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France races against clock in Iraq hostage crisis
France scrambled to secure the freedom of two French journalists kidnapped by Iraqi militants who gave Paris until Monday evening to drop its controversial ban on Muslim headscarves in schools.
The militant group, which last week said it killed Italian journalist Enzo Baldoni, Saturday gave the French government 48 hours to rescind the headscarf ban, without saying what would happen to the two Frenchmen if it did not comply.
"I call for their release in the name of the principles of humanity and respect for human beings which are at the very heart of the message of Islam and Muslim religious practice," Barnier told reporters at the French embassy in Cairo.
The crisis over the French journalists stunned France which won Russian and German support last year in its high-profile campaign against the U.S.-led war in Iraq and because of this considered itself safe from militant attack.
"Their kidnapping is incomprehensible to all those who know that France, the country of origin of human rights, is a land of tolerance and of respect for others," Barnier said before seeing Arab League chief Amr Moussa and Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit.
"France has always opposed the vision of a clash between the West and Islam," said Barnier, who along with other French officials was entrusted with trying to secure the journalists' release. The minister did not give other details of his trip.
Chesnot of Radio France Internationale and Malbrunot, who writes for the dailies Le Figaro and Ouest France, disappeared on Aug. 20 on their way from Baghdad to Najaf, the day after Baldoni was taken hostage.
CRISIS DRAGS FRANCE INTO IRAQ
"France, due to its position on the war in Iraq, could have hoped it was safe," Le Figaro said in an editorial Monday. "This was not the case."
President Jacques Chirac, who sent Barnier to the Middle East and made a televised appeal for the journalists' release, postponed Monday's talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder.
The Foreign Ministry said its secretary-general, Hubert Colin de Verdiere, left for Baghdad Sunday night for separate talks aimed at securing the hostages' release.
Diplomats in Iraq said that, while Barnier's Middle East trip was a very public response to the kidnappings, private contacts with the kidnappers could be the most effective way of trying to secure the release of the two journalists.
Most countries that have had citizens taken hostage in Iraq have used Iraqi intermediaries to try to contact kidnap groups and open a channel for negotiations.
Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, the Arab world's largest Islamist organization but officially banned in Egypt, said in a statement it condemned the kidnappings.
"The Muslim Brotherhood demands the two French journalists kidnapped in Iraq be freed, especially as there is no proof of their involvement in any activity against the law and order, but rather they were participating in exposing the occupation and its practices," the group said.
FRANCE UNITES AGAINST KIDNAPPERS
French critics and defenders of the ban on Muslim headscarves in schools united in support of the law Monday, pledging to stand firm against the kidnappers. Representatives of France's five-million strong Muslim community, the largest in Europe, have denied any link with the militant Islamic Army in Iraq. Fouad Alaoui, secretary general of an Islamic group that had previously urged schoolgirls to defy the French headscarf ban, recommended Monday that they refrain from openly flouting the law. "This episode must not lead to a further radicalization of the situation in France," Alaoui told RTL radio. A group of Arab intellectuals called for a demonstration of support for the journalists at RFI's headquarters Monday. France passed the law in March in reaction to the growing influence of Islamist activists and tensions between Muslim and Jewish youths in schools. The law also banned Jewish skullcaps and large Christian crosses. It was widely condemned as a flagrant breach of religious freedom, in countries such as the United States and Britain as well as across the Muslim world. The French government, which rejected the criticism, said there was no question of the law being revoked. "It will be applied," government spokesman Jean-Francois Cope told Canal Plus television. |
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