PARIS — On the eve of the second round of presidential elections tomorrow, French Muslims say they’re in a quandary as to what will be their place in France once presidential and legislative elections are over with in late June.

True, Jacques Chirac, who has been close to the Islamic community, and indeed won the support of all major Islamic organizations for the first round of elections April 21, is expected to be handily re-elected to a new five-year term come Sunday, and this, say pollsters, with as much as 80 percent of the vote.

If, however, the French Muslim community is so concerned in recent days, it’s because Chirac, who will have been elected with the support not only of the traditionally pro-Arab Gaullist right, is also being elected with the support of French socialists, all of whose leaders have asked the socialist electorate to vote for Chirac as a way of "barring the road" to extremist National Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen.

Ostensibly in return for the gesture, Chirac has spared no effort to condemn French "anti-Semitism," and took note recently of a French police report according to which 350 incidents of "anti-Semitic" activity had been reported in only a few days last month.

Islamic community leaders are concerned too because Chirac is also attempting to win votes away from Le Pen, who has placed much of the blame for criminality in France on young Muslim who inhabit the country’s poorer suburbs on the periphery of such cities as Paris, Marseilles and Lyons.

Only a few weeks ago, Chirac would have also spoken out against anti-Arab behavior, which is also flagrant in France, but his remarks — undoubtedly as a function of the need he perceives of attracting the traditionally strong pro-Israeli support of French socialist voters — have in recent days been limited to incidents in which Jews have been attacked or Jewish places of worship have been the target of vandals.

Notes one prominent Islamic leader who requested he not be identified: "Where was Chirac last weekend when two youths, one of them a government employee working for French National Railways, threw a Molotov cocktail against a mosque at Chalons-en-Champagne" in the eastern part of France? True, he notes, the two youth were arrested, but the French president, he notes, "who in the past would have immediately condemned such an act, did not utter the slightest condemnation nor the slightest statement of support for the Arab and Islamic communities, who because of the presence of Le Pen in the second-round vote, continue to be the target also of extremist violence."

To add insult to injury, he notes, the two men did not hide their affiliation with the local chapter of the National Front. "It was a golden opportunity for Chirac to take a further distance from Le Pen," notes the Islamic community leader, "but there too he seems to have forgotten he received our overwhelming support for the first-round vote, when undoubtedly we helped him maintain his three-point lead against Le Pen."

"Without our support," notes the leader, "isn’t it conceivable that he, and not Jospin, might have ended up in third place?"

Another incident has also left Islamic community leaders in a quandary as to what role they will play once presidential and legislative elections are all over as of late June. The Muslim community, which was to elect next May 26 its first representative council, the Conseil Representatif du Culte Musulman (CRCM), quite sadly decided this week to postpone indefinitely the elections, given its inability to receive the support of the Grande Mosquee de Paris, and this after the extensive efforts of community leaders to come through with a joint position in the matter.

Here too, President Chirac is being held responsible by community leaders for the decision to postpone the elections, as in the past, they say, he would have certainly intervened to see to it that French Muslims are at last accorded the same status as France’s other major traditional religions. The Grande Mosquee, which until now had represented the interests of the French Muslims, is considered as partial to the interests of one country, Algeria, which has always held the upper hand in guiding the destinies of the mosque, also in naming its rector, who is presently Dalil Boubakeur.

Also, the Grande Mosquee and its rector are considered not only close to Algeria, but also to the French right, and notably President Chirac.

The French president became in early April the first head of state in 76 years to set foot in the Grande Mosquee, located on the Left Bank of Paris.

Indeed, sources within the French Interior Ministry, which two years ago under the control of the French Socialist Party had come up with the idea of giving the French Muslim community a truly representational assembly which would not be under the influence of a single country, say that the Grande Mosquee refuses to accord its support to the CRCM for the simple reason it knows that within the larger assembly its own interests would be overshadowed.

The other major Islamic representational institution, the Union des Organisations Islamiques de France (UOIF), which is close to the Muslim Brotherhood, is also known to have the favors of the French Socialist Party, which was instrumental in coming up with the idea of a larger assembly, the CRCM, which was to represent all the major tendencies of Islam in France, but in which the UOIF was expected to predominate, thus giving it an institution, unlike the Grande Mosquee, whose political color would be more to its liking.

Many French Muslims had hoped that the election would go through, for the CRCM would have been authorized to represent all Muslims before the French government and could have resolved a number of thorny problems, among them the construction of mosques in France, also the acceptance of such rituals as Aid-El-Kebir, and the training and naming of imams in France.

The willingness by the French Muslim community to have the elections and the CRCM is evidenced in the decision by more than 1500 mosques to take part in the vote. They in turn had already named 4000 delegates to meet May 26 to vote for the creation of the representative council. But, it was the decision by Boubakeur and the Grande Mosquee to boycott the elections that prompted the French Interior Ministry to call them off and postpone them indefinitely.

