While Premier Oil gets on with developing the Sea Lion oilfield, and others like Borders & Southern and Falkland Oil & Gas plan the next stage of their exploration campaigns, the long-running row between the UK and Argentina over the future of the Falklands has taken two dangerous twists.
One: President Cristina de Kirchner – who wants the Falklands, possibly at any price, is apparently buying 20 second-hand Mirage F1 jets from Spain. The 1,453mph aircraft can handle a lethal array of weaponry including smart bombs.
And it has happened when the UK is at its most vulnerable… a decimated Royal Navy with no OPERATIONAL aircraft carriers; possibly the most stupid of PM Cameron’s many poor decisions.
Two: She is using the UN as a weapon against the UK too.
Basically, Argentina claims that it has received strong support from the United Nations for its bid to grab control, despite the islanders stating in their March referendum that they wanted to remain under Britain’s wing.
This supposed support worries me as it is not long since UN secretary general Ban Ki-Moon said the UK was not violating relevant UN resolutions regarding the Falklands and the vexed issue of colonialism.
In November, he said that a prevailing impression is that “people living under certain conditions should have a certain level of capacities so that they can decide their own future”, be it independence or some kind of government in their territories.
The Falklands referendum was entirely in the spirit of Moon’s pronouncement. But after the March poll, Argentine foreign minister Hector Timerman branded the referendum “illegal” and said it was “truly deplorable” that Britain had rejected 40 resolutions by the UN Decolonisation Committee calling for negotiations on sovereignty.
The UK’s ambassador to the UN, Mark Lyall Grant, pointed out that the islanders merely exercised their right to self-determination under the UN Charter by holding the referendum, where the vote was 99.8% in favour of the status quo.
Lyall Grant said: “Their views are now unequivocally on the record and should be respected by all.”
In June, the Falkland Islands Government rightly defended its position at the UN Committee of 24 on Decolonisation (C24).
MLA (Member of the Legislative Assembly) Sharon Halford told the committee: “The right of Falkland Islanders to determine their own future is unequivocal. The principle of self-determination is enshrined in Article 1, paragraph 2, of the Charter of the United Nations.”
It strikes me that the UN needs to get its house in order. It cannot claim that Argentina has the right of control, particularly since effectively the Falklands population has told Kirchner to take a hike.
I imagine that they would also like to tell the Pope to get lost too.
Pope Francis, the first Latin American pontiff, said last year when archbishop of Buenos Aires that Britain had “usurped” the disputed islands from Argentina. In 2011, he said the islands were “ours”; music to most Argentineans.
He lately had the temerity to offer to intervene in the dispute and find a resolution. Clearly, Pope Francis has one objective; help Kirchner grab control of the Falklands.
The very idea that he could ever be even-handed in this affair is a joke.
Predictably, Argentine president Cristina Kirchner branded Falkland Islanders “squatters” and dismissed the March vote as a “parody”. Well she would say that, would she not?
Of course, as is now clear, the Falklands are a major economic prize, given the discovery of oil and gas. There is also the squid fishery.
Whether or not the Falklands have any strategic military value to anyone is hard to determine. There was a time when they were exactly so to the UK, especially during the early 20th century when Germany’s navy was marauding.
When she was in power as the UK’s prime minister, Margaret Thatcher clearly thought the islands had value and she fought tooth and nail with her Cabinet to go to war with Argentina, which had insolently invaded the Falklands in 1982.
Basically, but for Thatcher, the British government would have sold Falkland islanders down the river.
Had the “Iron Lady” not forced the issue with her Cabinet, we would not have gone to war with Argentina. This suggests that, by the 1980s, zero strategic military value was ascribed to this so-British remnant of empire by government.
So what is the value of the Falklands to London today, bearing in mind that the islanders have the right to determine their own future; it is they who will harvest tax revenues and royalties from Big Oil and NOT the British Treasury?
Not much, though one supposes there could be leaning on the tiny government in Port Stanley by London to ensure that British companies get a decent whack of business out of the oilcos. But don’t count on it with our laissez faire attitudes.
It happens that logistics for the campaign that generated the Sea Lion discovery, promising Darwin and other hydrocarbon teasers like Loligo, was run out of Aberdeen, because Brazil, Uruguay and Chile are ganged with Argentina. That’s the long and the short of it.