MOSCOW, February 7 (RIA Novosti) - The "cartoon scandal" over the publication of caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed in a Danish newspaper that ignited a wave of anger in Muslim countries triggered a varied response in Russia and the former Soviet republics Tuesday.
Russian President Vladimir Putin said he hoped Muslim leaders would be able to resolve the scandal. "We very much hope that Muslim religious figures and leaders of the Muslim world will be able to take the situation under control," the Russian leader said in an interview with Spanish media on the eve of his official visit to the country.
Putin said that any provocations in this sensitive area were unacceptable.
"We condemn any such actions, whichever side they may come from," the Russian leader said. "We also condemn such [provocative] cartoons, which add to the division between religions, insult the feelings of believers and provoke them."
The president said the publication of offensive images could not be justified by invoking slogans of free press and that the states where the Mohammed cartoons had been printed or reprinted should at least apologize for failing to prevent it.
Depictions of the Prophet Mohammed are explicitly prohibited in Islam. The cartoons, originally published in a Danish newspaper and subsequently reprinted in several other countries, provoked protests throughout the Muslim world, which led to the Danish Embassy in Lebanon being ransacked on Monday.
Expressing concerns over the growing crisis, an official on Russia's Mufti Council said the organization would make every effort to prevent the violence that could erupt over the publication of the caricatures in the European media.
"Now, the Mufti Council is restraining the situation in Russia to prevent the kinds of developments that took place in certain countries in the past days. The situation is under control," Deputy Chairman Mansur Shakirov said at an international conference Tuesday.
However, Shakirov said 20 million Russian Muslims, along with the 1.4 billion Muslims worldwide, felt offended by the drawings.
"This provocation triggered a chain reaction that is very difficult to stop," he said.
Echoing Shakirov's statement, Mikhail Margelov, chairman of the Federation Council (Russian parliament's upper chamber) foreign affairs committee, said: "The outrage that the Danish newspaper brought about is gaining such momentum that the world community must focus on the events."
Margelov also said none of the sides could afford to remain observers to the crisis and that Jews appeared to be the scapegoats in the conflict.
"Some Islamic circles decided to test Europe's tolerance, and the Arab European League posted on its Web site [Saturday] vulgar cartoons of Anne Frank, a Jewish girl who fell victim to Nazism, sharing a bed with Adolf Hitler," the official said.
Margelov said he had come up with a proposal to make a report on anti-Semitism in Europe at the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) last year, but most PACE members turned it down.
Another senior member of the Russian parliament, Konstantin Kosachev, who heads the international affairs committee in the lower house, said: "The conflict that was sparked by publications of cartoons depicting Prophet Mohammed in the European media should be resolved in its early stages, or it will spiral off into something worse."
The MP said the European Union should issue a statement to calm the situation.
However, he also said that authorities in the Muslim countries where protests had turned violent, claiming the lives of several people, must also take measures to ensure the protests remained civilized.
The Duma deputy also took a different angle on the issue, saying that the scandal benefited Iran.
He said the controversy was helping to radicalize sentiments in the Islamic world against the West and that Moscow would hardly be able to influence Tehran's position on the issue.
"For us Iran is not the most comfortable of partners, particularly the president of Iran [Mahmoud Ahmadinejad], who through his public speeches on a range of international issues has ruled out the possibility of an alliance with Russia," Kosachev said. " We have virtually no means of applying pressure on Iran."
The Islamic Republic has been at the center of controversy over its insistence on developing a controversial nuclear energy program, and toward the end of last year, over its leader's comment that Israel should be "wiped off the map."
Meanwhile, Muslims in the capital of the former Soviet republic of Azerbaijan took to the streets of Baku to protest against the blasphemous cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed.
They carried slogans "Prophet Isa (Jesus) is ashamed of you!" and "Rise, Muslims!" and tried to march toward the country's Foreign Ministry, but police stopped them because they had not been given permission to hold a protest rally.
The activists read out a resolution denouncing the publication of the cartoons as an insult to Islam and called for the people responsible for printing the caricatures to be punished.
According to the document, Muslims all over the world must take a hard line on the problem, as otherwise grave consequences will inevitably ensue.
In a separate development, the Chechen government announced Tuesday that it would suspend a Danish relief group's operations in the republic following the publication of the cartoons.
In a letter of notification to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), Chechen officials said the suspension of the Danish Council for Refugees was intended to avoid further escalation of tensions in the predominantly Muslim republic over the "cartoons scandal."
"The publication of the drawings in Denmark - a "leading European nation that keeps declaring its interfaith tolerance" - "may lead to irreversible consequences for the complicated socio-political situation in the Chechen Republic," the letter said.
According to Chechen officials, the decision to suspend the Danish humanitarian organization has also been necessitated by concerns for the security of its staff amid the wave of angry protests across the Muslim world.
