MARSEILLE, France — Brought into the international spotlight by the ban on hijabs for French athletes at the upcoming Paris Olympics, France’s unique approach to “laïcité” — loosely translated as “secularism” — has been increasingly stirring controversy across the country.

The struggle cuts to the core of how France approaches not only the place of religion in public life, but also the integration of its mostly immigrant-origin Muslim population, Western Europe’s largest.

Perhaps the most contested ground is public schools, where visible signs of faith are barred under policies seeking to foster national unity. That includes the headscarves some Muslim women want to wear for piety and modesty, even as others fight them as a symbol of oppression.

“It has become a privilege to be allowed to practice our religion,” said Majda Ould Ibbat, who was considering leaving Marseille, France’s second-largest city, until she discovered a private Muslim school, Ibn Khaldoun, where her children could both freely live their faith and flourish academically.

“We wanted them to have a great education, and with our principles and our values,” added Ould Ibbat, who only started wearing a headscarf recently, while her teen daughter, Minane, hasn’t felt ready to.

For Minane, as for many French Muslim youth, navigating French culture and her spiritual identity is getting harder. The 19-year-old nursing student has heard people say even on the streets of multicultural Marseille that there’s no place for Muslims.

“I ask myself if Islam is accepted in France,” she said.

Minane also lives with the collective trauma that has scarred much of France in the aftermath of Islamist attacks, which have targeted schools and are seen by many as evidence that laïcité (pronounced lah-eee-see-tay) needs to be strictly enforced to prevent radicalization.

Minane vividly remembers observing a moment of silence at Ibn Khaldoun in honor of Samuel Paty, a public school teacher beheaded by a radicalized Islamist in 2020. A memorial to Paty as a defender of France’s values hangs in the entrance of the Education Ministry in Paris.

For its officials and most educators, secularism is essential. They say it encourages a sense of belonging to a united French identity and prevents those who are less or not religiously observant from feeling pressured.

For many French Muslims, however, laïcité is exerting precisely that kind of discriminatory pressure on already disadvantaged minorities.

Amid the tension, there’s broad agreement that polarization is skyrocketing, as crackdowns and challenges mount.

“Laws on laïcité protect and allow for coexistence — which is less and less easy,” said Isabelle Tretola, principal of the public primary school across from Ibn Khaldoun.

She addresses challenges to secularism daily — like children in choir class who put their hands on their ears “because their families told them singing variety songs isn’t good.”

“You can’t force them to sing, but teachers tell them they can’t cover their ears out of respect for the instructor and classmates,” Tretola said. “In school, you come to learn the values of the republic.”

Secularism is a fundamental value in France’s constitution. The state explicitly charges public schools with instilling those values in children, while allowing private schools to offer religious instruction as long as they also teach the general curriculum that the government establishes.

Government officials argue the prohibition against showcasing a particular faith is necessary to avoid threats to democracy. The government has made fighting radical Islam a priority, and secularism is seen as a bulwark against the feared growth of religious influence on daily life, down to beachwear.

“In a public school, the school for everyone, one behaves like everyone else, and should not make a display,” said Alain Seksig, secretary general of the Education Ministry’s council on secularism.

For many teachers and principals, having strict government rules is helping confront multiplying challenges.

Some 40% of teachers report self-censoring on subjects from evolution to sexual health after the attacks on Paty and another teacher, Dominique Bernard, slain last fall by a suspected Islamic extremist, said Didier Georges of SNPDEN-UNSA, a union representing more than half of France’s principals.

Like him, Laurent Le Drezen, a principal and a leader of another education workers union, SGEN-CFDT, sees a nefarious influence of social media in the growth of Muslim students challenging secularism at school.

His classroom experience in Marseille’s Quartiers Nord — often dilapidated suburbs with projects housing mostly families of North African origin — also taught him the importance of showing students that schools aren’t coming after them for being Muslim.

At Marseille’s Cedres Mosque, next to the projects, Salah Bariki said youth are struggling with exactly that sense of rejection from France.

