French divided as burkini ban goes to court
Salma, a 28-year-old French Muslim, was watching her son swim in the blazing afternoon sun at Cannes yesterday wearing a T-shirt and baggy shorts.
She usually prefers to cover her head but did not want to be chased off the beach by the local police.
‘‘I understand the emotion but this has gone beyond silly,’’ said the pharmacist’s assistant of the town’s ban on full-body beachwear.
The burkini ban on municipal beaches was imposed after the Bastille Day terrorist attack in nearby Nice.
On Monday local police acting on the orders of David Lisnard, the Cannes’ mayor, escorted a woman off the beach for wearing a hijab veil, not the clinging bodysuit that has been outlawed in some 20 resorts on the Cote d’Azur and other coastal towns. After another incident involving a veil-wearing woman in Nice, the burkini ban has triggered a national row which yesterday reached the council of state, the highest administrative court in Paris.
Its judges heard an appeal against the bans by rights organisations and were due to rule within hours.
The Nice administrative court ruled on Monday that the local ban in Villeneuve-Loubet was ‘‘necessary, appropriate and proportionate’’ to prevent public disorder after the murder of 85 in the Islamist truck attack in the city in July.
Discord also broke out in the socialist government yesterday when the Moroccan-born education minister Najat Vallaud-Belkacem spoke out against the government’s support for local bans.
‘‘There is nothing to prove that there is a link between the terrorism of Islamic State and what a woman wears on a beach,’’ said Vallaud-Belkacem. She said that right-wing mayors were using the bans to ostracise Muslims and risked stirring racism.
She was slapped down by Manuel Valls, the prime minister, who has backed the mayors, some of whom are fellow socialists, claiming that the full swimsuits were a political provocation and a symbol of women’s enslavement. ‘‘We are not at war with Islam the French republic is welcoming [to Muslims], we are protecting them against discrimination,’’ Valls said.
A poll for Le Figaro yesterday showed that 64 per cent of the French disapproved of the burkini on beaches; 30 per cent were indifferent.
On Cannes’ crowded beaches, foreign tourists said that they were bemused by the bans but few French disagreed with the measures. ‘‘After all the horror inflicted by these Islamists, we shouldn’t have this forced on us on the beach,’’ said Sophie Martinon, a visitor in her 40s from northern France. As she spoke, a patrol of four soldiers walked by, clutching automatic weapons. Attached to an adjacent lamppost fluttered a municipal ban on large bags and backpacks – terrorists’ favourite storage for bombs and assault rifles.
Left-wing politicians and intellectuals are split. Liberation, the main centre-left newspaper, opposes the ban, saying that outlawing Muslim dress on the beach was discrimination that would help extremists.
Support for the bans remains strong among conservatives. Nicolas Sarkozy, who is running for re-election to the presidency, said: ‘‘Wearing a burkini is a political militant act, a provocation. Women who wear it are testing the resistance of the republic.’’ He called for a national ban. Le Figaro called the burkini ‘‘the umpteenth manifestation of political Islam, militant, destructive, which is seeking to throw into question our way of life.
‘‘There is nothing to prove that there is a link between the terrorism of Islamic State and what a woman wears on a beach.’’ Moroccan-born education minister Najat Vallaud-Belkacem