FRANCE/MIDDLE EAST: France is to send its foreign minister, Mr Michel Barnier, to the Middle East in a bid to save the lives of two journalists kidnapped by Iraqi militants who have demanded that Paris revokes its ban on the wearing of Muslim headscarves in school. Amelia Gentleman reports from Paris and Luke Harding from Baghdad
With the 48-hour ultimatum due to expire today, President Jacques Chirac and a team of ministers discussed how to respond to the crisis, but there was no hint that they planned to yield to the demands of an extremist group, the Islamic Army of Iraq.
In a televised address on Saturday, the kidnappers gave France two days to overturn a law, due to come into force this week, banning all conspicuous displays of religious faith in state schools, describing the legislation as "an aggression on the Islamic religion and personal freedoms".
There was no doubt about the gravity of the threat, three days after an Italian journalist, Enzo Baldoni, was killed by the same organisation.
"Today, the whole nation is united because the lives of two Frenchmen are at stake," Mr Chirac said in a short televised address yesterday evening, adding he had no more information about them.
"Backed up by this national unity, I solemnly call for the release of Christian Chesnot and Georges Malbrunot. Everything is being done and everything will be done in the coming hours and days to achieve this."
"The situation is serious," the prime minister, Mr Jean-Pierre Raffarin, said last night. "We have mobilised all our energy to secure the liberation of our compatriots who have been taken in such an odious manner."
Chesnot, a radio journalist, and Malbrunot, of Le Figaro, were seized on August 20th while travelling on the notoriously treacherous road between Baghdad and Najaf. Their employers had no information about their whereabouts until the Arabic television station al-Jazeera broadcast footage of them, looking tired and frightened, late on Saturday.
There was dismay in France that a nation which has vehemently opposed the conflict should be vulnerable to the same kind of violence used against countries participating in the war. But the government's decision in March to strengthen its secular principle in the face of rising Islamic extremism with a law banning the veil in schools was greeted with hostility in much of the Arab world.
Earlier this year Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden's deputy, accused France of "Crusader hatred" against Muslims, while an Islamist group called the legislation "a declaration of war to the Muslim world" and threatened "to plunge France into terror and remorse and spill blood outside its frontiers".
The interior minister, Mr Dominique de Villepin, defended the law, saying: "It is not directed at anyone but aims on the contrary at preserving everybody's freedom." Asked if France was ready to review the headscarf ban, a spokesman for the president's office said: "I don't think we are at that point for the moment." Ministers also held talks with Muslim leaders.
Mr Lhaj Thami Breze, head of the Union of French Islamic Organisations, which is encouraging schoolgirls to break the new law, stressed the headscarf issue was a domestic matter. "There can be no negotiations. France deserves thanks from Iraq, not punishment," he said.
Although little is known about the Islamic Army of Iraq, the journalists are almost certainly in the hands of a hard-line Sunni Islamist group with close links to the "resistance" in Fallujah.