“What do they want us to do, look at the Eiffel Tower instead of Mecca?” Bariki quipped. Nine of 10 young women in the neighborhood are now veiled, “for identity more than religion,” he added.

To avoid a vicious cycle, more — not less — discussion of religion should be happening in schools, argued Haïm Bendao, rabbi at a conservative synagogue in a nearby neighborhood.

“To establish peace, it’s a daily effort. It’s crazy important to speak in schools,” said Bendao, who has gone to both Ibn Khaldoun and the Catholic school across from it, Saint-Joseph, which also enrolls many Muslim students.

Several families at Ibn Khaldoun said they chose it because it can support both identities instead of exacerbating all-too-public doubts over whether being Muslim is compatible with being French.

“When I hear the debate over compatibility, that’s when I turn off the TV. Fear has invaded the world,” said Nancy Chihane, president of the parents’ association at Ibn Khaldoun.

At a recent spring recess where girls with hijabs, others with their hair flowing in the wind, and boys all mingled, one headscarf-wearing high-schooler said transferring to Ibn Khaldoun meant both freedom and community.

“Here we all understand each other, we’re not marginalized,” said Asmaa Abdelah, 17.

Nouali Yacine, her history and geography teacher, was born in Algeria — which was under French colonial rule until it won independence in 1962 after a violent struggle — and raised in France since he was 7 months old.

“We are within the citizenry. We don’t pose that question, but they pose it to us,” Yacine says.

The school’s founding director, Mohsen Ngazou, is equally adamant about respecting religious and education obligations.

He recalls once “making a scene” when he saw a student wearing an abaya over pajamas — the student code prohibits the latter alongside shorts and revealing necklines.

“I told her she wasn’t ready for class,” Ngazou said. “The abaya doesn’t make a woman religious. The important thing is to feel good about who you are.”
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Carentan-les-Marais, France — Agnes Scelle grew up listening to her parents’ stories about life in occupied France, living near the Normandy town of Carentan-les-Marais. She heard of the knife pushed up against her father’s throat for trying to block a strategic river, of how German soldiers held her mother at gunpoint.

“They were very afraid,” said Scelle, a former postal worker and village mayor, who still lives in her family’s ancestral home. “Even when the American soldiers had landed, they didn’t know what was going on because there were bombings.”

As Normandy prepares for the 80th anniversary of the Allied landings on June 6, locals like Scelle are focusing on another war, as Russia gains ground in Ukraine.

“The war is at Europe’s doorstep, so of course we’re afraid,” Scelle said. “We need to stick together, the Americans and the European Union, in case we see another conflict on our soil.”

That message is expected to resonate next month, as onetime D-Day allies gather to mark the 80th anniversary of landings on Omaha Beach, roughly 30 km from Carentan-les-Marais. But the celebrations come as some Europeans worry that decades-old transatlantic ties may unravel, along with a U.S. commitment to Kyiv.

The war in Ukraine is shaping this latest D-Day commemoration in other ways. Host France has invited Russia to the official ceremonies, but not Russian President Vladimir Putin. Even including Moscow has reportedly sparked tensions on the part of other WWII allies.

“I can’t say what the solution is for this commemoration,” said Denis Peschanski, a World War II historian at the Sorbonne University in Paris. “What’s certain is we refuse to deny the fundamental contribution of the Soviet army in the liberation. We would never have had a successful landing in Normandy if there hadn’t been 180 German divisions that were blocked on the eastern front’’ by Soviet soldiers.

Like other towns across Normandy, Carentan-les-Marais — known to locals as Carentan — has a full schedule of D-Day events running before and well after official ceremonies. Among them: a parachute drop in period clothes, a parade of World War II military vehicles, and an opportunity to meet Ukrainian war veterans and view a phalanx of donated ambulances bound for Ukraine’s battlefields.

There’s also the wedding of 100-year-old U.S. World War II veteran Harold Terens to 94-year-old Jeanne Swerlin. Carentan’s mayor, Jean-Pierre Lhonneur, will officiate at the ceremony.

