At least 50,000 people demonstrated on Monday in Dhaka, according to police, calling for a boycott of French products and accusing France of supporting the cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, after statements by its President Emmanuel Macron on freedom of expression.
The demonstrators, who were responding to the call of the Hefazat-e-Islam group, one of the main Islamist groups in the country, were prevented from approaching the French embassy, where security had been tightened.
The organizers assured for their part to have gathered more than 100,000 demonstrators.
Third demonstration against France
This is the third large-scale demonstration for a week against France and its president for a week in Bangladesh, a country of 160 million mainly Muslim inhabitants.
Demonstrators protest against statements by Emmanuel Macron defending the right to caricature in the name of freedom of expression, after the beheading on October 16 by an Islamist of a French teacher, Samuel Paty, who had shown his students caricatures of the prophet of Islam.
On Monday, the demonstrators chanted slogans like “boycott of French goods” or “no to defamation of the Prophet Muhammad”. They again burned an effigy of the French president.
On Saturday, the head of state tried, in an interview with the Qatari channel Al-Jazeera, to calm the situation by saying he understood that Muslims could be “shocked” by these cartoons, but that they did not justify the violence. In this same interview, he judged that “the reactions of the Muslim world were due to a lot of lies”.
Original article by : www.leparisien.fr
