COPENHAGEN: Danish opposition parties called on Monday for an independent investigation into the right-leaning coalition government’s handling of a row over Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) cartoons that have sparked violent protests in Muslim countries.
"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," said Frank Aaen, a spokesman for the formerly communist Unity List party.
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 said.
The prime minister has refused to apologise 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. Jelved on Monday criticised Rasmussen for having only presented the letter from the ambassadors as a protest against the drawings, when in fact it also condemned "the anti-Muslim atmosphere in Denmark".
Members of Rasmussen’s coalition government, and especially of government ally the extreme-right Danish People’s Party, have openly referred to Muslims and Islam in derogatory terms. "The prime minister focused only on the (protest against the) drawings in this letter, avoiding to talk about the ambassadors’ other grievances," Jelved said.
