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January 22nd, 2012 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda
If Mr Watts is anxious to avoid history repeating itself, so too is Adrian
Maroni, a haggard-looking Argentine who was among a crowd of Falklands
veterans protesting over war pensions last week outside the Casa Rosada, the
pink, neoclassical presidential palace in the steamy capital, Buenos Aires.
He lost 649 comrades during the invasion ordered by the country’s
whisky-sipping dictator, General Leopoldo Galtieri, which is widely
remembered in Argentina as a reckless gamble to garner patriotic support.
While it cemented the reputation of Margaret Thatcher, then facing a tough
first term in office, it prompted General Galtieri’s removal from power just
days after the British flag went up again in Port Stanley.
“It’s a repeat of what we saw with Galtieri and Thatcher,” said Mr Maroni,
who, like many ex-veterans, accuses successive Argentine governments of
doing little to care for them.
“A drunk general and a weak prime minister both needed domestic distractions
in 1982.”
Yet despite Argentina now being a democracy rather than a junta, the question
of who should own Las Malvinas, as the Argentines call them, remains an
irresistible card for politicians to play.
Three decades on from the conflict, it is the turn of President Cristina
Kirchner, the fiesty ex-lawyer who draws inspiration from Argentina’s other
great female demagogue, the late Eva Peron, to make the 180-year-old dispute
a priority again.
In combative interviews with The Sunday Telegraph in Buenos Aires last
week, senior figures in her party blithely dismissed the aspirations of the
island’s residents to remain British, describing them as colonial “imports”
whose views should count for nothing.
“These people were imported to the islands and cannot be allowed to determine
policy,” said Daniel Filmus, head of the Senate foreign affairs committee
and a leading member of Mrs Kirchner’s ruling Victory Front alliance.
“When we reclaim the islands, we will respect their way of life, but under no
circumstances should we be negotiating with them.”
Carlos Kunkel, a long-time ally of Mrs Kirchner and fellow Peronista in his
youth, went even further. In rhetoric that would not look out of place in
the Victorian era, he painted London as a flagging colonial power, desperate
to keep what remained of its fraying empire.
“David Cameron is pursuing a policy of piracy and aggression because at home
the economy is collapsing, there are riots in London, and Scotland and Wales
want to escape the English empire,” he claimed.
“The islanders are a transplanted people who live in an occupied British
enclave. You cannot talk about self-determination in those circumstances.”
Last week, Mr Kunkel’s accusations were fired back across the Atlantic by the
Prime Minister, David Cameron, who retorted that it was Buenos Aires that
was guilty of “colonial” ambitions. Aides pointed out that as a land settled
mainly by Spanish settlers, Argentina was in no position to lecture on
colonial injustices.
“The definition of colonialism is to look at some land and say ‘we want it’,
whatever the inhabitants think,” said one senior British diplomat. “That’s
Argentina’s policy on the Falklands. We know about colonialism, and it’s
they who are the ones with colonial attitude.”
The trenchant British position was backed by Mike Summers, a member of the
islands’ legislative assembly, whose grandchildren are eighth-generation
Falklanders.
“The reality is that 90-plus per cent of the inhabitants of North and South
America and the Caribbean are settlers or descendants from settlers, as are
New Zealand and Australia,” he said. “The Falklands is no different to any
of those.”
This was always going to be a high-profile year for the islands, a windswept
South Atlantic archipelago that many Britons knew little of until the time
came to defend them. April 2nd is the 30th anniversary of the invasion,
which claimed 258 British lives.
And next month, the Duke of Cambridge arrives for a six-week tour of duty as a
helicopter pilot with an RAF search and rescue team.
But the anniversary is also a chance for an upsurge in rhetoric from Mrs
Kirchner’s government, which has denounced Prince William’s deployment as a
deliberate provocation.
No matter however far-fetched the prospect of success, she remains determined
to pursue Argentinian ownership – not least because it was also a goal of
her husband and predecessor as head of state, Nestor Kirchner, who died of a
heart attack in 2010.
Nor are such ambitions purely the preserve of jingoistic Argentine
politicians. Across the political spectrum, there is consensus that the
“Malvinas” are Argentine — a principle drummed into children from their
first year at school.
In cities across the country, memorials and murals depict the islands’ rugged
contours coloured in the blue and white bands of the Argentinian flag.
That claim is based on a contentious interpretation of the islands’ history
during the colonial era, when Spanish, British, French and Argentine trading
posts frequently switched hands or were simply abandoned according to shifts
in mercantile and nautical dominance. Perhaps the only thing that is not in
dispute is that they have been in British hands since 1833.
