No scarf, no job

Grozny - Female civil servants must wear Islamic headscarves or be fired, the maverick head of Russia's Chechnya region said yesterday, an edict that may put him at odds with his secular masters in Moscow.

The Kremlin installed 30-year-old Ramzan Kadyrov as Chechnya's President to crush a decade-old separatist insurgency, but some observers say he has turned the region into a private fiefdom.

Russian law separates the state from religion and gives both sexes equal rights.

But Kadyrov, who this year made a pilgrimage to Muslim holy sites in Saudi Arabia, said Chechnya had different traditions.

- Reuters