Greenland wants to decide its own future and does not want to become an American territory. This was said on Tuesday by the Prime Minister of Greenland, Mute Egede, TASR writes, according to a report by the AFP agency.
“We are Greenlanders. We don’t want to be Americans. We don’t even want to be Danes. Greenland will decide the future of Greenland,” Egede told a press conference on Tuesday, adding that Greenland is now in a “complex situation”.
Trump, who took office on Monday, caused an uproar 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 beautiful place, we need it for international security,” the US president told 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 simply take over another. “Of course, we can’t have a world order where countries, if they’re 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 the need for Denmark to maintain its alliance with the US, which she called the most important for her country since the Second World War.