March 31, 2002	Sunday	Muharram 16, 1423

PARIS: The Consultative Commission on Human Rights (CCHR), the governmental agency charged with closely watching the situation of human rights in France, has revealed in its just-published annual report a larger-than-expected increase in the number of anti-Muslim and anti-Arab racist acts in France, this largely the result of Sept 11.

The report also relays the conclusions of the European Observatory of Racist and Xenophobic Phenomena which also indicates a rise in the number of post-Sept 11 racist acts against Muslim and Arabs residing in the 15 member nations of the European Union.

The report says that of 163 acts “of intimidation and of a racist and xenophobic character,” reported for last year, most following Sept 11, fully 115 of them — or 70 percent — were made against persons originating from the Maghreb countries of Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria.

The figure, says the report, represents a “sharp rise” over the three previous years.

Still, notes the CCHR report, the situation in France, albeit much graver than in past years, is not as bad when compared to the overall situation of all 15 member states of the European Union, when it comes to aggressive behaviour “against mosques, Arab or Muslim organisations, or persons of Arab or Muslim extraction.”

The other major conclusion of the CCHR report is that the authors of the violence and racist threats “no longer belong exclusively to movements close to the extreme-right.” As for the 163 racist acts recorded last year, 45 of them (28 per cent), says the CCHR report, are attributed to persons who have nothing to do with extremist groups. The report, however, did not indicate, the particular identity of the new sources of racist behaviour.

Moreover, says Gerard Fellous, secretary-general of the Consultative Commission, commenting on the just-published report, La Lutte contre le Racisme et la Xenophobie (The Battle against Racism and Xenophobia), the true number of such racist acts is much more important than his statistics can indicate.

“Firstly, the true number of victims is difficult to evaluate, because racist acts have a way of being less visible than other such incidents.” Also, says Mr Fellous, as many of the acts are non-violent, and contrary to today’s explosion in Lille, do not leave a permanent trace, “few people end up reporting them to police, especially when you’re talking about insults made in the Metro, or those made in your neighbourhood.”

Overall, he says, in spite of France’s plethoric number of ethnic minorities, “Jews and Muslim remain the two principal groups that are subject to racist acts. But then, in spite of Sept 11, and the sharp rise in incidents that we expected, the rise — and regrettably there is an increase in the number of racist acts — is much less than the previous year — that coincided with the start of the second Intifada — which was a particularly violent year.”

One of the reasons ostensibly why Mr Fellous and the Consultative Commission on Human Rights chose this year to speak about the rise in the number of anti-Muslim racist acts in France was the large publicity given in recent weeks in reports coming out of Israel that claimed a larger-than-reported number of “anti-semitic” acts, indeed went so far as put the blame for them squarely on the back of the young men of Muslim origin who inhabit many of the low-cost housing projects around Paris and Lyons, two of the cities where the number of racist acts are reported to have occurred.

The CCHR’s report was given additional publicity this year because of the coincidence between its publication and the bombing last Sunday in Lille of a crowded Moroccan hallal butcher’s shop in the Wazemmes section of Lille, a part of the city that has a strong Muslim population. Six persons - four adults and two children — were injured and had to be hospitalised when a home-made bomb exploded in front of the entrance to the butcher’s shop at precisely 1210pm last Sunday.

The bomb — which was composed of black powder, an electrical circuit and a motorcycle battery — exploded at the very moment when the shop was most crowded, blowing out its front window. Several of the persons inside reported loss of hearing. According to an eyewitness Abedellah Assaidi, a salesperson at the butchery, “the panic lasted all of thirty seconds, because nobody knew what was happening. But order was soon reestablished.”

The explosive device had been placed under a stroller located in front of the butcher shop. The woman who’d just parked the stroller in order to enter the butchery had luckily taken her child with her inside, otherwise say police officials he certainly would have been killed. According to another eyewitness Yaya Dahmani, “we were very lucky that there were no deaths or more injuries. Luckily the bomb had not been placed inside the store.”

As for the man who left the bomb, he was able to escape but was seen by a number of eyewitnesses. In the words of the official placed in charge of the inquest into the bombing, Philippe Gosselin, a prosecutor for the Criminal court of Lille, “we now have to determine who and why. As far as we’ve been able to ascertain, the butchery (shop) had not been subject to any threats, and so far no organisation has yet taken responsibility for the attack.”

Mr Gosselin is being assisted in his investigation by a special criminal police squad, the SRPJ Lille. Its priority this week has been to determine the precise nature of the explosive used in the blast, to see whether it contains a “signature” similar to those observed on the explosive devices left by other extremist organisations.

For the moment, however, police refuse to characterize the bombing as anti-Arab or anti-Muslim, but Lille — a major metropolis located 130 miles north of Paris — having an important Muslim population, the possibility remains strong, they say, that an Arab public was particularly targeted.