Moroccan Restaurant Owner Faces Racist Assault in French Town, Sparking Outrage

It all started with Hasna’s refusal "to receive slightly intoxicated customers" in her Moroccan restaurant Le Casablanca in La Roche-Posay (Vienne) on July 16th last. One of them, annoyed, attacked her. "It started from there, a Gentleman took a dislike to me. His friends made him leave. We called the gendarmes and that was it," retraces the restaurateur, who opened Le Casablanca at the end of spring, after already running a pizzeria in the same premises, rue Pierre Nonnet.

On July 18th, the thirty-year-old received an order by phone. She was far from imagining that this order would come from the slightly intoxicated customers. "At first, it was a standard order. And then the person on the phone told me that I had assaulted his uncle and that they were coming four strong to beat me up." A few minutes later, four men show up. One of them hurls insults at her: "He insults me in every way, assures Hasna. Where I was lucky is that his friends were not very virulent. He left, I thought we had understood each other."

The next day, Saturday, July 19th, two men arrive around 5:30 pm. The restaurateur is "preparing for the evening service." "They’re banging on the door, I immediately saw who it was," Hasna recalls. It was, according to her, the man who had gotten angry on Wednesday, accompanied by a younger man introducing himself as one of the nephews, already present the day before. Her companion was present. She tells him to stay in the restaurant "so as not to make things worse." She goes out alone. This is the beginning of a racist assault.

"They tell me that I am a dirty Arab, that I have no business in La Roche-Posay, that on top of that, I make couscous in La Roche-Posay, that I am a big whore." In the process, an inappropriate gesture: "He literally groped my buttock. I felt my buttock squeezed in his hand." She would have been hit by the younger one. "I fell, I took several blows, to the buttocks, knees, face and breast," she describes. Her partner finally joins her when he hears her scream. "That’s when the gendarmes arrived." But the two alleged aggressors were not arrested.

"What has traumatized me even more is the fact that they left, with a smile on top of that. [...] In this super complicated moment, I didn’t really understand if they didn’t have a place to put him, or if they weren’t enough. They told me they were sorry, but I’m more sorry for myself who got assaulted," adds Hasna. She filed a complaint the next day, Sunday, July 20th, and an investigation has been opened. The mayor of La Roche-Posay, Pascale Moreau, says she is "shocked by this affair." She expresses all her compassion to the victims and condemns "all forms of aggression and violence."

The French woman of Moroccan origin comes out of this assault traumatized. "I have nightmares in which they rape me, they beat me up, they beat up my children, they burn me at home," she lists. This mother of three children aged 16, 12 and 11 is now taking tranquilizers and sleeping pills. "I am completely destroyed. Why so much hatred? I just have the feeling that I am not welcome here," articulates the one who was born in Nantes.