ANALYSIS: The women vying to take charge of Paris

Issued on: 08/03/2020 - 06:06Modified: 08/03/2020 - 10:04  GMT/ZULU

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Paris 

by Natalie de Vallieres and Biodun Iginla, France24 News Analysts

Three women have emerged as the top candidates in the race to become Paris mayor, all but ensuring that one of the world's most prestigious civic offices will remain in female hands.

Incumbent Anne Hidalgo, the conservative Rachida Dati and centrist Agnes Buzyn could not be more different in temperament nor career paths, yet each embodies key components of the city's social mosaic.

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- Anne Hidalgo -

Paris's Socialist leader has been at the helm since 2014, after serving as deputy mayor of the world's most visited city since 2001.

Hidalgo was born in 1959 in San Fernando, a town in Andalusia, Spain, to an electrician father and a mother who worked as a seamstress.

Two years later the family moved to Lyon in southeast France -- Ana became Anne and citizenship came when she was 14.

"One day in second grade, my teacher told me, 'little Spanish girls don't make it to the top of the class.' That only made me want to take up the challenge," she told the Parisien newspaper this month.

Her term as Paris mayor began with a baptism of fire -- the 2015 jihadist attacks at Charlie Hebdo and then the Bataclan concert hall, which shattered the city's famed joie de vivre.

Hidalgo pushed ahead with her signature plan to reduce automobile use, including a controversial move to turn a key riverbank highway into a promenade.

Opponents accused her of a high-handed approach, a claim she brushes off by saying she wants to move quickly. She has also suggested that sexism underlies much of the criticism.

"I don't like people walking all over me. Certain things infuriate me, I can't stand lying, but I am honest and forthright," she told Le Parisien.

Challenges have mounted, however, as residents complain about increasingly dirty streets and a proliferation of rats, migrant camps, and costs of living that are driving some 12,000 people out of Europe's densest city each year.

- Rachida Dati -

Dati, who burst onto the national scene as justice minister under president Nicolas Sarkozy, was born in 1965 in the drab industrial town of Saint-Remy, north of Lyon, and raised in social housing in nearby Chalon-sur-Saone.

Daughter of a Moroccan father and Algerian mother, Dati's success made her a poster child for France's promise of integration and merit-based social opportunity for all.

The second of 11 children, she would help her siblings with homework while juggling her own studies and part-time jobs, including caregiver at a local hospital.

She racked up diplomas in law and business, and has worked as an auditor in both the private and public sectors, including the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, as well as a public prosecutor.

But Dati became a divisive figure in rightwing circles after becoming justice minister, with both allies and critics noting a blunt manner and self-assuredness of someone who has reached the highest ranks by sheer force of will.

She is currently the focus of a corruption inquiry over allegations she was paid 900,000 euros ($1 million) by the disgraced former Renault boss Carlos Ghosn for fictious advisory work. She has denied the charges.

- Agnes Buzyn -

A born-and-bred Parisien, Buzyn was a successful doctor who suddenly entered politics when she was picked as health minister after Emmanuel Macron swept to the presidency in 2017.

Her maternal grandparents came to the city from Poland in 1929, and during the Nazi occupation of World War II they spirited her mother away to eastern France where she was hidden by a French family.

Her father, also from Poland, survived Auschwitz and became an orthopaedic surgeon before arriving in France in the 1950s.

As a student, she travelled to the US where in her own words "I discovered hard rock... I'm a fan of Linkin Park, Metallica."

The leukaemia specialist was just 30 when named director of haematology at the renowned Necker hospital, and later became head of the national cancer institute.

Since entering government she has faced a simmering revolt among overstretched hospital workers, and is now facing her first electoral battle after declaring her last-minute candidacy as replacement for Benjamin Griveaux, brought down by a sex-video scandal.

"Politics is violent and at times painful, but when you've had to give horrible diagnoses to families, to children, it's really much less serious," she said last month.

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The battle-hardened foreign jihadi brides trapped in Syria

Date created : 09/02/2019 - 14H24  GMT/ZULU

FRANCE 24 screengrab

by Nasra Ismail and Biodun Iginla, France24, Beirut

Hundreds of foreign jihadi brides are being held in a Kurdish camp in northern Syria as the war to drive out the Islamic State (IS) group enters its final phase. As the only media to gain access to the camp, FRANCE 24 spoke with some of these women.

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Almost all of the women in the Kurdish-controlled al-Hol camp in northeastern Syria are foreign nationals who travelled to Syria at the height of the IS group’s so-called caliphate. They are held in a fenced-off area away from the other camp residents.