“If you come here for the 80th anniversary, you’ll see we almost live in an American state,” said Carentan’s deputy mayor, Sebastien Lesne. “There will be many American flags flying from windows here to celebrate the peace we got back — and especially to say thank you to the veterans who are coming back this year, and who return every year.”

Price of freedom

A strategic crossroad, cut through by highways, waterways and a railway, Carentan saw a pitched six-day battle before American forces defeated the town’s German occupiers on June 12, 1944.

Scelle still remembers her parents’ accounts of German occupation. Troops lived in her home in the village of Baupte, a few kilometers from Carentan. “It was a regular army,” as opposed to Nazi troops, she said. “If you were nice to them, things went well.”

But when her father threw stones into the village river to try to block German passage, the soldiers threatened him with a knife. After the D-Day landings, they demanded of her mother at gunpoint that she disclose the location of arriving U.S. soldiers. Her family fled their home under falling bombs and found it ransacked when they finally returned.

Roughly 20,000 French civilians died during the nearly three-month Battle of Normandy — along with about 73,000 Allied forces and up to 9,000 or so Germans. Overall, Normandy lost many more of its citizens during its liberation than during the entire German occupation.

“My village didn’t have a lot of deaths, but people wouldn’t have been bitter anyway,” Scelle said. “For them, it was the price to pay for freedom.”

Today, Scelle is helping out other war survivors. Since Russia invaded Ukraine two years ago, dozens of Ukrainian refugees have arrived in Carentan and surrounding villages. Many have since returned to their homeland. But Ukrainian student Kateryna Vorontsova, 19, and her family remain and count among those Scelle has helped to settle in and learn French.

“I would like to stay in France,” said Vorontsova, although she wants to eventually return to her homeland in peace. “I like the weather, the landscape, the culture.”

Of D-Day, she added, “it’s important to remember the landings. They’re our common history.”

Ukraine ties

Carentan has other ties to Ukraine. Donated ambulances line a field next to the D-Day Experience Museum, just outside Carentan. Some are funded by U.S. donors, others by European entities like the government of Madrid. Just after the D-Day anniversary, volunteers will drive them more than 2,000 km to Ukraine.

“According to doctors I’ve talked to in Ukraine, every ambulance saves an average of 250 lives a month,” said Brock Bierman, president of Ukraine Focus, a nongovernmental group based in Washington and Ukraine, which is spearheading the effort. He is in Carentan organizing the convoy’s departure.

“Our volunteer drivers have delivered them literally to the front lines … in Bakhmut and Kherson, in Odesa and Mykolaiv,” he added, naming towns in Ukraine. “There’s a lot of work to get this done, and we couldn’t do it without an alliance of people from all over Europe and the United States.”

A former senior official with the U.S. Agency for International Development during the Trump administration, Bierman strongly backs U.S. aid for Ukraine, including the $60 billion finally passed by Congress in April. Uncertainty about whether those funds would be approved lingers and is among issues feeding doubts in Europe about long-term U.S. commitment to Ukraine and — if Donald Trump returns to office — to the NATO transatlantic alliance.

Bierman believes the costs will be high if Washington does not stand by Kyiv.

“If we fail to support Ukraine’s independence, what we could be looking at is a longer-term conflict in the next decade — which could involve boots on the ground and possible American lives lost,” he said.

At Carentan’s town hall, Deputy Mayor Lesne believes the Normandy landings offer lessons for today.

“I think the most important message is in two words: to remember,” he said. “Not to forget what happened, so it won’t be repeated. Millions of people died in the Second World War — we can’t have that happen again.”
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Dakar, Senegal — Mali and Russia on Friday launched the construction of the largest solar power plant in West Africa, Malian Energy Minister Bintou Camara said on national television. 

It comes as the country continues to be plagued by electricity supply problems, with only half of the population having access to electricity. 

