Falkland Islands referendum
The Buenos Aires government has said sovereignty is not a matter of the right of self- determination of people
Monday’s voting results ought to end once and for all Argentina’s claim to Britain’s South Atlantic possessions.
Monday’s referendum results in the Falkland Islands ought to end once and for all Argentina’s always- feeble claim to Britain’s South Atlantic possessions. But it won’t. Under the banner of the right to self- determination of peoples, the referendum asked the 1,672 eligible voters among the islands’ 2,841 people: “Do you wish the Falkland Islands to retain their current political status as an Overseas Territory of the United Kingdom?”
Over 90 per cent of those eligible voted, and all but three people said, yes, they want the islands to remain British.
For the islanders and the British government, there could be no clearer expression of what the future should be for the two main and 776 smaller islands making up the Falklands group. The territory also includes the South Georgia and South Sandwich Islands.
And stemming from administration of these territories, Britain has a large pie slice of Antarctica to the south, which is also claimed by Argentina.
But even before the referendum was held — nearly a year after the 30th anniversary of the 74- day war in 1982 in which Argentina briefly occupied the Falklands — the Buenos Aires government said the vote was fraudulent and it would not be influenced by the outcome.
The position of the government of President Cristina Kirchner is that the sovereignty of the Falklands is not a matter of the right of self- determination of peoples.
With tortuous logic, Kirchner and her ministers say the Falkland Islanders are a transplanted British population, and their presence on the islands does not alter Argentina’s sovereignty over what they call Las Malvinas.
Well, many of the old Falkland Islands families trace their heritage back generations, to the years immediately after 1833 when the British established the first major administration over the islands as a sheep- rearing outpost and supply base for ships rounding Cape Horn.
Likewise, Argentina is an immigrant nation populated by people whose lineage goes back to Europe several generations ago.
Over many decades, successive Argentine governments have manufactured an emotional attachment to the Falklands, 500 kilometres east of Argentina’s Patagonian coast.
But as is so often the case with unfulfilled territorial claims, the real reasons are political and economic, rather than some fanciful blood bond between the people and the land.
The occasions on which various Argentine governments have made a public fuss about their claim to the Falklands follow closely the popularity, or lack of it, of the administration in Buenos Aires. President Kirchner began clamouring about the claim last year, and gathering support from fellow South American countries to impede shipping to and from the islands at a time when the popularity of her administration was plummeting because of incompetent economic management and inflation rising to about 25 per cent.
In 1982, it was a fear of being ousted that led Gen. Leopoldo Galtieri and his military regime to invade the Falklands in the hope of courting public approval.
He was removed from power and Argentina began the transition to democracy four days after the British retook the islands on June 14, 1982.
Since then, the economic value of the Falklands and the ocean territory within their exclusive economic zone have become just as alluring as their usefulness as a political distraction.
Since the British established lasting settlements, the economy has been based on the fine wool produced by the sheep that feed on the islands’ sweeping grassland.
But this never made the islands or the islanders rich. The fisheries promoted by the British in the 1980s after the war have.
European and Asian fishing fleets have willingly paid high licence fees to fish the bountiful waters in the islands’ economic zone. As a result, in the 1980s the Falkland Islanders had the second- highest per- capita income in the world.
More recently, the islands have benefited from high- end tourism as cruise ships call in at the capital, Port Stanley, to disgorge visitors avid for sightings of the islands’ unique population of birds and marine mammals.
The latest lure of the islands, however, is the prospect of significant finds of offshore oil and gas.
Who discovered the Falklands and when remains a matter of conjecture, but the first Europeans to establish a settlement there, a fishing outpost, is clear from the Spanish name, Las Malvinas. That’s a translation of the 18th- century French name for the islands, Iles Malouines, indicating those first settlers came from Saint- Malo in Brittany.
Over the next 50 years, the French, British and Spanish all established outposts on the islands, often at the same time.
Argentina claims the Falklands were part of the territory bequeathed to it on independence from Spain in 1816. But Britain also claimed sovereignty, and the few settlements established by Argentines in the next 15 years lasted only months.
When the British asked the Argentines to leave in 1833, they did so.