As matters now stand, the earliest that elections could be held is next fall, this largely because their holding would have to be decided on and undertaken by the new French government, which will be elected late June, this in the wake of legislative elections on June 9 and 16 that are expected to be dominated by the French right.

French Islamic leaders say, however, that all is not lost, and that perhaps Chirac, if ever he does not obtain, as is expected a majority during the all-important legislative elections scheduled for June 9 and 16, may very well suddenly realize that he needs the support of French Muslims, who constitute an important voting bloc, when the time comes to bar the way to French socialists who are already organizing an important campaign of support for their own legislative candidates.

Still, the French Islamic leaders seem to believe that one day or another President Chirac will remember the debt he owes to the country’s Muslim community which has supported him over the many years he was head of state, prime minister, and mayor of the city of Paris.

They’ve not yet forgotten the "historic gesture" he made in early April when he became the first French president since 1926 to visit the Grande Mosquee de Paris, France’s leading Islamic place of worship. "It is indeed an historic gesture," said Dalil Boubakeur, the rector of the Mosquee at the time, in welcoming Chirac to the edifice located in the fifth arrondissement of Paris, not far away from the Institut du Monde Arabe.

The French president was undertaking the visit not only to stress his personal longtime ties to the Arab world, as well as those of the Gaullist party which he heads, but also to attempt to ensure that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict does not get imported onto the French soil, in any case any more than it has been in recent days.

It is a message that Chirac had already transmitted to Israel when in early April he summoned Ambassador Eli Barnavi to the Elysee Palace to remonstrate with him over the pro-Israeli solidarity marches that took place in Paris the previous Sunday and which resulted in Jewish extremists assaulting several journalists, bloodying up a young Arab boy who was simply crossing the street, and stabbing a policeman in the abdomen who required hospitalization.

At the Grande Mosquee, in front of a crowded assembly, Chirac declared that "I will not permit any external conflict to set up one Frenchman against other Frenchmen," referring to the fact that a good portion of France’s Islamic population had chosen to acquire French nationality." Chirac also insisted that the places of worship of all religions in France — be they synagogues, mosques, temples or churches — be spared the profanation to which some of the religious edifices had become victim in recent weeks.

In reaction to Chirac’s words, the assembly cheered him on, intoning such words as "Chirac President," but also "Chirac Peace in the Middle East" and "Chirac to Ramallah."

Reacted an aide to the French president who was surprised by the explosive support for Chirac: "You would think we were at an election rally." The president also reiterated the introductory words of Boubakeur who had noted that the French Islamic community happened to be "tolerant, open to dialogue with other religions, and refuses to belong to any movement that does not uphold France’s republican values, and are, above all, totally opposed to any and all forms of extremism.

Chirac also profited from the occasion to render homage to the combatants from such Islamic countries as Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia and Senegal, who had fought in the name of France in past wars, notably World War I. He also implied that he would continue to recognize the pre-eminence accorded the Grande Mosquee and its rector as the French government’s principal interlocutor in questions relating to Islamic affairs.

The French president had also — before the first-round elections — repeatedly expressed his satisfaction over the support he received from the 350,000 voters who represent the Harkis, the Algerian combatants who had fought on the side of France during its war with Algeria that ended forty years ago with the Evian Accords of 1962. Earlier this year, the Harkis had sent letters to the principal French presidential candidates asking them to express themselves on a number of questions with regard to the Harkis and their situation in France, where many feel that their role in the Algerian war has never been appropriately recognized.

In the words of Boussad Azni, president of the Comite National de Liaison des Harkis, "Jacques Chirac was the only candidate to reply in writing to our questionnaire, and who also had the honesty to tell us that he would support our demands but not all of them, only two-thirds of them."

Among the promises that Azni said President Chirac has made to the Harkis is the introduction before parliament by year’s end of a law that would not only improve the conditions under which the Harkis have to exist on French soil, but also declare Sept. 25 as a national day of homage to the Harkis who took France’s side during its bloody war with Algeria.

Only a few days before, Chirac had received the support of another major association of French Muslims, the Conseil national des Francais Musulmans (CNFM), which claims to represent 85 percent of the 2.7 million French citizens of Muslim extraction. In the words of its President Hamlaoui Mekachera, the CNFM said that it was throwing its support behind Chirac in the upcoming presidential elections and would be recommending that French Muslim vote for Chirac who, he noted, "is the candidate who has done the most for the French Muslim community."

According to Mekachera, this is the second time that the National Council has called upon its members to vote for Chirac, who has, in his words, "taken seriously our concerns, indeed upon being elected president in 1995, immediately named an inter-ministerial council on integration," which was presided over by Mekachera, a council which went on to "undertake a major battle against discrimination, create a special free telephone number where complaints could be lodged, also promote the idea of more ethnic integration in French public housing."

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