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PARIS, Jan 22: French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin said on Thursday a planned ban on religious symbols in state schools had caused Paris problems with Arab countries and the United States , government sources said.
Mr Villepin told cabinet colleagues during a government meeting that the law, meant primarily to banish Muslim headscarves from state schools, had put Paris in "a very delicate situation on the international scene", they said.
French foreign policy was now in "an awkward position ... towards Arab countries, and also towards the United States", they quoted him as saying. Mr Villepin recently defended the looming ban on a tour of the Gulf states, where there have been demonstrations and hostile press reaction against what was seen there as discrimination against France's five million Muslims.
The US ambassador for religious freedom, John Hanford, voiced misgivings last month, citing Muslims who said the ban went too far. "We are very concerned that that not be the case," he told reporters in Washington.
Few commentators abroad seem able to follow the particularly French logic that says the ban reinforces respect and tolerance for all religions by keeping all of them out of schools. Many see it as a violation of religious freedom.
The planned ban, which if passed would bar Muslim veils, Jewish skullcaps and large Christian crosses from September, has provoked protests from Muslim leaders and criticism from other religions in France.
It prompted Pope John Paul to make a barbed reference last week to "some European countries" that endangered religious freedom, a rare criticism that provoked an equally unusual rebuke from the French official who first proposed the ban.
GERMAN PRESIDENT: German President Johannes Rau on Thursday spoke out against draft bills in some states to ban public servants from wearing headscarves, saying they could be unconstitutional.
Mr Rau, in a speech at the northern town of Wolfenbuettel, said he believed that any law banning a symbol of one religion "is not compatible with freedom of religion guaranteed by the constitution".
"It would open a door that even those who favour banning headscarves would not want," he said. "I fear that it could become a first step toward a secular state, which would ban religious symbols and signs from public places. I don't want that," said Mr Rau, a member of Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's Social Democrats party.
Mr Schroeder said last month that he was opposed to public servants wearing headscarves, but was not against students wearing them in schools. But Mr Rau has the support of the Greens Party, the junior partners in Gerhard Schroeder's coalition.-Reuters / AFP
