Thousands of demonstrators took to the streets for a fifth straight day in Pakistan, with police firing tear gas and waving batons at protesters in the southern city of Karachi and the central city of Multan.

Pakistani police arrested nearly 300 people and put a firebrand Islamic leader under house arrest in a bid to clamp down on the unrest that has left five people dead this week.

Meanwhile former US president Bill Clinton said during a visit to Pakistan that printing the cartoons was a mistake but that the violent protests by Muslims have wasted a chance to build bridges with the West.

Copenhagen said its embassy staff would remain in Pakistan but not in the embassy and denied that diplomatic ties were affected.

"We decided on Friday to shut our embassy for security reasons, because we believe it is not responsible to keep it open at the moment," said Lars Thuesen, head of the Danish foreign ministry's crisis centre.

Danish ambassador Bent Wigotski told AFP: "I am still in Pakistan so there is no talk of breaking relations."

Denmark has consistently attracted the fury of protesters in Pakistan and around the world, who have repeatedly burned effigies of Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasumussen and torched and trampled on the country's flag.

It has already temporarily closed its embassies in Tehran, Damascus and Jakarta and its consulates in Beirut and Tunis.

Pakistan cited the cartoons issue in its decision to recall its ambassador but did not explicitly link it to the shutdown of the Danish mission.

"Pakistan's ambassador in Copenhagen, Mr Javed A. Qureshi, has been called to Islamabad for consultations over the cartoon controversy," foreign ministry spokeswoman Tasnim Aslam told AFP.

Several European ambassadors attended the foreign office to be informed of the situation, a diplomatic source said.

But the unrest continued Friday with police battling around 2,000 protesters who blocked a major highway and threw stones at buses in Karachi. The city was largely shut down by a general strike called by religious parties.

Another 1,000 demonstrators chanting "Death to Denmark" gathered in northwestern Peshawar city, where Maulana Yousaf Qureshi, prayer leader at the historic Mohabat Khan mosque, offered the reward for killing the cartoonists.

A boy was shot and wounded near Lahore when protesters scuffled with police, while some 2,000 Islamists burned Danish, US and Norwegian flags in the southwestern city of Quetta.

Meanwhile Hafiz Mohammad Saeed, founder of the militant Lashkar-e-Taiba outfit fighting Indian rule in Kashmir, was detained in Lahore to stop him giving a sermon on the controversy after Friday prayers, his spokesman said.

Around 70 people were held in Multan, 30 in Karachi, 24 in Faisalabad and more than 150 in Lahore in a crackdown, according to police.

Weeks of small protests in Pakistan recently snowballed into violent displays of anger at the West and discontent with the government of military ruler President Pervez Musharraf.

The unrest flared Tuesday when students stormed a diplomatic enclave in Islamabad and rioters rampaged through Lahore, trashing US fast food outlets and leaving two people dead.

On Wednesday 50,000 demonstrators in Peshawar torched a KFC restaurant and the offices of a Norwegian mobile phone firm. Two people died there and another in Lahore that day.

Around 35,000 rallied in Karachi on Thursday but the protest was mostly peaceful.

The Muslim Action Committee, which organized the protest, estimated 20,000 people were there.

"Every Muslim understands this basic concept of the centrality in importance of Muhammad to their lives," said Taji Mustafa, a spokesman for the committee. "So when he is demonised, the young and old are deeply affected. As long as the abuse is ongoing we will continue to rise up in protest."

Mustafa said Muslims' anger had been fuelled by several European newspapers' decisions to reprint the cartoon, which first appeared in a Danish paper in September, and recently by an Italian cabinet minister's decision to wear a T-shirt showing the cartoons.

Reforms minister Roberto Calderoli's appearance in the shirt was blamed for sparking clashes that killed at least 10 people at an Italian consulate in Libya yesterday.

Mustafa said the cartoons were reminiscent of attacks on Jews in European publications in the 1930s.

"Now there is a demonisation of the Muslim community, so we have to speak up to prevent something like the Holocaust from happening," he said.

The protesters postponed their departure from Trafalgar Square to Hyde Park by nearly an hour so participants could take turns kneeling and praying on mats in a designated prayer area.

Some demonstrators wore traditional Muslim garb, while many others were in Western dress, such as jeans and sweatshirts.

"What happened should not have happened," said Younas Yousas, 33, a protester from east London.

"Their freedom of speech should be restricted because it hurts our religion. At the end of the day everyone needs to respect others' religions. And we should strive for peace."

