Sunday newspapers will not be allowed to publish controversial cartoons of the prophet Muhammad after a Muslim pressure group was granted a court interdict.
The South African National Editors’ Forum (Sanef) said on Saturday that several South African media houses were gagged from publishing the cartoon on Friday night.
The Jamiat-ul Ulama of Transvaal, which sought an interdict against Johncom Media and Independent Newspapers, among others, said the cartoons were ”deeply offensive”.
The organisation was granted the interdict at about 10.30pm on Friday.
The Sunday Times, one of the Johncom newspapers that received a
letter from the group asking if it would publish the cartoon, said at the time it had not decided on its action.
The paper’s editor, Mondli Makhanya, told the Mail & Guardian Online on Saturday that it was a ”huge blow for the media”.
He said he had refused to make an undertaking to the Jamiat-ul Ulama on the principle that the Sunday Times would not be dictated to by outsiders on what to publish.
But, ”We would have done the responsible thing,” Makhanya said.
”We believe that if we were to have given an undertaking not to publish, we would invite similar demands and threats from anyone who felt offended by the stories we publish. No credible newspaper can be held to ransom by the beliefs of a section of a population,” he told the South African Press Association.
”We are obliged to reflect the world that we live in — not just a part of it — for the benefit of all our readers. We must uphold the right to publish without fear or favour.”
Sanef chairperson Joe Thloloe described the interdict as alarming. He said Sanef believes the interdict amounts to pre-publication censorship.
The interdict ”limits freedom of expression in that the decision on whether to publish or not to publish has been taken away from the editors and placed on the shoulders of the court”.
”The editors of the publications that were gagged are aware of the law and the limitations the Constitution has placed on freedom of expression and would respect those.
”It is not for the courts to assume that the law is going to be broken and make the decision for editors,” he said in a statement.
‘Deliberate act of provocation’
Meanwhile, demonstrators from both the far left and extreme right gathered on Saturday in Copenhagen to add to the uproar over the publication of the cartoons, which have now been reprinted as far away as New Zealand.
Leftist anti-racist activists were due to start their protests at 1pm (12am GMT) north-east of Copenhagen, while the extreme-right Danish Front was to start its own march an hour later from the same spot.
The 12 cartoons, first published last September by the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, have caused an uproar in the Muslim world and drawn the lines of a new cultural battle over freedom of speech and religious tolerance.
The leftist demonstration had been organized by SFU, the youth wing of the Socialist People’s party, and could well include ”troublemakers”, police spokesperson Flemming Steen Munch told Agence France-Presse.
”We expect activists of the anarchist type and troublemakers to appear in this demonstration,” he said.
The extreme-right organisers called for demonstrators to march calmly, but said that ”one can almost expect that the anti-racists are fantasising about a violent confrontation”.
In spite of appeals by western leaders the cartoons appeared Saturday in two New Zealand newspapers, drawing criticism from the government.
In the Muslim world anger continued to simmer.
Indonesia, the world’s largest Islamic country, condemned on Saturday the publication of the cartoons as insensitive and an insult to Muslims around the globe.
”The publication of the caricatures is clearly an insensitivity towards the perception and beliefs of a religious group,” President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono told reporters.
Malaysian Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi on Saturday condemned the drawings as ”a deliberate act of provocation”.
”This deplorable act is a blatant disregard for Islamic sensitivities over the use of such images, which are particularly insulting to and forbidden by Islam,” Abdullah said in a statement to the official Bernama news agency.
The cartoons show the West is against Islam, the ousted Taliban said on Saturday as Afghan religious leaders added to worldwide condemnation of the images.
A statement purportedly from the Taliban, who have been waging a bloody insurgency since they were removed from power in late 2001, said the cartoons published in other European newspapers last week showed ”the enmity of the West to Islam”.
Dozens of religious leaders and tribal chiefs met on Saturday at a mosque in the southern city of Kandahar, once a Taliban stronghold, to express their disapproval of the cartoons.
Several dozen angry students hurled stones at the European Union headquarters in Gaza City early on Saturday in protest
A Dutch newspaper, De Volkskrant, that reprinted the cartoons has received threats, its editor said.
United Nations chief Kofi Annan on Friday urged Muslims around the world to
accept the apology offered by Jyllands-Posten.
”I share the distress of the Muslim friends who feel that the cartoon offends their religion,” the UN chief said. – Sapa, AFP