Greenland wants to decide its own future and does not want to become an American territory. Greenland Prime Minister Mute Egede said this on Tuesday. He responded to the repeated statements of the new American president, Donald Trump, that The US should take control of Greenland, writes TASR according to an AFP report.
“We are Greenlanders. We don’t want to be Americans. We don’t want to be Danes either. Greenland will decide the future of Greenland,” he said at a press conference on Tuesday, Egede, adding that Greenland is now in a “complex situation”.
Trump, who assumed the office of President of the United States on Monday, caused a stir in early January when he refused to rule out military coercion to bring both Greenland and the Panama Canal under US control. Greenland, which is seeking independence from Denmark, has important geostrategic importance and the United States has a military base there.
Although Trump did not directly mention Greenland in his inauguration speech on Monday, reporters later asked him about it in the Oval Office. “Greenland is a wonderful place, we need it for international security,” the American president answered them. “I’m sure Denmark will ‘smarten up’ – it costs them a lot of money to maintain (Greenland) to keep it,” he added.
In response to his comments on Tuesday, Danish Foreign Minister Lars Lökke Rasmussen said that no country should be able to just take over another. “Of course, we cannot have a world order where countries, if they are big enough…, can just take whatever they want,” he told reporters.
Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen wrote in a post on Instagram on Monday that Europe will now have to orientate itself in a new reality. She added that Greenlanders have the right to self-determination. At the same time, however, she emphasized that it is necessary for Denmark to maintain its alliance with the USwhich she characterized as the most important since World War II.
