of Iraq demanded France revoke the law banning head scarves in public schools, calling it "an aggression on the Islamic religion and personal freedoms."

They gave no ultimatum, Al-Jazeera said.

The station showed a brief tape of the journalists saying they were in captivity - the first word on their fate since they disappeared.

A militant group with a similar name to the one holding the French journalists is believed to be responsible for the death last week of Italian freelance journalist Enzo Baldoni.

Prior to his murder, the group had said it could not guarantee his safety unless Italy announced within 48 hours that it would withdraw its troops from Iraq.

French President Jacques Chirac vowed on Sunday to spare no effort to secure the reporters' freedom and dispatched Foreign Minister Michel Barnier to the Middle East.

Insurgents in Iraq have kidnapped dozens of people in their campaign to drive out coalition forces and hamper reconstruction, demanding that the hostages' nations pull their troops out of Iraq if coalition members, or that foreign companies end operations there.

But the demand to end the head scarf ban was the first time hostage-takers sought to reverse a nation's domestic law.

- AP