FREE THE MALVINAS! :

The Belgrano precedent: war in the service of politics? : Twenty years on, the first major incident of the Falklands/Malvinas war between Britain and Argentina still haunts both nations. What really happened and why is it relevant to the United States and Iraq? (Paul Rogers, OpenDemocracy)

Twenty years ago, on 2 May 1982, the Argentine cruiser General Belgrano was sunk in a torpedo attack by the British submarine HMS Conqueror with the
loss of three hundred and sixty-eight lives. It was an action that was controversial then and remains so to this day. In this attack, and the war that followed, over one thousand Argentine and British lives were lost. Now, the Falkland Islands has ended up as a veritable fortress that has cost billions of pounds to establish and maintain. To this day, Britain maintains a considerable garrison to protect less than two thousand islanders, and a long-term diplomatic settlement seems years away.

One month before the Belgrano sinking, the Argentine armed forces had invaded and occupied the Falklands (known to Argentinians as the Malvinas), and Britain had responded by sending a substantial task force to re-take the islands. During that month, a hectic round of shuttle diplomacy was undertaken by the US Secretary of State, Al Haig, but this ended in failure. On 30 April, the United States gave its support for Britain, just as the task force was approaching the islands. Haig¹s mantle was taken up by the UN Secretariat and the Peruvian government, and a further bout of peace-making was attempted.

At that juncture, the Thatcher Government had the support of the United States and the EEC as well as a number of other states. It was in a position to organise harsh sanctions on Argentina, already in a weakened economic state and run by a military junta that had used the invasion to counter its own domestic unpopularity.

Negotiations could then have followed, leading in all probability to a leaseback arrangement providing an environment for the economic development of the Falklands/Malvinas and surrounding marine resources. Perhaps most important of all, a potentially costly war could have been avoided.

Instead, the Thatcher government was to embark almost immediately on a war that cost some four hundred Argentine lives within two days, with the first
British deaths from Argentine action following shortly afterwards with the attack on HMS Sheffield.

Here's the real controversy : why does Britain think that it should get to keep the Malvinas but that Israel should give back all of the land it took in 1967? Posted by Orrin Judd at May 3, 2002 6:20 AM