France fighting burkini terror on the beaches
Is this really happening in France, the home of human rights, asks Rory Mulholland from Nice.
On Friday morning I was on the beach in Nice, at the spot where that nowinfamous photo was taken of a Muslim woman surrounded by armed police who looked like they were making her take her top off.
There were rumours that the photo had somehow been staged and I was sniffing around to see if there was any truth to that. (I think not, for what it’s worth.)
As I chatted to a man who ran a shop there, a middle-aged Moroccan woman wearing a grey headscarf came up and asked if she was allowed to go on to the beach.
Has it really come to this? A grown woman has to ask if she can go and sit on a public beach? Could this really be France, the country whose leaders never miss an opportunity to state that theirs is le pays des droits de l’homme?
The woman, a civil servant in Morocco who was visiting her daughter, a student at university in Nice, said she didn’t want to swim. She just wanted to sit on the beach with her husband and enjoy the morning sun. But neither I nor the shop-owner were able to say if she’d be able to do that without an awkward conversation with men in uniforms.
Come with me, I said. Just a few metres away was a sort of summer beach camp for under-privileged kids, run by police officers. We shall ask there.
The eight officers on duty, all clad in beach gear for their summer job, were munching on roast chicken and paying precious little attention to the kids splashing about in the water.
When my new Moroccan friend meekly asked her question, the police naturally suspected a set-up due to the presence of a foreign journalist.
‘‘C’est une provocation!’’ snarled a blonde policewoman. The officer in charge then intervened to deliver a short lecture on ‘‘mixite sociale’’ and the virtues of the secular state, before washing his hands of the affair.
This part of the beach is being used as a summer camp for children so you can’t go there, he said, suggesting she ask police somewhere else.
I wished her luck and said goodbye. Off she and her husband went, walking along the boardwalk of the Promenade des Anglais, looking for permission to enjoy the beach.
The burkini ban that so troubled my Moroccan acquaintance was declared illegal just a few hours later. Islamic swimwear was not, after all, a security threat.
That was the ruling delivered on Friday afternoon by France’s highest court. It had been asked to examine a specific burkini ban – in the Riviera resort of VilleneuveLoubet – but its decision was likely to be applied in all places where the prohibition was in force. I headed over to Villeneuve-Loubet to hear what its mayor had to say about that.
Lionnel Luca, like many of the burkini-banning mayors, is an ally of Nicolas Sarkozy, who is accused of stealing the ideas of the farRight Front National in the hope of getting re-elected as president next year.
Luca emerged from his town hall to declare himself appalled at the court’s ruling, which allowed ‘‘rampant Islamism’’ to gain more ground in France.
The handful of journalists present, all French, were giving him an easy ride and avoiding what seems to many to be the obvious question about the ban.
Did your ban target only Muslims, I asked, or if a Catholic nun had turned up on your beach in her habit, would you have ordered the police to remove her? He turned to glare at me.
‘‘I don’t know what it’s like wherever you come from,’’ he said, with more than a hint of contempt in his voice, ‘‘but that doesn’t often happen here.’’
Asmall stretch of the Promenade des Anglais is still cordoned off to protect the candles, photos, fluffy toys and other objects left there as an informal shrine to the 86 people mown down by a man driving a truck last month.
But on the beach below, tourists and locals alike get on with the serious business of sun worship. And here at the city’s picturesque flower market, as I sit in the Cafe des Fleurs to write this piece and idly watch shoppers pick out their bouquets, terror and the many other ills that plague France seem to be far from people’s minds. The country has its problems and its worries, to be sure, but for all that it remains a remarkably pleasant place to spend time. A Russian priest who has climbed Everest and rowed solo across the Atlantic has revealed plans to ascend 25 kilometres into the stratosphere in a helium balloon.
Fyodor Konyukhov, 64, set a world record for the fastest circumnavigation of the globe in a hot-air balloon this summer and will follow this with his ascent attempt scheduled for next year.
The record for the highest balloon flight was set by an Indian businessman at 21km in 2005.
Konyukhov, who was ordained a priest in the Orthodox church in 2010, hopes to set a heroic example for others to follow. ‘‘I want younger generations to be inspired to push themselves to the limit and to love this world of ours,’’ he said.
‘‘Having gone round it I can say the world is smaller than you think and yet we don’t do enough to safeguard it.’’
It is only weeks since Konyukhov completed an 11-day, 33,800km balloon voyage around the world, starting and finishing in Australia.
He endured mishaps and extremes of temperature including a dip to minus 50 degrees Celsius.
‘‘There are moments when you think this is it, it’s the end, but then with God’s help you get through them.’’