Jonathan Motzfeldt | Ex-Greenland premier, 72

Jonathan Motzfeldt, 72, a former prime minister of Greenland who spearheaded a drive for more self-rule and opposed U.S. bases on the semiautonomous Danish territory, has died, the local government said.

He was admitted to a hospital in Nuuk, the capital, with pneumonia and died there of a brain hemorrhage Thursday.

Mr. Motzfeldt led the island's government from 1979 to 1991 and again from 1997 to 2002, and is considered one of the founding fathers of its home-rule agreement with Denmark.

Greenlanders knew him as "Junnuk," a pipe-smoking Lutheran priest turned politician, who led the mostly Inuit population toward autonomy. As a member of the social democratic Siumut party, he became Greenland's first government leader after home rule was introduced in 1979.

"Junnuk was for many years the pillar and beacon of the Greenlandic people, our national focal point," Prime Minister Kuupik Kleist said Friday.

Mr. Motzfeldt was forced to leave politics in the early 1990s because of alcohol problems but returned six years later.

In 2002, he lost an internal party struggle to fellow Siumut member Hans Enoksen, who replaced him as prime minister on the island of 56,000 people. Mr. Motzfeldt then became speaker of Greenland's parliament but resigned in 2008 amid allegations that he groped a female civil servant. He denied wrongdoing and was never charged.

Mr. Motzfeldt started his battle for autonomy in the mid-1950s with a group of young Inuit activists. The Arctic island was then a province governed from Copenhagen.

As prime minister, he opposed a 1951 defense agreement between the United States and Denmark allowing four U.S. air bases in Greenland. Most Greenlanders opposed the deal because they never profited economically from the rent-free bases.

All except the U.S. base in Thule have since been shut.

- AP