COPENHAGEN - Danish Foreign Minister Per Stig Moeller claimed Monday that extremist elements were continuing to foment anger over the publication of cartoons of the prophet Mohammed and suggested Al-Qaeda was exploiting the uproar.
"Extremist forces are seeking to keep the conflict alive because they are not attracted by the Western tilt that many of their governments have taken," he told reporters in Copenhagen after meeting his Norwegian counterpart Jonas Gahr Stoere, in Denmark to sign a deal on maritime boundaries.
According to Moeller "there is no doubt that Al-Qaeda is also trying as far as possible to exploit the situation and fan the flames."
Asked if calm was now returning in the Muslim world Moeller said that it would be more accurate to say that the crisis ebbed and flowed.
"And is is very hard to be a prophet to predict what is happening on the street," he added, in a reference to Pakistan and Turkey.
Danish opposition parties had earlier called for an independent investigation into the right-leaning coalition government's handling of the row, which has sparked violent protests in Muslim countries.
"The prime minister (Anders Fogh Rasmussen) has insisted that he has no reason to blame himself and has laid most of the responsibility for the crisis on imams in Denmark, which is far from accurate," Frank Aaen, a spokesman for the formerly communist Unity List party, told AFP.
Aaen, supported by the other leftist and centrist opposition parties, has called for an explanation in writing from Rasmussen and an investigation into the cartoon affair as soon as the protests die down.
"This investigation is necessary because things are too murky. The head of the government has said himself that Denmark is facing its biggest challenge since World War II. So it is obvious that we should cast some light on this serious crisis," the head of the centrist Radical Party, Marianne Jelved, told AFP.
Rasmussen's effigy has been torched in the streets across the Muslim world, and his name has been blazoned across banners at violent protest rallies against 12 caricatures of Mohammed, first published in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten last September.
The prime minister has refused to apologize for the publication of the cartoons, insisting that the government has no sway over what appears in the media in Denmark, where freedom of expression is fundamental.
Instead, the government has laid most of the blame for the global uproar over the drawings on a group of Muslim clerics in Denmark who, angered by the Danish government's lack of response to their protests, traveled to the Middle East last year to present a dossier including the 12 cartoons and three other more inflammatory pictures that had not appeared in the paper.
"The government carries the greater responsibility for its misinterpretation of a letter by the 11 Muslim ambassadors protesting against these drawings and for underestimating and ignoring the repeated warnings from Egypt last fall," Aaen said.
The 11 diplomats in October requested a meeting with Rasmussen to express their outrage over the cartoons, but he declined, and Egypt reportedly cautioned early on that the row could escalate out of control if Denmark did not issue an official apology.