Demonstrators carried placards reading "Europe lacks respect for others," and "Don't they teach manners in Denmark?"

Hamshahri might have done better to compare these two sets of cartoons with each other and the distress they have caused their respective targets. Instead, the newspaper cited the European Jewish Holocaust, not as an illustration of where pictorial denigration of minorities can ultimately lead, but as an example of western hypocrisy over free speech.

Confusion and obfuscation have clouded every element of this morass. Torrid debates about the right to mock belief systems versus the obligation to respect religious sensitivities camouflage the essentially racist nature of the cartoons in question. Take the publication by a German newspaper this week of a cartoon depicting the Iranian football team as suicide bombers. Analogies with the Rushdie and Behzti affairs, in this sense, are misleading.

Liberal secularists cite Enlightenment heroes such as Voltaire, Kant and Mill to underline their cause. But they fail to distinguish between free speech as an essential means to challenge state or church monopoly power and stigmatising vulnerable religious or ethnic minorities in the name of a free press.

Critics such as the philosopher Onora O'Neill (in the Media section of this paper) argue that human-rights values are part of the problem. Charters such as the European convention on human rights (ECHR), she says, have failed to distinguish between the free-expression rights of powerless individuals and those of powerful organisations, including the media, who have inequitable opportunities to defame others.

The eminent law professor Ronald Dworkin took the opposite view on these pages this week. He called for a new understanding of the ECHR. Holocaust-denial and similar laws that exist in many European states should be struck down. They are violations of free speech that should remain unfettered.

This Atlanticist belief in the pre-eminence of free expression, reflected in the US bill of rights, was deliberately rejected by the founding parents of the postwar human rights movement. They had experienced first hand the power of the pen to denigrate minorities and incite mortal hatred. Enlightenment laws that enshrined individual freedoms had proved unequal to the task of ending tyranny and upholding democracy. Drawing on many philosophies and religions, these pioneers sought to bind a fractured world through values that underlined human dignity and equal worth - values that would set strong limits to state power but also encourage everyone to "act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood". They called this the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Of all the freedoms enshrined in rights conventions it is free expression, alone, which directly entails "duties and responsibilities". This includes "protection of the reputation or rights of others". As a result, the distinction between the powerful and powerless that O'Neill rightly calls for is generally recognised in European and international human-rights law. Freedom of expression is valued as an essential foundation of a democratic society; applicable as much to ideas that offend as inform. But the principles of tolerance that define such societies also provide the basis for necessary and proportionate limitations on free speech.

Individuals are prohibited from citing their own human rights as grounds for destroying the rights of others under the ECHR. The European court of human rights has said there is no case to answer to the Dworkinian charge that Holocaust denial laws breach free expression. The specific context in which they operate in the post-Nazi countries, and the vulnerability of the communities targeted, are crucial factors in such judgments.

Who could deny that in the context of modern Europe it is Muslims who have reason to feel vulnerable when mass circulation newspapers publish images that deny their individuality and associate them with terrorism?

This is not to call for new laws to outlaw such images or for courts to ban them. Human-rights values should not become a byword for endless legislation and litigation. They are intended to provide a framework for democratic societies to help us decide what we stand for and how to act, especially in times of tension.

The European editors who published the cartoons sought to make a stand against self-restraint in the name of free expression. But self-restraint can be necessary to prevent the denigration of minorities while maintaining a free press. With this realisation, could a new enlightenment dawn?

·Francesca Klug is a professorial research fellow at the LSE
f.m.klug@lse.ac.uk

VOLGOGRAD - Journalists in Volgograd, a major city in southern Russia, protested Friday against closing a local newspaper embroiled in a controversy over the publication of a religious cartoon.

"The decision of the Volgograd administration to close down the Gorodskiye Vesti newspaper for publishing a religious illustration casts doubts on the main principle of a democratic state - freedom of speech," journalists said in an open letter.

The Gorodskye Vesti newspaper in Volgograd (formerly Stalingrad, the site the largest battle of WWII), carried an article entitled: "No room for racists in power". The article was accompanied by an illustration depicting Jesus Christ, Moses, Buddha and Mohammed in front of a television showing two groups of people about to start a fight. The caption read "We didn't teach you this."

The authors of the letter said the publication had not caused a negative reaction among believers, but had become a political matter.

According to Volgograd media, the closing of Gorodskye Vesti is an attempt to find culprits in an "artificially sparked scandal, is presented an incitement of inter-religious discord."

