Beirut – Protesters angry over Danish newspaper cartoons of the prophet Muhammad clashed with Lebanese security forces Sunday, setting a building housing the Danish Embassy on fire and attacking a nearby church.
The sectarian tone of the violence in the predominantly Christian section of East Beirut on Sunday raised fears of deepening divisions in Lebanon a year after former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri was assassinated, setting off political crises in Syria and Lebanon.
An early-morning march through downtown Beirut exploded into violence when a breakaway crowd of marchers surged toward a building that houses the Austrian and Danish missions, chanting obscene anti-Danish slogans in Arabic and vandalizing cars, office buildings, and a Maronite Catholic church nearby. Other protesters burned Danish flags and flags bearing images of the cross.
Lebanese security forces fired tear gas to disperse the crowd, but a group managed to make its way to the building, breaking windows and setting it on fire. The fire quickly spread through the high-rise building, and witnesses said they saw people jumping out of windows to escape the flames.
Reuters reported that one person had died. A Dutch news photographer at the scene was beaten when demonstrators mistook him for a Dane.
Demonstrators also attacked police officers with stones and set fire to several fire engines, witnesses said. Lebanese security forces regained control over the area within two hours, using water cannons and live bullets fired over protesters’ heads.
The Danish Foreign Ministry on Sunday urged Danes to leave Lebanon. On Saturday, protesters set fire to Danish and Swedish missions in Damascus, Syria.
“This was a worst-case scenario, a nightmare scenario,” said Thomas May, the Danish consul general in Dubai. “I don’t think anyone in their wildest imagination would have expected an escalation like what we have seen.”
Lebanese Muslim leaders quickly condemned the attacks and appealed for calm. Lebanon’s grand mufti, Muhammad Rashid Kabbani, denounced the violence, saying there were infiltrators among the protesters trying to “harm the stability of Lebanon.”
On Sunday night, several Lebanese Christian political parties held an unusual counterdemonstration near the Maronite church that was damaged during the demonstration.
“We are here to say that nobody can get the Christians out of Lebanon,” said Mark Mahfouz, 34, a member of the Lebanese Forces party.
The unrest in Lebanon was the latest turn in a controversy that has spread worldwide following publication of the cartoons in Denmark and other Western countries and showed no signs of ebbing Sunday. Demonstrators took to the streets in Afghanistan, Iraq, the West Bank and New Zealand.
In their scope and vitriol, the protests say much about the state of relations between the West and the Muslim world in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
The anger was ignited by 12 caricatures of the prophet Muhammad that were commissioned in September by a Danish newspaper to challenge Islam’s ban on depicting the prophet. Along with picturing him, some lampooned him, with one artist rendering his turban as a bomb with a burning fuse.
After protests began, other European papers reprinted the cartoons.
They declared it an issue of freedom of expression, a cornerstone of democratic values; many Muslims cast it as another insult in a growing conflict that is most often reflected here through the lens of a religious struggle with an American-led West.
The Washington Post contributed to this report.