These days, however, more than just national pride is at stake. In recent
years, prospectors have begun tapping into what are believed to substantial
oil fields in Falklands’ waters, and while exploration is still in its early
stages, it is already thought that they could contain 8.3 billion barrels,
almost two-thirds of what remains in the North Sea. And the more the oil
starts to flow, the angrier Buenos Aires is likely to get.
True, nobody sees war as a realistic prospect again – not least because today,
the archipelago is one of the most heavily defended pieces of turf in the
world. As well as four Eurofighter Typhoons, three Royal Navy ships and 150
troops, there is a vast runway ready to receive any amount of back-up forces
in an emergency – plans that Mr Cameron has now made a point of asking to be
updated.
The islanders themselves also have a 100-strong volunteer force, equipped with
quadbikes and Land Rovers fitted with heavy machine guns that can roam
across the Falklands’ wet, boggy terrain.
But while Mrs Kirchner insists that Argentina will only pursue peaceful means
to push its claim, she is wielding the diplomatic cudgels on every front.
Just before Christmas, she persuaded neighbouring Chile, Brazil, Uruguay and
Paraguay – all part of the Mercosur trading bloc – to ban Falkland-flagged
vessels from their ports (the fact that Paraguay is landlocked did not
preventing it signing the order).
It is thought she may now also try to sever the islands’ only commercial air
link, a weekly flight from Chile that passes across the tip of southern
Argentina.
Buenos Aires has also crowed over the position of the US government, which has
shifted from explicit support for the British position to one of studied
neutrality. In a stance that has irked Downing Street – given British
support for the US ventures in Iraq and Afghanistan – the Obama
administration has called on both sides to hold a dialogue, saying it takes
no position on sovereignty.
Mrs Kirchner is expected to take up the cause again when she returns to work
this week after recuperating from throat surgery for what turned out to be a
falsely diagnosed thyroid cancer.
In practical terms, however, her threats so far pose limited menace. Oil, if
discovered, can also simply be shipped out via tanker across the Atlantic.
The plane from Chile, meanwhile, could easily fly around the small corner of
Argentinian airspace it traverses, and besides, the islands can still get
much of their food and supplies from container ships and the 20-hour RAF
flight that comes in from Brize Norton thrice fortnightly.
And as William Hague, the Foreign Secretary, pointed out during a visit to
Brazil last week, any Falkland vessels can simply run up the red ensign of
British merchant ships to avoid the ban.
In the increasingly febrile atmosphere, Mr Filmus denounced even that
observation. “It’s a bad attitude for the British Foreign Secretary to
encourage vessels from the Malvinas to fool the countries of Mercosur,” he
said. But asked how Argentina would respond, he would only say that Mercosur
members should meet to discuss how “not to be fooled”.
All the same, a blockade can still make life awkward for the islanders, said
Stuart Wallace, the director of Fortuna, Port Stanley’s biggest fishing
company. “We used to put ships regularly into Montevideo in Uruguay and we
have a long-standing relationship there,” he said. “We’ll have to review
whether we continue that.”
Just as troubling is Argentina’s ongoing “squid wars” offensive. The
Falklands’ much sought-after Illex squid begin life off the River Plate, on
the Argentina-Uruguay border, and swim southwards into Falkland waters as
they grow.
But this year, Argentina opened the squid-catching season early, ignoring
conservation issues, in a deliberate attempt to sabotage the Falklands’
market. “It’s too early to say if it’s had an impact, but it’s certainly
another area of concern,” said Mr Wallace. “It’s a reckless move that could
threaten stocks.”
In all likelihood, this may be level at which Mrs Kirchner’s hostilities
continue – in petty skirmishing over molluscs, rather than soldiers battling
it out on Goose Green. Yet while the conflict may remain as frozen as the
icebergs further south of the islands, there is no shortage of Argentinians
determined that the British resolve will eventually melt.
“This is a deep part of our psyche and our identity,” said Abel Rausch, who
served as a 19-year-old Argentine conscript during the fighting, and who now
frequents a veterans’ club in Lujan, a gaucho town on the edge of
Argentina’s pampas-ranching heartland.
He, too, remains a strong critic of General Galtieri’s attempt to talk the
islands by force – but on the question of who should own the islands, he is
just as sure of his case as Mr Watts is. “The Malvinas always have been and
always will be Argentine territory.”
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