Volgograd Deputy Mayor Andrei Doronin said the City Hall, as the founder of the newspaper, would close down Gorodskye Vesti.

"We have carefully studied the article and decided to close down the newspaper in order not to inflame ethnic hostilities," he said.

On Wednesday, prosecutors announced that they were launching a probe into the matter after local politicians and representatives of public organizations voiced their concerns in the wake of the recent wave of protests that engulfed the Muslim world after satirical cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed were published in a Danish newspaper and reprinted internationally.

Gorodskiye Izvestia Editor Tatyana Kaminskaya apologized for any offense that may have been caused, but added that she had received no complaints from religious or ethnic communities. She justified the article by saying that it was a protest against religious and ethnic intolerance.

"I can't understand why anyone could come to such conclusions," she said. "The piece is against religious and ethnic intolerance. A caricature is something comical but with a malicious depiction of reality - there was nothing of that sort in our newspaper."

The secretariat said all those involved "and the officials responsible for them" should be referred to investigations and to court.

"Those who have a relation to the incident and are responsible for security in Benghazi have been suspended and referred to investigations," the statement said.

It declared Sunday a day of mourning for "our martyr sons."

At least 10 people died in the six-hour riot outside the Italian consulate, where more than 1,000 demonstrators gathered in an angry protest, apparently in reaction to an Italian cabinet minister who said he would wear a T-shirt printed with the cartoons satirising Prophet Muhammad that have provoked protests across the Muslim world.

The crowd hurled rocks and bottles before storming the compound and setting fire to the building and cars parked nearby. Police with Kalashnikov rifles fired live ammunition and tear gas to disperse them.

Roberto Calderoli, the Italian cabinet minister blamed for sparking the riots handed in his resignation today, the news agency ANSA reported.

The reforms minister said he had offered his resignation to Silvio Berlusconi to stop "the shameful exploitation which in these hours has been directed against me," ANSA reported.

Calderoli had been under increasing pressure to step down after his intention to wear the T-shirt was blamed for the protests, resulting in the highest death toll of any of the riots held against the caricatures in the Muslim world.

Is the argument over the Danish cartoons really reducible to a matter of free speech? Even if we believe that free speech is a fundamental value, that does not give us carte blanche to say what we like in any context, regardless of consequence or effect. Respect for others, especially in an increasingly interdependent world, is a value of at least equal importance.

Europe has never had to worry too much about context or effect because for around 200 years it dominated and colonised most of the world. Such was Europe's omnipotence that it never needed to take into account the sensibilities, beliefs and attitudes of those that it colonised, however sacred and sensitive they might have been. On the contrary, European countries imposed their rulers, religion, beliefs, language, racial hierarchy and customs on those to whom they were entirely alien. There is a profound hypocrisy - and deep historical ignorance - when Europeans complain about the problems posed by the ethnic and religious minorities in their midst, for that is exactly what European colonial rule meant for peoples around the world. With one crucial difference, of course: the white minorities ruled the roost, whereas Europe's new ethnic minorities are marginalised, excluded and castigated, as recent events have shown.

But it is no longer possible for Europe to ignore the sensibilities of peoples with very different values, cultures and religions. First, western Europe now has sizeable minorities whose origins are very different from the host population and who are connected with their former homelands in diverse ways. If European societies want to live in some kind of domestic peace and harmony - rather than in a state of Balkanisation and repression - then they must find ways of integrating these minorities on rather more equal terms than, for the most part, they have so far achieved. That must mean, among other things, respect for their values. Second, it is patently clear that, globally speaking, Europe matters far less than it used to - and in the future will count for less and less. We must not only learn to share our homelands with people from very different roots, we must also learn to share the world with diverse peoples in a very different kind of way from what has been the European practice.

Europe has little experience of this, and what experience it has is mainly confined to less than half a century. Old attitudes of superiority and disdain - dressed up in terms of free speech, progress or whatever - are still very powerful. Nor - as many liberals like to think - are they necessarily in decline. On the contrary, racial bigotry is on the rise, even in countries that have previously been regarded as tolerant. The Danish government depends for its rule on a racist, far-right party that gained 13% of the seats in the last election. The decision of Jyllands-Posten to publish the cartoons - and papers in France, Germany, Italy and elsewhere to reprint them - lay not so much in the tradition of free speech but in European contempt for other cultures and religions: it was a deliberate, calculated insult to the beliefs of others, in this case Muslims.

