GREENLAND cannot be “bought or seized”, the head of Greenland’s Evangelical Lutheran Church has said, as she urged Americans to oppose President Trump’s threats to take over the country.
“We are people, not property, and our homes are not for sale,” Bishop Paneeraq Siegstad Munk said this week, emphasising that her country remained historically and culturally distinctive. Her Church, which forms a diocese of the Church of Denmark, accounts for 95 per cent of Greenland’s 57,000 mainly Inuit inhabitants.
“We’re a small people, but we are not invisible. We have language, culture, ancestors, children, and a future tied to this place — we do not want to become part of the United States.”
The appeal was issued as President Trump vowed to press ahead with a takeover of the vast Arctic territory, a Danish county since 1953, despite repeated warnings of a conflict with NATO.
In a social-media post from the capital, Nuuk, Bishop Munk said that she was asking Americans to write to the US Congress and Senate to oppose any unilateral move, and to defend “freedom, dignity, and the right of people to choose their own path”.
A priest ministering to the island’s small Roman Catholic community, the Revd Tomaž Majcen, a Conventual Franciscan from Slovenia, said that he had also been alarmed at the “blunt and disturbing tone” of recent US statements.
The governments of Denmark and Greenland had “firmly rejected” any outside control, he told Italy’s Servizio Informazione Religiosa. “I’m concerned that our home might be considered a piece of land rather than a community of people with families, traditions and faith. Most Greenlanders firmly believe in their identity and right to decide their own future — they mostly reject the idea of joining the US. . . But people are worried and scared, and are talking about this.”
The Danish and Greenlandic Foreign Ministers were due to hold talks on Wednesday with the US Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, after a fresh warning this week from the premier Jens-Frederik Nielsen’s regional government that Greenland’s security and defence belonged “fundamentally and firmly” to the Western Alliance.
In a new message on Monday, published by the World Council of Churches, Bishop Munk said that it was “critical to stay calm” amid the current tensions, which raised issues of human rights and respect “for international laws and treaties”.
Mr Majcen said that Greenlanders, who are European Union citizens, understood that their country’s “strategic position” as a source of “minerals and rare earths” had been amplified by the melting of ice sheets. He said that the Arctic was “one of God’s most spectacular yet vulnerable masterpieces”, and urged Western Christians to “pray for peace and respect for sovereignty”.