'Police did their job perfectly,' says interior minister Manuel Valls, declaring ban on full-face Muslim veils to be in women's interests
France's interior minister has defended a ban on wearing full-face veils in public after a police check on a Muslim woman was followed by two nights of rioting near Paris, exposing tensions in suburbs with many immigrants.
The 2010 law was brought in by the conservative former president Nicolas Sarkozy and targets burqa and niqab veils that fully conceal the face, rather than the headscarf that is more common among French Muslim women.
A police check on a couple in the southwest suburb of Trappes provoked an angry confrontation that led overnight on Friday to a police station being surrounded by several hundred people, some hurling rocks. Another building was torched in several hours of street violence that led to six arrests.
"Police did their job perfectly," the interior minister, Manuel Valls, told RTL radio.
"The law banning full-face veils is a law in the interests of women and against those values having nothing to do with our traditions and values. It must be enforced everywhere," he said.
The town of some 30,000 inhabitants, which has produced celebrities including the football player Nicolas Anelka, was mostly calm on Monday as tow trucks carted away burnt cars.
Police made two further arrests in raids late on Sunday, during which they were pelted with firecrackers from rooftops. Four other youths were due later on Monday to appear before a judge for sentencing.
But while Valls said that order had quickly been restored, opposition politicians accused him of minimising violence, which he acknowledged had spread for a while to three nearby towns.
The French president, François Hollande, has said the suburbs should be treated like any other part of France, but his government was accused of refusing to recognise that France was failing to integrate Muslims.
"There is a denial of reality, a refusal to see that violence is rising," said Jean-François Copé, head of the centre-right UMP party.
France has Europe's largest Muslim population, estimated at about five million. Yet according to interior ministry figures, only between 400 and 2,000 women wear the burqa or niqab and only a handful have been ordered to pay a fine for wearing it.
The riots marked the first time the ban had led to an outbreak of violence. But it was not the first example of rioting under Hollande, who faced two days of riots in the northern city of Amiens shortly after becoming president.
Analysts have long debated the causes of such outbreaks of violence, with some pointing to economic and social factors such as the rise in youth unemployment. About one in four youths are now jobless, a figure that is higher in many suburbs.
Others say the causes are more complex and point to efforts made by French authorities in recent years to regenerate such suburban zones. Trappes itself has just emerged from a seven-year renovation plan and in 2011 won an award for its parks and the attractiveness of its environment.
