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April 6, 2008

France: Muslim World War One Graves Desecrated

News from Agence France-Presse, Tocqueville Connection, the Times, Al Jazeera, Australian Broadcasting, Reuters, UPI, Voice of America, All Headline News, DPA, BBC:

On Sunday it was fond that 148 graves belonging to Muslim veterans of WWI had been desecrated. The attacks had taken place at Notre Dame de Lorette cemetery in northern France, near the city of Arras. This cemetery, one of numerous memorials from the First Wold War in the region, had been the scene of intense fighting between October 1914 and October 1915. Notre Dame de Lorette is situated at Ablain-Saint-Nazaire, and is the largest cemetery of its kind in northern France.

Many of the gravestones had swastikas painted onto them, and a pig's head was suspended from one grave marker. Almost exactly a year ago, 52 Muslim graves in the same cemetery had been vandalized. In that incident, three youths were punished. Two who were aged 18 and 21 were each given a year in jail, while a 16-year old was given a six-week prison sentence.

According to Jean-Pierre Valensi, the state prosecutor for Arras, the desecration had insulted Islam and had gravely insulted Rachida Dati, France's justice minister. Ms Dati is descended from north African migrants. She had been targeted by name in verbal abuse painted onto gravestones. She herself issued a statement, claiming that the desecration "hurts the memory of our dead, of the veterans who gave their lives for France. Through its racist connotations, it is an assault on the values of the republic and an insult to all French people."

President Sarkozy said that the attack was "sordid" and a profound outrage. He promised that those who had committed the vandalism would receive punishment. Security arrangements at the cemetery were being placed under review following Saturday night's incident.

A statement from the president's office said: "This is the most inadmissible kind of racism and the president of the republic shares the pain of France's entire Muslim community. This hateful act is also a attack on the memory of all veterans of World War I, beyond the faith of each one."

The cemetery was inaugurated in 1925, seven years after the Armistice, and holds the remains of 40,000 soldiers. In the Muslim section of the cemetery there are 576 graves.

During the First World War, 600,000 colonial French subjects were inducted to fight, and 78,000 of these lost their lives. A total of 1.2 million French soldiers died between 1914 and 1918.

Attacks upon Muslim graves have been increasing in recent years. Jewish graves have also been subject to attacks from racists. In 1990, more than 50 Jewish graves were desecrated over two days in May at two cemeteries in France. 34 tombs were attacked in Carentras near Avignon in the south of the country, while 20 graves in Wissembourg, close to the German border, were attacked. During the 1980s there had been at least nine attacks upon Jewish cemeteries.

In 2004 then-president Jacques Chirac condemned the desecration of Jewish graves in Lyon in the southeast of France. Shortly before that incident, on Friday August 6, 2004, Muslim graves at a military cemetery in Strasbourg, northern France, had been attacked. Before that attack, there had been a rally by neo-Nazis in the region.

At the end of March 2007, dozens of Jewish graves in a cemetery near Lille in northern France were vandalized. 51 graves were attacked, with two of these smashed. Five young males were later arrested in April. By that time, 180 Jewish graves had been desecrated in three separate incidents in three weeks. At the same time, the three men who had carried out the April 2007 attacks upon Muslim graves in Notre Dame de Lorette cemetery had confessed.

Posted by Giraldus Cambrensis at April 6, 2008 9:11 PM

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