On 10th and 11th March voters in the Falkland Islands will be taking part in a referendum on whether they want to stay being British.
They have decided to organise the referendum because they want the world to hear what they think and want for the islands where they live and for future generations. They want to speak out in a way that is clear and that is democratic. They are fed up with the current Government of Argentina’s bullying, with its insistence that they are people who have no voice and should have no vote about what happens to the place they, their parents and generations before them call home.
They really hope that the world respect their right to self-determination, will listen to what they have to say and support the outcome.
One of the stories I hear most often – I’ve read it again in “information” circulated around Lima this week by the Argentine authorities – is that the Islands, having been Argentinian, were seized by the United Kingdom in 1833 and that the local population and the “legitimate authorities” expelled.
This all sounds rather serious. But a frustrating thing is that none of it is true.
British sovereignty over the Falkland Islands dates back to 1765, before even the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata had been established by the Spanish state. No civilian population was expelled from the Falkland Islands in January 1833. The only people who were made to leave were the members of the Argentine military garrison that had been sent to the islands three months earlier to take what was already British sovereign territory.
The early history of the Islands is complex, involving French, Spanish and British settlers. But what is clear is that the Islands were never Argentine, despite what the Government of Argentina now says.
For a very different perspective on the history of the Islands, I recommend this recent publication by the Falkland Islands Government.
I also keep reading things written and said by Cristina Kirchner’s government about the “situación colonial”.
This ignores the reality of who the people of the islands are and how they are governed. The people of the Falkland Islands have their own government, they make their own laws, they run their own economy and control their own resources.
True, the population is an immigrant population just as the population of Argentina is today. But unlike Argentina the islands had no indigenous population before they were settled. Decades before the wave of Italian, Spanish and German emigration to Argentina in the second half of the 19th century, many of the families from whom today’s islanders are descended were already well established.
Today’s Falkland Islanders have every right to decide how they want to be governed – this right of self-determination is a right accepted as a right so fundamental that it is enshrined in Article 1 of the United Nations Charter.
As well as wanting the world to hear what they think through this weekend’s referendum, the people of the Falkland Islands want to have a good and healthy relationship with Argentina. This is an ambition that the British Government shares with them.
Everyone – the islanders, the people of Argentina, the countries of the region – stands to gain from it: in fisheries and transport, in trade and communications, in maritime safety and tourism. A number of people here in Lima have commented to me that talking up disputes with neighbours to distract attention from internal problems is an old trick.
True, but it has almost never helped to make things better. In the Islands and in Britain people are looking forward to a return to the happy and prosperous relationship with Argentina that our two great countries enjoyed throughout most of the 19th and 20th centuries.