The power station, “the first [in terms of size] in the country and even in the subregion … will greatly reduce the electricity shortage currently affecting our country,” Camara told Malian TV station ORTM. 

Grigory Nazarov, director of NovaWind, the Russian company in charge of the construction, said it is expected to increase Mali’s electricity production by 10%. 

NovaWind is a subsidiary of Russia’s nuclear agency Rosatom. 

The 200-megawatt solar station will cover 314 hectares in Sanankoroba, in southwestern Mali, close to the capital, Bamako. 

The work, which is costing over 200 million euros ($217 million), will take a year to complete, Nazarov said. 

The solar power plant is designed for “stable operation for 20 years” and will come “under full control of the Malian Ministry of Energy” after 10 years, he added. 

Malian electricity production is 70% thermal, which is extremely costly, Finance Minister Alousseni Sanou said in March when the deal with NovaWind was signed. 

Burdened with a debt of more than $330 million, Mali’s national energy company is no longer able to supply electricity to the capital and other towns around the country. 

Construction of two other solar plants near Bamako is scheduled to start on May 28 and June 1 and be built by Chinese and Emirati companies. 

Moscow has steadily gained influence in Mali through the deployment of Wagner Group mercenaries, unofficially serving the Kremlin’s aims in resource-rich Africa since the 2010s. 

During a call in March, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Malian junta leader Colonel Assimi Goita discussed strengthening “cooperation in energy, agricultural and mining projects,” the Kremlin said. 
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May 20 marked Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s fifth anniversary as Ukraine’s president. By law, the president serves five years, but elections have been postponed while the country remains under martial law. Katerina Besedina examines Zelenskyy’s challenging term so far. Anna Rice narrates. VOA footage by Elena Matusovky.
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United Nations — The United Nations General Assembly voted Thursday to designate July 11 annually as an international day of reflection and commemoration of the 1995 Srebrenica genocide of more than 8,000 Bosnian Muslim boys and men by Bosnian Serb forces. Serbia and Bosnian Serbs strongly opposed its adoption.

“Perpetrated amidst the Bosnian War, this act of genocide led to the tragic death of the victims and to unimaginable suffering for survivors and their families,” German Ambassador Antje Leendertse said, introducing the resolution. “Our initiative is about honoring the memory of the victims and supporting the survivors who continue to live with the scars of that fateful time.”

Germany and Rwanda co-led the negotiations on the resolution’s text over more than a month.

The resolution received 84 votes in favor, 19 against and 68 abstentions. Only a simple majority of those countries present and voting “yes” or “no” was needed for the motion to pass. It was co-sponsored by more than 40 countries, including the western Balkan nations of Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, North Macedonia and Slovenia, along with the United States.

Chairman of the Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina Denis Becirovic welcomed the resolution, saying it is an important step for the promotion of peace and reconciliation in the region and beyond.

“Truth and justice won today in the U.N. General Assembly,” he told VOA after the vote.

In addition to designating the annual international day of reflection and commemoration, which would start next year on the 30th anniversary of the massacres, the resolution also condemns genocide denial and the glorification of perpetrators.

The U.N.-backed International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia concluded in 2004 that genocide had been committed in the small mountain town in eastern Bosnia and Herzegovina in July 1995. In 2007, the International Court of Justice also ruled that the massacres constituted genocide.

Regional opposition

The president of Bosnia’s Serb-controlled Republika Srpska, Milorad Dodik, has threatened to secede from the country if the resolution is adopted.

Serbia’s government has also vigorously campaigned against the resolution, urging its co-sponsors to withdraw it, saying it unfairly targets Serbia and attributes moral responsibility for genocide collectively to its people and will hurt the fragile reconciliation process, a claim the authors deny.

Montenegro suggested language that was added to the final text, clarifying that “criminal accountability under international law for the crime of genocide is individualized and cannot be attributed to any ethnic, religious, or other group or community as a whole.”

Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic traveled to New York for the vote. He urged the General Assembly to vote against the resolution, saying it was highly politicized and would only sow deeper divisions in the region.

