’I’ll go out in my veil and fight’

Kenza Drider is on a solo mission to protest the veil ban in France

'I'll go out in my veil and fight'

Kenza Drider is on a solo mission to protest the veil ban in France

Kenza Drider, a respectable mother of four, left her home in Avignon's Place de la Resistance yesterday with the intention of committing a crime.

If the police chose to, she would be cautioned, perhaps be asked to accompany officers to the local station, possibly face a fine and, perhaps, will leave with a criminal record.

Kenza Drider at the Gare de Lyon train station in her full veil yesterday a 'crime' under the new law

It is unlikely she will end up in jail, but who knows? It is a risk she is willing to take. Drider is not only determined to become a miscreant; she sees it as her absolute duty to do so.

This 32-year-old French housewife has become the face of the country's "burkha brigade", the women in France who cover themselves from head to toe in full veils.

She will fall foul of a law that kicked in yesterday and forbids French citizens from covering their faces in public places; despite the ban's deliberately general wording, there is no doubt its target is very specific: Muslim women.

Drider's first offence was to set foot inside Avignon's TGV rail station where she is due to take a train to Paris.
For this she risks a Eurou00a0 150 (Rs 9,600) fine and, if she repeats the offence, being sent on a "citizenship course".

"I will be going about my business in my full veil as I have for the last 12 years and nothing and nobody is going to stop me," she declares.

Like most of the women concerned by this law, Drider wears a niqab (veil) that reveals only her eyes, as opposed to a burqa, the full body covering worn by Afghan women.

Few affected

For all the political energy President Nicolas Sarkozy's right-of-centre Government has expended on this law, it will affect a relatively tiny number of women; estimates range from 350 to a maximum 2,000 full-veil wearers out of France's population of 64 million.

It is not the potential effectiveness, or otherwise,u00a0 of the ban that bothers Drider, however. It is the principle.
"This whole law makes France look ridiculous," she says.

"I never thought to see the day when France, my France, the country I was born in and I love, the country of liberte, egalite, fraternite, would do something that so obviously violates people's freedom."

Drider's husband, Allal (40), who works in a soup factory, says that, unlike other housing estates, the area is not "chaud" (hot) and there is little trouble.
u00a0
He jokes that perhaps he should grow it longer and bushier, as Islamophobes think he and his wife are extremists.

Two arrested

Two Muslim women wearing full face veils have been arrested within hours of France's burkha ban becoming a law, as they were taking part in a demonstration against the new measure in front of Notre Dame Cathedral in central Paris.

Police said they were held not because of her veil but for taking part in an unauthorised protest against the ban.

The law is worded to trip safely through legal minefields: The words "women," "Muslim" and "veil" are not even mentioned. The law says it is illegal to hide the face in the public space.

Rs 9,600
Fine for covering the face in public

Rs 20 lakh
Fine (30,000 euro) for forcing women to don a veil, and possibly twice that if the veiled person is a minor.