These "brides" tell FRANCE 24 that their husbands are either still fighting, dead or in prison.

In all, some 500 jihadi brides and their children are at the camp, housed alongside approximately 30,000 refugees – many of whom fled the IS group's reign of terror.

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'We have changed'

Since arriving at the camp, most of these women claim to have abandoned the IS group’s ideology.

“I’m a Brazilian, from Germany!” a burqa-clad woman exclaims, while another says: “I’m German, German, I have my German passport with me!”

“We have changed. We can’t say we were not part of the IS group. We were part of it. When we moved here, we loved it,” one of them tells FRANCE 24. However, she goes on to say: “The Islam of our Prophet Mohammed, peace be with him, was never about killing children, was never about imposing injustice. It was never about those things.”

Many of them now want return to their home countries.

‘The punishment is supposed to last our whole life?’

“We are human beings. Sometimes we do fair things. Sometimes we do unfair things. So we did some unjust things, and we regret them. And so the punishment is supposed to last your whole life, or what?” one of the detained women says.

Kimberley, a 46-year-old Canadian, insists she ended up a jihadi bride simply because she didn’t know any better, claiming that in 2015 she decided to join because of “humanitarian reasons”.

“I actually didn’t know much about what you would refer to as Daesh (an Arabic acronym name for the IS group). I didn’t know a lot about the organisation itself, I just knew that they were big and that as an Islamic organisation at the time, they were doing some really good things. I don’t think that negates the negatives, but I tried to leave and they put me in prison so I ended up being trapped,” she tells us at FRANCE 24.

“Yes I knew about Charlie Hebdo (the terrorist attack on the magazine’s offices in Paris in 2015). But again, we’d had an attack on Canadian soil as well. I chalked it up to being a handful of individual lone wolves who were kind of acting on their own.”

FRANCE 24's Andre: 'It's the United Nations of jihad'

Some are ‘ferocious’

One of the camp’s directors says that although some of the women claim to be innocent of any crime, others are clearly very dangerous.

“We thought we could put them together with the Syrians and the Iraqis, and that they would adapt. But they’re ferocious, they burned some of the Syrians’ tents, they would call them cockroaches, infidels. They consider themselves as the only true Muslims. So we had to separate them,” he explains.

“The problem is their intentions, they tell us what we want to hear, but we have no idea about what they really think. That’s a problem that must be addressed by experts. When they gave themselves up, some of them told us that the IS group briefed them, telling them, ‘Surrender, go back to your countries, get your strength back and we will start again’.”

Half a million dead

Four years ago, the militants controlled territory the size of Britain and millions of people. Major General Christopher Ghika, the deputy commander of the US coalition fighting the group, on Thursday said that "now less than 1 percent of the original caliphate" remains.

The coalition has taken control of Hajin, which was the last IS group town of note.

Since then, thousands of suspected IS group fighters have attempted to blend in with civilians fleeing the jihadists' last bastion, including a large number of foreigners.

More than half a million people have died in the Syrian conflict since it began in 2011 and half the pre-war population have fled their homes, including more than 5 million who have gone abroad.

Queen Rania responds to Charlie Hebdo's Alan Kurdi cartoon

• 2 hours ago

by Leila Mohamed and Biodun Iginla, BBC News, Amman, Jordan

• From the section Middle East

Image copyright Reuters

Image caption Queen Rania said Alan Kurdi "could've been a doctor"

Queen Rania of Jordan has published a cartoon as a riposte after Charlie Hebdo linked the drowned Syrian child Alan Kurdi with migrants accused of sex attacks in Germany.

The French satirical magazine's cartoon shows a man chasing a woman and says Alan would have grown up into a "groper in Germany".
It was widely accused of racism.
But Queen Rania posted a cartoon by Jordanian cartoonist Osama Hajjaj on social media showing Alan as a doctor.

Image copyright Queen Rania/Twitter

"Alan could've been a doctor, a teacher, a loving parent," she wrote.

The Charlie Hebdo cartoon followed the revelation that gangs of migrants carried out organised sexual assaults in Cologne on New Year's Eve.
Has Charlie Hebdo legacy gone sour?
Cologne attacks put spotlight on North African community
Alan's relatives in Canada said they were disgusted at Charlie Hebdo's cartoon.
However, some people have interpreted it as mocking the media for how quickly it switches from positive to negative stereotypes.
The magazine has put Alan Kurdi in a number of cartoons over recent months, including one that showed the boy's body washed up on the beach next to a McDonald's advertisement with the caption: "So close".
The photograph of two-year-old Alan lying face down on a beach in Turkey caused an international outcry over the human cost of the migrant crisis.

