November 11, 2003	Tuesday	Ramazan 15, 1424

PARIS: France’s bishops, assembled at Lourdes for their episcopal conference, have declared their “hostility” to any law that would attempt to legislate with regard to the wearing of the Islamic veil in French schools.

According to Monsignor Joseph Dore, the Archbishop of Strasbourg as well as a spokesman for the conference which ended on Monday, “we feel that we’ve reached a satisfactory equilibrium after a century of secularity in France and fear that this delicate balance would be upset by the emergence of fundamentalist currents in the country.”

The episcopal conference also fears that on the eve of the centenary of the 1905 decision officially separating church and state in France that a new law would call into question many of the rights and prerogatives that the Church feels it’s acquired in French public schools, hospitals and prisons, among them the presence of a chaplain, not to mention the “good relations we’ve established with our elected officials,” notes Monsignor Dore, as well as “the right to manage the churches and other buildings that are theoretically owned by the French State, as well as the legal status of Catholic institutions which hold contracts with the French government.”

OPINION POLL: The episcopal conference’s strong statement against the proposed law comes just as 55 per cent of respondents to a poll say that they are favourable to a law on the wearing of religious signs of affiliation in French schools. According to the poll, done by the CSA polling organisation for this weekend’s issue of Le Figaro Magazine, only 40 per cent of those questioned said they were opposed to any such law.

The Bishops’ statement denouncing a possible law comes in the wake of revelations made last week on French public TV according to which both President Jacques Chirac and Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin had come to an agreement that France should adopt a law effectively banning the wearing of the Islamic veil in French schools and in public places. This agreement has come about several weeks before a final report on secularity in France is to be filed by commission chairman Bernard Stasi.

According to the TV report as anchored by Daniel Bilalian, given the decision that has been taken by the French head of state and prime minister, all that needs to be worked out now is the precise language and the scope of the proposed law which President Chirac has insisted be “as general as possible,” according to Mr Bilalian.

Only last month during a speech at Valenciennes Mr Chirac already had given a hint of a change of feeling when he told a local audience that “secularity in France is something that is not negotiable,” even if that means giving the country a new law that would effectively resolve the issue of the wearing of external signs of religion in French schools and offices.

A presidential source quoted in the France 2 news report indicated in fact that Mr Chirac was thinking in terms of a law that not only would ban external signs of religious affiliation in French schools, but also signs of one’s political affiliation.

For the moment, Mr Chirac’s and Mr Raffarin’s support of a law has resulted in little political rejection of the idea, if only that a leading opponent of such laws, Maxim Gremetz, a high-level member of the French Communist Party who told an interviewer from France 2 today that “a law won’t give schoolteachers any more means to fight the practice than they already have.”

If the decision taken by Mr Chirac to give France a law on the wearing of external signs of religious and political affiliation doesn’t come as much of a surprise, it’s largely because it follows several weeks of political debate on the issue and the espousal of the idea of a law by the very same French political leaders who only last summer had publicly expressed their disapproval of such a measure, saying that a law was not the best way to tackle a problem that had grown in recent months by leaps and bounds and should be handled differently, for example, on a case by case basis.

But, in recent weeks the country’s most prominent leaders, of all political colours, had begun to publicly call for enactment of a law that would forbid the wearing of all external signs of religion in French classrooms, as well as in governmental offices, where many Muslim employees have begun in recent weeks to wear their veils to work.

The spokesman for the rightwing UMP (Union pour un mouvement populaire) political movement that controls the French executive and parliament has indeed gone on record this weekend as saying that “a legislative text is desirable if our political project is the reaffirmation of the principle of secularity and of integration.”

Francois Baroin, the official UMP spokesman, went on to warn in an interview with French weekly newspaper Le Journal du Dimanche that if the country did not adopt a new law in the matter, “we will slide into an Anglo-Saxon style of society, which will authorize the existence of separate religious communities, with all the exorbitant dispensations that such a system authorizes not only in common law, but also in public transportation, indeed community swimming pools, as well as hospitals, a situation which has nothing to do either with our history or with our culture.”