A French ambassador has resigned, accusing the country's foreign ministry of abject racism. Zaïr Kédadouche, France's man in Andorra is now suing over the discrimination he claims is endemic in the country's elite diplomatic service, reports The Guardian.
In a letter to the country's president, François Hollande, Kédadouche wrote: "I am resigning in the name of the values of the Republic that the Quai d'Orsay has flouted … It's at the ministry of foreign affairs that I have met the most abject racism and felt the humiliation of not belonging to the same social class."
He accused the ministry of imposing a "terrible omertà", or code of silence, on diplomats and insisted his was not the only case of discrimination.
"My case is not unique, far from it. If that was the case, it would only be personal," he wrote.
Kédadouche worked in several French ministries before Hollande's centre right predecessor Nicolas Sarkozy appointed him ambassador in 2012. The former professional footballer was born in France's northern industrial region to a refuse collector father and an illiterate mother, both from Algeria.
He grew up on a housing estate in one of Paris's roughest suburbs and was a rarity in a ministry staffed mainly with graduates of France's elite higher education institutions known as the grandes écoles.
"The children of immigrants, African, Maghrebains … who have not 'done' the grandes écoles but are former sportsmen and women of a high level, or artists or have acquired skills by the result of their own hard work, have the right, as do all citizens, to become ambassadors of a France that respects all her children," he wrote.
Read more of this report from The Guardian.