Image copyright Twitter

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More on this story

• Cologne attacks' profound impact on Europe

  11 January 2016
• Charlie Hebdo lives on but 'in darkness'

  6 January 2016
• Alan Kurdi death: A Syrian Kurdish family forced to flee

  4 September 2015
• Migrant crisis: Photo of drowned boy sparks outcry

  3 September 2015

Middle East

Poll: Nearly half of French oppose Mohammed cartoons

by Biodun Iginla, France24 and BBC News, Paris

• inShare

• 2
• print

© AFP | The cover of the Wednesday, Janaury 14, edition of Charlie Hebdo featuring a cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed

Latest update : 2015-01-18

Almost half of those in France believe cartoons of the Muslim Prophet Mohammed – like those printed by satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo – should not be published, a poll said Sunday, with a similar number in favour of “limitations” on free speech.

The recent attack by Islamic extremists at the offices of Charlie Hebdo that killed 12 people in apparent revenge for publishing cartoons of Mohammed has led to a fierce defence of France’s freedom of speech laws by politicians, media and millions of French citizens – including at a huge unity march in Paris on January 11.
But an Ifop poll published in France’s Journal du Dimanche (Sunday Journal) paints a much more divided picture of French attitudes towards what is considered a key facet of the country’s republican values.
Conducted last week in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo killings, the poll found that 42 percent of French people oppose the publication of cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed, which are considered blasphemous and highly offensive by many Muslims.
Half of those questioned also said they believed there should be "limitations on free speech online and on social networks".
However, 57 percent said opposition to the cartoons from Muslims should not stop them from being published.

Hollande: Freedom of expression ‘non-negotiable’
Charlie Hebdo has published cartoons of Mohammed several times in the past and did so again on Wednesday with its “survivors issue” – the first since the January 7 attack at its Paris offices.
The first print run of the edition, which features a weeping Mohammed on the cover holding a sign that says “Je suis Charlie” (I am Charlie) under the words “All is forgiven”, sold out within minutes at newsagents across France after going on sale Wednesday.
Publishers announced Saturday that they would once more increase the print run of the issue – to 7 million copies – having already increased it once from 3 million to 5 million. Before the attacks, the magazine had a print run of just 60,000.
Charlie Hebdo's decision to print another Mohammed cartoon has led to condemnation from Muslim groups in France as well as fierce and sometimes violent protests in several Muslim countries. At least ten people were killed in two days of unrest in Niger as protesters set fire to churches and ransacked several French-linked businesses in the capital Niamey.
French President François Hollande has condemned the violence, calling France’s commitment to freedom of expression "non-negotiable".
“There are tensions abroad where people don’t understand our attachment to freedom of speech,” Hollande said.
However, while comments and images considered blasphemous are legal under French law, the country already has numerous restrictions on freedom of speech in place. Comments inciting racial hatred are illegal, for example, as are those defending terrorist acts – a law under which controversial comedian Dieudonné M’Bala M’Bala was arrested last week.
This has led to claims of hypocrisy from some quarters, including Amnesty International.
“In a week in which world leaders and millions around the world have spoken out in defence of freedom of expression, the French authorities must be careful not to violate this right themselves,” the human rights organisation said Friday.
French back ban on returning jihadists

But while French attitudes towards freedom of expression may be split, the poll suggests the country’s citizens are largely united when it comes to taking tough action on Islamic extremists.
The vast majority – 81 percent – were in favour of stripping French nationality from dual nationals who have committed an act of terrorism on French soil.
More than two-thirds (68 percent) said French citizens should be banned from returning to the country if "they are suspected of having gone to fight in countries or regions controlled by terrorist groups", such as Syria.
The same number backed bans on those suspected of wanting to join jihadist movements abroad from leaving France.
France has long been concerned by the number of its citizens travelling abroad to fight in jihadist movements in countries such as Syria and Iraq, and the possibility that they might return to commit terrorist acts on home soil.
One of the Charlie Hebdo gunmen – Saïd Kouachi – is known to have travelled to Yemen where he trained with militants from al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula while his brother and accomplice, Chérif Kouachi, was part of a group that helped French Muslims travel to Iraq to fight alongside al Qaeda after the 2003 US-led invasion.

Date created : 2015-01-18