Iraq: Crisis talks held over French journalists

French envoys are to hold crisis talks in Iraq and Jordan today in a desperate bid to free two journalists seized by militants seeking to overturn France’s law banning Islamic head scarves in public schools.

A group of French Muslims was to arrive in the Iraqi capital of Baghdad to try to pursue negotiations with the shadowy militant group holding the journalists.

Representatives of the French Council for the Muslim Faith, which serves as a link to President Jacques Chirac’s government, left Paris yesterday in hopes of retrieving the journalists.

“I am against the presence of the Americans in Iraq, it is an occupying army, but if an American journalist was captured, my message would be the same,” said Abdallah Zekri, a member of the French Muslim council.

“The role of journalists is democracy. They inform us, they inform the entire world. Journalism is a profession that must be respected.”

The whereabouts of veteran Middle East correspondents Christian Chesnot and Georges Malbrunot remained unknown.

A first deadline issued by militants for France to overturn its head scarf law passed Monday night without incident. A second deadline was issued Tuesday and extended until late Wednesday.

Chesnot, 37, of Radio France International, and Malbrunot, 41, reporting for the daily Le Figaro, were last heard from on August 19 as they set off for the southern city of Najaf. Their Syrian chauffeur also vanished.

Bernard Bajolet, the French ambassador to Iraq, met in Baghdad with leaders of the Muslim Scholars Association, an influential Sunni clerical organisation that has been trying to secure the journalists’ release.

Bajolet thanked them for denouncing the abduction ”extremely forcefully, clearly and without ambiguity”.

Using his nation’s formidable diplomatic clout, Chirac has made good on a pledge to spare no effort to save the lives of the journalists.

Foreign Minister Michel Barnier arrived in Qatar yesterday after high-level talks in Cairo, Egypt and Amman, Jordan. A French special envoy was dispatched to Baghdad to pursue contacts with the hostage-takers.

Barnier said yesterday that he was optimistic that the two French journalists would be released.

“I can’t imagine any other solution except a positive outcome,” Barnier said in an interview with the pan-Arab Al-Jazeera satellite channel, based in Qatar. He was to return to Amman for further talks with Jordanian Cabinet members.

Barnier has won massive support from leaders throughout the Arab world, cashing in on France’s strong backing for the Palestinians and its anti-war stance in Iraq.

The kidnappers want France to annul a new law that bans all conspicuous religious signs and apparel from public schools, such as the Islamic head scarf. France says it will not capitulate: The law goes into effect today, when school opens.

In a video broadcast Saturday, a group known as the Islamic Army in Iraq gave the French government 48 hours to overturn the ban.

The group is believed to have killed an Italian freelance journalist last week after Italy’s gvernment rejected a demand that it withdraw its 3,000 soldiers in Iraq