Date Posted: Monday, August 30, 2004

Demonstrators including journalists and members of the Muslim community gather on the Trocadero Esplanade in Paris

Paris (Masnet & News Agencies) - As thousands took to the streets in France to demonstrate, French Foreign Minister Michel Barnier visited Egypt as part of a mission to rally support in Iraq and the region. He made an impassioned plea to the Islamic Army in Iraq to free Christian Chesnot and Georges Malbrunot.

The group, which last week said it had killed Italian journalist Enzo Baldoni, Saturday gave the French government 48 hours to rescind the headscarf ban, without saying what would happen to the two Frenchmen if it failed to comply.

"We will continue, come what may, to follow all contacts ... with civil and religious personalities to explain the reality of the French republic ... and obtain the release of these people," Barnier said in Cairo.

Iraqi Sunni and Shi'ite Muslim groups and Islamic groups outside Iraq urged the kidnappers to release the journalists, noting France's opposition to the U.S.-led Iraq war and saying journalists were not combatants.

The crisis stunned France, which campaigned against the 2003 invasion of Iraq and so had considered itself relatively safe from militant attack. France also opposed the 1990-2003 economic sanctions on Iraq.

Chesnot of Radio France Internationale and Malbrunot, who writes for the dailies Le Figaro and Ouest France, disappeared on Aug. 20 on their way from Baghdad to Najaf; the day after Baldoni was seized.

Protests were held across Paris against the kidnappings while French diplomats explored possible solutions.

Many Muslim women in headscarves joined French protests for the newsmen’s release. Some 200 people took to the streets of eastern Strasbourg and about 3,000 protested in Paris.

"The hostage-taking risks making public opinion in France turn against women and girls who wear headscarves," one of the veiled protesters in Paris said in front of the headquarters of Radio France Internationale, for which Chesnot works.

Barnier said Foreign Ministry Secretary-General Hubert Colin de Verdiere arrived in Baghdad Monday for crisis talks. Barnier is expected to visit Amman and Qatar, but not Iraq.

"France's position toward Iraq is good. But we also are against kidnapping all journalists," said Sheikh Abdel Sattar Abdel Jabbar, a top official in the Muslim Clerics Association. "We call on the kidnappers to release them immediately."

French diplomats Monday met members of the Sunni group which was formed after Saddam Hussein was toppled and has intervened in the past to win the release of kidnapped journalists. Iraqi Shi'ite groups also called for the Frenchmen's release.

Outside Iraq, Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, the Arab world's largest Islamist organization, and the Federation of Arab Journalists spoke out against the kidnapping.

Cairo's prestigious Sunni seat of learning, al-Azhar and Lebanon's top Shi'ite cleric Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah also condemned the action.

Qatar-based satellite channel Al Jazeera, which aired a tape Saturday showing the two kidnapped Frenchmen and which has regularly broadcast similar tapes of hostages, said all kidnapped journalists should be released.

"This clearly means a call for the immediate release of the French journalists held hostage," Al Jazeera spokesman Jihad Ballout said.

French critics and defenders of the ban on Muslim headscarves in schools united in support of the kidnapped journalists, pledging to stand firm against the kidnappers.

France passed the law in March in reaction to the growing influence of Islamist activists and tensions between Muslim and Jewish youths in schools. The law also bans Jewish skullcaps and large Christian crosses.

Leaders of France's five-million strong Muslim community, the largest in Europe, have denied any link with the militant Islamic Army in Iraq.

Fouad Alaoui, secretary-general of an Islamic group that had previously urged schoolgirls to defy the headscarf ban, recommended Monday they refrain from flouting the law. The French government said there was no question of the law being revoked.