Rosmarie Zapfl-Helbling is President of alliance F. She was a member of the Swiss National Council and Vice-Chair of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe’s Committee on Equal Opportunities for Women and Men.
The Initiative for the Ban on Minarets has pretended to protect our culture. But the basic tenets of our culture are first of all freedom of religion, and respecting values such as solidarity, diversity, democracy, and the rule of the law. Arbitrariness and discrimination like the initiative promoted are totally against Swiss values, values we do not want to cultivate and which we condemn in other countries. The debate held about this initiative has been characterized by its hate mongering and unwillingness to understand those of other faiths. I often feel transported back to those days fifty years ago when, in catholic communities in Switzerland, protestant believers were discriminated against, and the same happened vice versa in cities and villages predominantly inhabited by protestants.
The popular initiative ‚Against the Construction of Minarets’ stands in opposition to basic human rights and endangers the religious peace. What I found most outrageous in the campaign was the image on the poster where, next to minaret towers, a burqa-clad person was shown. That was the point: hyping up fears by using exactly what the initiative set out to prohibit. It comes perilously close to lying to the voting public when the construction of minarets is connected to wearing the burqa. The initiative was not against minarets – it directed itself against an entire religion. This is not worthy of a governing party. It was an embarrassing situation which once more went to prove how many of our fellow citizens are prone to being manipulated by a few agitators and to help them get the vote.
Accepting the initiative is a set-back. In our Federal Constitution of 1999, we no longer maintain a difference between the Christian and other faiths. The initiative also infringes upon cantonal as well as communal authority: shaping the relationship between state and church falls under the cantons’ jurisdiction, building regulations are communal law. We now have to wait for the results of the first lawsuits and verdicts; it is most likely that the issue will be brought to the European Court of Human Rights.
After the Ban on Minarets was accepted, the discussion on banning burqas was launched immediately. As an advocate of women’s and human rights, I have clearly expressed my position: I am against the burqa. Banning the burqa does not touch upon the religion as such, but it does discriminate against women’s freedom. It is feasible that the head scarf offers some kind of protection to many Muslim women for a while. If women wear the scarf of their own free will, not because family or husband force them to do so, that is alright. The face veil, in contrast to the head scarf, is not a duty prescribed by Islamic religious law. Islamic law schools agree that the hair must be covered, but not face and hands.
If we want to continue living together in peace in Switzerland in the future, in Europe, and all over the world, we are called upon to understand – to understand the culture, the religion, and the behavior of our fellow human beings who practice a different faith. Discrimination of people based on their sex, violence against women, and disregarding human rights are not to be tolerated.
This is the text of the paper the author presented at the conference “After the Ban on Minarets: The Open Society and Islam” organized by ResetDoc and UFSP Asia and Europe and held at Zurich University on Wednesday November 17th 2010.