This kind of mentality - combining Eurocentrism, old colonial attitudes of supremacism, racism, provincialism and sheer ignorance - will serve our continent ill in the future. Europe must learn to live in and with the world, not to dominate it, nor to assume it is superior or more virtuous. Any continent that has inflicted such brutality on the world over a period of 200 years has not too much to be proud of, and much to be modest and humble about - though this is rarely the way our history is presented in Britain, let alone elsewhere. It is worth remembering that while parts of Europe have had free speech (and democracy) for many decades, its colonies were granted neither. But when it comes to our "noble values", our colonial record is always written out of the script.

This attitude of disdain, of assumed superiority, will be increasingly difficult to sustain. We are moving into a world in which the west will no longer be able to call the tune as it once did. China and India will become major global players alongside the US, the EU and Japan. For the first time in modern history the west will no longer be overwhelmingly dominant. By the end of this century Europe is likely to pale into insignificance alongside China and India. In such a world, Europe will be forced to observe and respect the sensibilities of others.

Few in Europe understand or recognise these trends. A small example is the bitter resistance displayed on the continent to the proposed takeover of Arcelor by Mittal Steel: at root the opposition is based on thinly disguised racism. But Europe had better get used to such a phenomenon: takeovers by Indian and Chinese firms are going to become as common as American ones. A profound parochialism grips our continent. When Europe called the global tune it did not matter, because what happened in Europe translated itself into a global trend and a global power. No more: now it is simply provincialism.

When Europe dominated, there were no or few feedback loops. Or, to put it another way, there were few, if any, consequences for its behaviour towards the non-western world: relations were simply too unequal. Now - and increasingly in the future - it will be very different. And the subject of these feedback loops, or consequences, will concern not just present but also past behaviour.

For 200 years the dominant powers have also been the colonial powers: the European countries, the US and Japan. They have never been required to pay their dues for what they did to those whom they possessed and treated with contempt. Europeans have treated this chapter in their history by choosing to forget. So has Japan, except that in its case its neighbours have not only refused to forget but are also increasingly powerful. As a consequence, Japan's present and future is constantly stalked by its history. This future could also lie in wait for Europe. We might think the opium wars are "simply history"; the Chinese (rightly) do not. We might think the Bengal famine belongs in the last century, but Indians do not.

Europe is moving into a very different world. How will it react? If something like the attitude of the Danes prevails - a combination of defensiveness, fear, provincialism and arrogance - then one must fear for Europe's ability to learn to live in this new world. There is another way, but the signs are none too hopeful.

· Martin Jacques is a senior visiting research fellow at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore

In one segment of the film, three decapitated heads are held up to cheers from a gathered crowd. Later, a number of bodies are seen being dragged behind a pick-up truck.

Crowds are heard chanting "long live Osama bin Laden" and "long live Mullah Omar", respectively the leaders of al-Qaeda and the Taleban.

The lawless, mountainous region neighbours the volatile Helmand provice of Afghanistan, where the first of 3,300 British troops arrived this week to begin setting up camp as part of a two year Nato deployment.

The footage underlines the struggle the troops face when they join a Nato peacekeeping force of 16,500 in the area to tackle

The Army is on high alert for a backlash over video footage of British troops attacking youths in Basra, Iraq. The region has also seen some of the more extreme protests in the 'on-going cartoon wars' against the pictures of Muhammad in which more than a dozen people have died.

Last week, in a show of strength, 200 Taleban militants surrounded provincial government offices in the area killing more than 20 people in a failed attempt to capture the deputy governor. The beheaded bodies of two Afghan intellingence agents were found two days ago in a desert near the border with Iran.

The Taleban, toppled from power in a US-led military campaign in late 2001, regrouped on the border of Aghanistan and Pakistan was last year blamed for the deaths of 1,700 people in the area.

Tolo TV launched in Jalalabad last August and claims to be Afghanistan's largest private broadcaster. Although its production values have been compared unfavourably to those of American public access TV, it prides itself on reflecting the diversity of the nation's contemporary culture.
# Thousands joined street rallies in Pakistan today to protest at the cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. An imam in Peshawar declared a $1 million bounty on the head of offending Danish cartoonists, as Danish flags were ritually burned.

Pakistani police put an Islamist leader under house arrest in a vain attempt to prevent more unrest after Friday prayers. Five people have been killed in Pakistan this week, and a further 10 in violent protests in Afghanistan.