Word: bans
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...confronted by certain Muslim women wearing the burqa, which covers and fully envelops the body and the head like a moving prison," said Andre Gerin, a Communist Party legislator who joined 57 others on Wednesday in signing a motion for a parliamentary committee to study possible legislation to ban the wearing of the traditional costume in public. Despite the fervor of Gerin and his allies, however, the burqa remains sufficiently rare in France that even the legislators railing against it are unable to say how many Muslim women in the country actually wear one. All Gerin would say was, "There...
...this point, no Muslim defenders of the rare French burqa have emerged. Indeed, Dounia Bouzar, a specialist on Muslim affairs, notes that while she and many fellow Muslims opposed the headscarf ban as meddling in private matters of choice, she is relieved at action taken on the burqa. "Imposition of this garment on women is one manner Salafists get individuals to renounce their individuality and submit to the extremist cult thinking that masquerades as Islam - but which is an abomination of it," Bouzar says. "That Salafist influence and activity is spreading, and if it takes political action to prevent their...
...Lukashenko's refusal to attend a key security summit in Moscow on Monday because of the dairy ban has infuriated the Kremlin, and despite Belarus' achievements with the E.U., the price for angering Russian President Dmitri Medvedev may just be too high. "Exporting food to Russia has been one of [Belarus'] most important and reliable trade sectors," Andrew Wilson, a senior policy fellow at the think tank European Council on Foreign Relations, tells TIME. "The ban will definitely sting." In 2008, Russia bought 93% of Belarus' meat and dairy products, earning Belarus $1 billion...
...Russia has insisted that the ban is not political and simply reflects a failure on Belarus' part to meet new sanitary regulations. But Russia has a tradition of banning goods from neighboring countries at the first sign of disagreement, like the 2005 ban (which has since been lifted) of Polish meat after Poland joined the E.U. and the 2006 ban of Georgian wine after Tblisi accused Moscow of spying, leading some observers to suggest that Belarus isn't being paranoid. "That's the Russia way," says Wilson. "It has had a lot of economic rows with neighbors, and it uses...
...Those instincts told Lukashenko to skip the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) meeting on Sunday in protest over Russia's dairy-imports ban. The organization - which has been dubbed Russia's answer to NATO - consists of Russia, Armenia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and, supposedly, Belarus and was formed to tackle drug-trafficking from Afghanistan, as well as international terrorism. "Economy serves as the basis for our common security," Lukashenko said in a statement. "But if Belarus' closest CSTO ally is trying ... to destroy this basis ... how can one talk about consolidating collective security in the CSTO space...