Americas view | The Falkland Islands

Referendum rewound

Argentina wins a small victory at the UN

By J.B. | NEW YORK

FALKLAND ISLANDERS expressed their wish to remain British nearly unanimously in a referendum in March. But the result of their plebiscite has fallen on deaf ears in some quarters. At a meeting of the UN Special Committee on Decolonisation held in New York this week, member states adopted a resolution—recalling the decisions of over forty previous ones, but failing to mention the referendum—in favour of Argentina’s call for bilateral sovereignty negotiations with Britain.

The submission of the resolution without a vote received a standing ovation, to the delight of Héctor Timerman, Argentina’s foreign minister, who arrived with an entourage of over a dozen government functionaries and two fellow petitioners with historical and biographical ties to the islands. Given the floor three times, Mr Timerman attacked what he characterised as Britain’s selective support for self-determination in its former imperial territories, as well as its alleged deployment of nuclear vessels in the South Atlantic (which was denied by Mark Lyall Grant, Britain’s ambassador to the UN). Committee members supportive of Argentina’s territorial claims described as “unacceptable” the oil exploration exercises recently carried out near the islands under licences issued by the Falklands government. Mr Timerman lamented the absence of a British government counterpart at the meeting—though earlier this year he had refused to meet William Hague, Britain’s foreign secretary, in the presence of Falkland Islanders.

Representatives of the Falkland Islands government have visited more than forty countries since the referendum to press their case. But when it came to the committee, their diplomacy was no match for the regional blocs of Latin America and the Caribbean, which also won support from Africa, the Arab world, the European Parliament, China and Russia. Sierra Leone and Papua New Guinea were the lone dissenters, arguing for a two-pronged approach that would recognise the self-determination of the Islanders while trying to settle sovereignty claims through negotiation.

All parties agreed on one thing: that the political dispute is “anachronistic”. The speeches of nearly every petitioner or delegation used that term to decry the “colonial situation” of the islands, as Mr Timerman and others put it. Amid all the huffing and puffing, the people at the centre of the dispute are struggling to get a hearing. To the outrage of some Latin American delegates, Mike Summers of the Falkland Islands government pointed out that the committee risked becoming an anachronism itself if it failed to listen to the concerns of islanders, whose views it appears to weigh rather lightly.

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