4 protesters killed in Afghan town: Blasphemous cartoons
QALAT (Afghanistan), Feb 8: Police shot dead four protesters here on Wednesday during rioting over the issue of blasphemous cartoons, bringing the worldwide death toll to 13. Eleven demonstrators have been killed since Friday in Afghanistan, and one each in Somalia and Lebanon.
The re-printing of the 12 cartoons in a French satirical weekly on Wednesday, along with a fresh batch of similar cartoons, is likely to deepen Muslim anger. French President Jacques Chirac reacted by condemning “all manifest provocation that might dangerously fan passions,” according to a government spokesman.
The latest deaths in Afghanistan occurred as protesters and police clashed in Qalat, the capital of Zabul province, while new demonstrations were held in Kabul and in Nangarhar.
The death toll from five days of demonstrations in Afghanistan rose one day after Nato troops were called in to a remote northwestern city where rioters attacked Norwegian-led peacekeepers.
Khaled Meshaal, head of the political bureau of the Palestinian Hamas movement, warned in Cairo that the Western press “was playing with fire”. Russian President Vladimir Putin also slammed the cartoons as a provocation, equating them with child pornography.
He called on Denmark to “ask for forgiveness”.
In Vienna, the current president of the European Union, Austrian Chancellor Wolfgang Schuessel, denounced the “spiral of reciprocal provocations and insults” which, he said, fanned the flames of intolerance.
Neither “disparaging caricatures” nor “jokes about the Holocaust have any place in a world where cultures and religions should live side by side in a spirit of mutual respect,” he said, alluding to an Iranian newspaper that has launched a contest for cartoons about the Nazi campaign to exterminate Jews.
European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana will work to ease tensions during a trip to the Middle East next week, he said, warning that the dispute could seriously strain relations between the Muslim and non-Muslim worlds.
Three United Nations human rights experts Doudou Diene, UN monitor on racism, sma Jehangir, expert on freedom of religion; and Ambeyi Ligabo, the world body’s watchdog on freedom of expression; slammed the publication of the cartoons, but said violence was the wrong way to protest.
The Danish newspaper at the origin of the row said it would consider also printing cartoons of the Holocaust collected by Iran’s largest-selling newspaper.
Iran’s Hamsharhri newspaper said on Monday it was holding a contest on cartoons of the Holocaust in response to the publishing in European papers of blasphemous caricatures.
“But we will not make a decision before we have seen the cartoons, and it is in no way seen as remorse or a way to establish a false balance between our cartoons and the Iranian cartoons,” Jyllands-Posten’s culture editor Flemming Rose told AFP.
The Iranian paper said its intention was to turn the tables on the assertion that newspapers can print offensive material in the name of freedom of expression.
In Pakistan, thousands of protesters burned an effigy of the US president in a remote tribal area.
In the West Bank city of Hebron, scores of Palestinians hurled stones and bottles at the offices of a team of international monitors to protest the cartoons.
Denmark continued to close diplomatic outposts, also pulling out 11 Danish members of a peace-monitoring team in the West Bank, officials said.
Its embassies and consulates have been fire-bombed and stormed in Tehran, Beirut and Damascus.
In Ankara, a lawmaker from Turkey’s governing party, Vahit Kiler, announced that the 110-store supermarket chain he owns would boycott Danish and Norwegian products.
Protests took place in Sarajevo and Sofia, and a march is planned for Friday in Rabat.
Journalists working for an Algerian television station which broadcast the offending images were fired.
The satirical French weekly Charlie Hebdo printed all 12 of the blasphemous cartoons on Wednesday, along with an original front-page caricature of its own.
Muslim scholars in Britain, where a radical Islamic cleric was given a prison term on Tuesday for soliciting murder and inciting racial hatred, called for a change in the law to prevent such depictions being published in the British media.
The newly-convened Muslim Action Committee of imams and mosque representatives also demanded tightening the newspaper industry code of conduct to restrict the press from copying their European counterparts.
