COPENHAGEN, Feb 3: Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen met Muslim envoys on Friday to seek calm over the storm triggered by the publication of sacrilegious cartoons, but refused to apologise on behalf of the Jyllands-Posten newspaper, which first published the cartoons.
“Neither the Danish government nor the Danish nation as such can be held responsible for drawings published in a Danish newspaper,” he said after the meeting.
“A Danish government can never apologise on behalf of a free and independent newspaper,” he said. “This is basically a dispute between some Muslims and a newspaper.”
Other European leaders called for restraint as more newspapers published the caricatures, saying freedom of speech was sacrosanct, and Muslims protested against the cartoons.
Muslim protesters in Indonesia, Turkey and the Palestinian West Bank staged violent demonstrations against the cartoons.
“I am concerned...about this escalation we have seen over the last few days,” said Austrian Foreign Minister Ursula Plassnik, whose country holds the European Union’s presidency.
“From my point of view it is high time to take a step back and make an effort to see things with each other’s eyes and heart. The language or gestures of threats gets us nowhere,” she told a news conference in Vienna.
But there was little respite in the fury of Muslims or a debate over freedom of speech verses respect for religion.
French President Jacques Chirac, whose country has a large Muslim minority, appealed for all sides to avoid ‘anything that could offend others’ convictions’, a spokesman said.
Indonesian Foreign Ministry spokesman Yuri Thamrin said the dispute pitted ‘the whole Islamic world vis-a-vis Denmark and vis-a-vis the trend of Islamophobia’.
Up to 300 activists in Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim country, rampaged in the lobby of a building housing the Danish embassy in Jakarta.
Shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’, they smashed lamps with bamboo sticks, threw chairs, lobbed rotten eggs and tomatoes and tore up a Danish flag. No one was hurt.
In the West Bank city of Ramallah, hundreds of Palestinians attended a Hamas-organised rally, tearing up a French flag and holding up banners reading: “The assault on the Holy Prophet (PBUH) is an assault on Islam”.
About 100 demonstrators protested outside the Danish consulate in Istanbul, tearing down a signpost, throwing eggs and leaving a black wreath in protest at the entrance.
Cardinal Achille Silvestrini, a retired Vatican diplomat who has had many dealings with Arab countries, told an Italian newspaper that Western culture had to know its limits.
“Freedom is a great virtue but it must be shared and it must not be unilateral,” Cardinal Silvestrini said.
Mona Omar Attia, Egypt’s ambassador to Denmark, said after meeting Rasmussen she was satisfied with the position of the Danish government but regretted the prime minister had said he could not interfere with the press.
DEATH THREATS: The editor of a Norwegian magazine which reprinted the Danish cartoons said he had received 25 death threats and thousands of hate messages.
A Jordanian editor was sacked for reprinting them, despite saying his purpose had been to show the extent of the Danish insult to Islam.—Reuters/AFP
