| |
Muslim graves desecrated in
French WW-I cemetery
Monitoring Report
VANDALS desecrated 148 graves in the Muslim section of a military
cemetery in northern France, hanging a pig’s head on one of the
headstones, police said on Sunday.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy called the attack “a hateful act”
and around 100 police were sent to the Notre-Dame de Lorette
cemetery near Arras to hunt for clues.
State prosecutor Jean-Pierre Valensi said the vandals struck
overnight, daubing insults on the graves. “They directly referred to
Islam and there were also insults directed at the justice minister,”
Valensi said, referring to Rachida Dati, whose parents came from
North Africa.
The desecration came almost exactly a year after youths daubed Nazi
inscriptions and swastikas on Muslim tombs in the same cemetery in
Ablain Saint-Nazaire.
France’s political class united in denouncing the vandalism. “This
is a most unacceptable act of racism and the president shares the
pain of France’s Muslim community,” Sarkozy’s office said in a
statement. Prime Minister Francois Fillon called it a “revolting
act” and said those responsible would be found.
Police arrested two men over the 2007 attack and sentenced them each
to a year in prison.
Notre-Dame de Lorette is one of France’s biggest World War One
military cemeteries and was built on the site of a battlefield where
many French and German soldiers died between October 1914 and
October 1915.
During World War One, France mobilized about 600,000 colonial
subjects, including many Muslims from Algeria and Tunisia, of whom
78,000 were killed. Some 1.2 million French soldiers were killed in
all during the war.
France is home to 5 million Muslims, Europe’s largest Muslim
community, making up 8 percent of France’s population.
The MRAP anti-racism group said this latest desecration showed that
“Islamophobia” was taking root in France.
|