“This is not about reconciliation; this is not about memories,” he said. “This is something that will just open an old wound and that will create a complete political havoc — and not only in our region, but here in this hall.”

On July 11, 1995, the U.N.-designated “safe area” of Srebrenica fell to Bosnian Serb forces. Over the next several days, at least 8,372 Bosnian Muslim boys and men were separated from their families, put on buses and taken to several locations including warehouses, schools and fields, where they were executed.

Their bodies were dumped in several mass graves. Investigators said their remains were later exhumed and moved to secondary graves in an extensive cover up. Experts used DNA samples from relatives to identify thousands of the murdered men.

The Hague-based tribunal for the former Yugoslavia convicted 16 people for crimes committed in Srebrenica, including eight men for the crime of genocide.

The General Assembly resolution adopted Thursday is partly modeled on a 2003 resolution that established the international day of reflection on the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda. It has been observed at the United Nations every April 7 since 2004.

Some countries that abstained or voted against Thursday’s Srebrenica resolution noted that there is also a day of remembrance for all victims of genocide, which the United Nations marks every December 9.

Others noted that there was no consensus in the region on the resolution and that they did not want to contribute to tensions.

Both the U.N. high commissioner for human rights and the special adviser on the prevention of genocide welcomed the resolution.

“This resolution is further recognition of the victims and survivors and their pursuit of justice, truth and guarantees of non-recurrence,” human rights chief Volker Türk said in a statement.

Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide Alice Nderitu said the resolution is important in light of the trend toward genocide denial in the region.

“Questioning the tragic reality of what happened in Srebrenica is not acceptable,” she said, adding it would only hurt peace and reconciliation efforts.
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Three European nations announced Wednesday that they intend to officially recognize Palestinian statehood, prompting a furious response from Israel, which is at war with Hamas militants in Gaza. Henry Ridgwell reports.
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Washington — Russia has launched a likely space weapon and deployed it in the same orbit as a U.S. government satellite, the Pentagon said.

“Russia launched a satellite into low Earth orbit that we assess is likely a counter-space weapon presumably capable of attacking other satellites in low Earth orbit,” Pentagon spokesman Air Force Major General Pat Ryder told a press briefing late Tuesday.

The Russian “counter-space weapon” launched on May 16 was deployed “into the same orbit as a U.S. government satellite,” he said.

Ryder added that Washington would continue to monitor the situation and was ready to protect its interests.

“We have a responsibility to be ready to protect and defend the domain, the space domain, and ensure continuous and uninterrupted support to the Joint and Combined Force,” he said.

Earlier Tuesday, Moscow accused the United States of seeking to place weapons in space after Washington vetoed a Russian non-proliferation motion at the United Nations.

“They have once again demonstrated that their true priorities in the area of outer space are aimed not at keeping space free from weapons of any kind, but at placing weapons in space and turning it into an arena for military confrontation,” Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said in a statement.

The world powers have traded multiple accusations of seeking to weaponize space in recent months.

They have proposed rival non-proliferation motions at the United Nations as part of the spat.

Russia vetoed the U.S. initiative last month, while Moscow’s proposal was blocked by the United States, Britain and France in a vote on Monday.

U.S. envoy Robert Wood said Russia’s proposal, which called on all countries to “take urgent measures to prevent for all time the placement of weapons in outer space,” was a distraction and accused Moscow of “diplomatic gaslighting.”

He said that Russia’s “likely” counter-space weapon was “presumably capable of attacking other satellites in low Earth orbit.”

“Russia deployed this new counter-space weapon into the same orbit as a US government satellite,” he said in remarks ahead of Monday’s vote.

“Russia’s May 16 launch follows prior Russian satellite launches likely of counter-space systems to low Earth orbit in 2019 and 2022.”

In February, the White House said Russia was developing an anti-satellite weapon, the existence of which was confirmed after lawmakers warned of an unspecified but serious threat to national security.
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