PARIS, 22 March 2003 — France issued a stern warning to its rebellious Muslim youths yesterday not to take the Iraq war as a pretext to raise tensions with other religious groups, especially the country’s large Jewish community.
“This is not our conflict. It must not be imported into France,” Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy told Europe 1 radio in comments clearly aimed at disaffected young Muslims.
“We will not accept any confrontation between communities, neither by words nor by attitudes, and least of all by acts.”
France, home to Europe’s largest Muslim and Jewish minorities, is deeply concerned that the US-led attack on Iraq could lead radicals among its Muslim and Arab population to take revenge by attacking Jewish synagogues, schools and shops.
France saw a wave of anti-Semitic attacks last year, mostly by youths of North African origin outraged by the flare-up of violence between Israelis and Palestinians in the Middle East.
The center-right government elected last year vowed to tackle the problem aggressively rather than play it down like the previous left-wing leaders, whose slow response was heavily criticized by Jewish groups in France and the United States.
Sarkozy, speaking after boosting domestic security measures because of the war in Iraq, said he had met Jewish and Muslim leaders on Thursday to discuss calming tensions between the two communities, which often live side-by-side in poorer suburbs.
“All called on their co-religionists to be responsible,” said Sarkozy, who has ordered extra security for about 2,000 Jewish and Muslim buildings in France. “Muslim representatives took courageous, reasonable and responsible stands.”
Muslims, who account for five million of the 60 million population, represent the second religion in this traditionally Catholic country. There are about 600,000 Jews in France. The minister said he had also instructed a meeting of prefects, Paris’s senior officials on the ground across France, to be extra vigilant for any Muslim-Jewish tensions.
“We cannot accept that (this war) translates into confrontations between communities,” he insisted.
Sarkozy urged the French not to adopt racist arguments such as saying that Muslims are terrorists, or that Muslims — mostly immigrants or children of Arab immigrants from North Africa — had no right to practice their religion in France.
Sarkozy’s warning was the iron fist inside a velvet glove of recent statements trying to head off violence from unemployed Muslim youths in tense slum areas ringing France’s cities. Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin appealed to French Christians on Thursday not to be afraid of Islam, while leaders of France’s Roman Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox churches called for interfaith dialogue with Jews and Muslims.
