nooleen
bad ape
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/8386456.stm
ooh-erIn Switzerland the soul-searching has begun following Sunday's nationwide referendum in which voters surprisingly backed a plan to ban the construction of minarets.
No-one can quite understand how a proposal widely regarded even by its supporters as destined for failure at the ballot box actually came to be passed.
...Swiss cabinet ministers who had advised, and confidently expected, voters to reject a ban, have woken up to newspaper headlines calling the referendum a slap in the face for the government, and a "catastrophe" for Switzerland.
They are now facing the delicate task of explaining the voters' decision to Muslim countries with whom Switzerland has traditionally good trade relations. Within government circles, there is the expectation that these relations will be damaged and that the Swiss economy may suffer as a result.
So concerned is the government by the decision that Swiss Justice Minister Eveline Widmer Schlumpf, watching the results come in on Sunday afternoon, apparently told her advisers there ought to be some restrictions on what the general public can actually vote on.
This, for Switzerland, is political dynamite. The country's system of direct democracy is sacrosanct. The people are allowed to vote on any policy and to propose policy themselves, which is what they did on minarets.
The fact that there is little evidence of Muslim extremism in Switzerland and that the banning of minarets would be unlikely to prevent extremism even if it did exist, does not really matter. The real issue is that there was clearly unease among the Swiss population, particularly among rural communities, about Islam.
The People's Party played on those fears while the Swiss government did not address them at all. Now Switzerland's image abroad, and its relations with its own Muslim community, may bear the consequences.
There are already indications that, buoyed by the size of the vote in favour of the ban, the Swiss People's Party is planning further measures.
Hermann Leu, a local People's Party representative from Thurgau canton, described the size of the vote in favour as "a clear sign that the Muslim community must get on with integrating itself right away".
Proposals from some towns include banning the burka, setting up committees to identify imams who preach "hate", detaining and deporting them, and banning school dispensations in which Muslim children stay away from swimming lessons or take time out for prayers.
Switzerland's debate about Islam has now well and truly begun but perhaps not in the way Swiss Muslims would have wished it.
