TWO French journalists being held hostage in Iraq today urged President Jacques Chirac to save their lives by giving in to militants’ demands to rescind a headscarf ban.
A video aired on the Al-Jazeera television station showed Christian Chesnot and Georges Malbrunot looking unshaved and seated together in front of a mud wall with a small window above them.
Mr Chesnot called on Mr Chirac and his government to scr
ap its plan to ban the wearing of Islamic headscarves in public schools, according to the newsreader, who was interpreting his remarks into Arabic.
Meanwhile, representatives of rebel cleric Muqtada al-Sadr also called for the pair to be released and denounced the abductions as "inhumane and immoral".
Aides to the Shia religious leader condemned the law, but stressed there were other ways to force Paris to backpedal, such as boycotting French goods or persuading Arab nations to suspend diplomatic ties.
"I call upon the kidnappers to immediately release the French journalists," Sadr aide Sheikh Youssef Al-Nassiri told Al-Jazeera.
"To fight in a battlefield is OK, but to kill a civilian or journalist is blasphemy," added Ali al-Yasiri, a Sadr representative in Baghdad.
He said killing the duo would "defame Islam and Muslims in general."
Earlier this month,British journalist James Brandon was released by militants in the Iraqi city of Basra after Sadr intervened.
Mr Chesnot and Mr Malbrunot appeared calm in the video, which seemed to have been shot in a room flooded with daylight.
"I call on President Chirac to retract the veil ban immediately and I call on French people to protest the veil ban. It is a wrong and unjust law and we may die at any time," Mr Chesnot said.
Mr Malbrunot added: "I appeal to the French people and each French citizen who values life to hold protests for this law on the veil ban to be cancelled, because our life is in danger and we might die at any moment if the law doesn’t get banned."
Al-Jazeera broadcast a video on Saturday from a militant group calling itself the Islamic Army in Iraq, which gave France 48 hours to overturn the ban, but the station mentioned no threat against the men’s lives.
Al-Jazeera today said the group had extended its deadline, which would have ended late last night, for another 24 hours.
French government officials were today locked in crisis talks in a bid to save the men.
Prime minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin called an emergency meeting of his top ministers for this morning, as foreign minister Michel Barnier began the second day of emergency diplomacy in the Middle East.
The headscarf law comes into effect when school resumes in France tomorrow.
It forbids public school students from wearing "conspicuous" religious apparel. Jewish skullcaps and large Christian crosses will also be banned, but the true target of the law are headscarves - seen by authorities as a sign of rising Muslim fundamentalism in France.
The headscarf is an emotive issue in France, which has sought to enforce its strictly secular legal code to quell simmering religious strife in a country with western Europe’s biggest populations of Muslims and Jews.
Mr Chesnot, of Radio France-Internationale, or RFI, and Mr Malbrunot, of Le Figaro newspaper and RTL radio, disappeared on August 19 while apparently headed toward the holy city of Najaf.
Iraqi Sunni and Shia groups and Islamic groups outside Iraq have all urged the kidnappers to release the two, noting France’s opposition to the United States-led Iraq war.
While French leaders have vowed not to give in to the kidnappers’ demands, some saw hope in the extension of the deadline and the mobilisation of Muslim and Arab opposition to the kidnappings.
