Kabul - Thousands of people in western Afghanistan gathered
on Saturday to protest the reprint of a caricature of the Prophet
Mohammed in Denmark and an upcoming film by a Dutch legislator that
criticizes the Koran, officials said.
The protesters gathered in the stadium of Herat city and were
chanting slogans against Denmark and the Netherlands, Noor Khan
Nikzad, spokesman for the provincial police chief, told Deutsche
Presse-Agentur dpa.
'More than 10,000 people, including scholars, school and
university students and local citizens of Herat city, have gathered
in the stadium,' Nikzad said.
The people were informed about the gathering though an
announcement by state-run television in the province, he said, adding
that hundreds of police officers were deployed around the centre of
the city to provide security and control the mob if they turned
violent.
Hundreds of schoolboys also tied black cloths around their heads
with the inscription 'God is great' and carried banners that
condemned the reprint of the cartoon and the making of the film.
'We want to show to the world that the Muslim people of
Afghanistan can not tolerate an insult to our religion or our holy
prophet,' Aslam Mohammadi, a scholar and one of the organizers of the
demonstration, told dpa by phone.
The protesters were chanting slogans 'Death to Denmark and death
to Holland,' protester Gulab Shah said.
The demonstration in Herat followed a similar gathering in
different parts of the country in the past week. Several Afghan
officials also condemned the cartoons.
'For Afghanistan it is intolerable and unacceptable that the
religious belief and faith of 1 billion people is subjected to
disrespect,' Afghan Foreign Minister Rangin Dadfar Spanta told a
press conference on Wednesday.
'Those who print these kinds of insulting cartoons, they are
pioneers in cultural clashes ... and they are against peace and
friendship of human beings,' he said.
The protesters in Herat also asked the Afghan government to expel
the Dutch and Danish soldiers, who serve in the country as part of
the NATO-led peacekeeping forces.
There are over 1,600 Dutch soldiers in the volatile southern
province of Uruzgan, and nearly 800 Danish soldiers mostly stationed
in neighbouring Helmand province, where the Taliban-led insurgency is
the most active.
The first publication of the Prophet Mohammed cartoons in a
Danish newspaper in 2006 sparked widespread condemnations and
demonstrations throughout the Islamic world.
Several people were killed in bloody demonstrations in Afghanistan
after the Afghan police opened fire on protesters.
A leading Danish newspaper reprinted the cartoons after the Danish
police discovered a plot to kill the artist.
Afghanistan is a conservative Islamic country that regards
disrespect of the Prophet Mohammed and the Koran as blasphemy, the
punishment for which is death.
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