Switzerland’s Foreign Minister Micheline Calmy-Rey was criticised on Wednesday by some media and politicians for wearing a headscarf during a meeting with Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad, AFP reported.

Photographs of the minister wearing a long white headscarf while standing alongside the firebrand Iranian leader sparked a fierce reaction in Switzerland, which is highly sensitive to Islamic symbols.
“Just like an oppressed woman!” was the headline of the Francophone tabloid Le Matin, which splashed the picture on its front page.
Le Matin’s editorialist asked why Calmy-Rey — a prominent feminist in a country which only gave women the right to vote in 1971 — was “crawling before this unshaven tyrant.”
Calmy-Rey justified wearing the headscarf by saying that “I have always been told that when you are a guest, you respect local customs.”
That did not satisfy her fellow Socialist parliamentarian Maria Roth-Bernasconi, who told the Tribune de Geneve newspaper that “the headscarf remains a symbol of women’s oppression.”
Calmy-Rey was in Tehran to sign an energy deal with Iran’s state gas company, a move that sparked sharp condemnation from the United States and Israel.