To Be Unfurled June 21 : New Greenland Flag Is Torn by Conflict

Instead of rallying around their new flag, Greenlanders are squabbling over what it should look like.

Some think it is too abstract and futuristic and looks like the symbol of a Danish rowing club. Others say it looks too much like the Polish flag.

The flag is supposed to be hoisted on June 21, the national day of the island that is mostly ice and mostly above the Arctic Circle. It was intended to be a symbol of the very soul of Greenland--a boost for the island’s 50,000 inhabitants, who are striving for an identity after centuries of direct rule from Denmark.

But angry opponents are collecting signatures on a petition demanding a referendum to give the people a chance to say no to the flag chosen in mid-February by the home rule legislature, the Landsting.

Greenland, an 840,000-square-mile island that covers an area roughly the size of Alaska and Texas combined, gained autonomous status in 1979.

500 Suggestions

By a narrow margin, the legislature decided the new flag would have a white top half with a red half-sphere on it and a bottom half red with a white half-sphere. The losing legislators wanted a white cross on a green bottom, one of four possibilities left after the flag committee’s yearlong scrutiny of 500 suggested designs.

The winning designer, Thue Christiansen, finds the whole flag flap distressing. To him, the flag’s design symbolizes the “tension between the cold ice and the warm sun.”

A local weekly newspaper described the controversy as “a tragic comedy.” Its survey found many Greenlanders insisting that all they see when they look at the new flag is a small man with a cap, while others say--after imagining a few lines added to it--that they see a skier.

Some complain it is identical to the rowing club symbol. Others say it looks like a twin-colored sun was superimposed on the red and white flag of Poland. Some say it should contain a Christian cross like other Nordic nations.

After the vote was taken on the flag, a small group of islanders marched angrily to the Landsting, waving the banners of various Greenlandic organizations using the Danish flag with a white cross on a white backing.

’ A Stripe of Green’

“If we could not have retained the old flag we could easily have created our own by adding to it, for instance, a stripe of green,” said Gudrun Chemnitz, organizer of the demonstration.

Peter Egede, one of the first to demand a referendum, recalled that the Danish flag has been raised in Greenland for 264 years “in sorrow and joy” and that generations of Greenlanders have been singing about “the cross flying so shining white.”

When the weekly Groenlands-Posten asked its readers last year to pick their favorite among a number of the suggested designs, the majority of replies stated the Danish flag.

Egede blamed it all on “the leftists” in the Landsting who “pay lip service only to solidarity” with Denmark and the other Nordic countries.

The Landsting met in closed session to review the situation. But Jonathan Motzfeldt, the home rule prime minister, announced that nothing new had emerged that could influence the choice of the flag.

He added that if the Landsting minority had had its way Greenland would now have a green-white flag identical with that of an independence movement in Puerto Rico.

Jan Kanstrup, a Danish expert who was a consultant of the Landsting flag committee, said there are a lot of identical flags across the world. He told Greenlanders that if they had chosen the Danish flag they would have had that symbol in common not only with Denmark but also with a producer of vermouth.