George's bargain basement
Sir: Your issue of 29 March has recently arrived in Argentina, allowing us here to read your leading article concerned chiefly with the future of the Falkland Islands. To read it, indeed, with increasing disbelief.
'An Argentine military attack'! Sir, can you be serious? The reasonable settlement of inter- national differences is not assisted by the invention of such fantasies. Government, press and public opinion in Argentina concentrate exclusively on diplomatic solutions to the prob- lem, and the government has already shown its good faith by utterly unsympathetic treatment of the small Condor group which attempted to land on the islands in 1966.
Your righteous condemnation of 'the transfer of loyal subjects of the Crown to alien rule against their will,' must make entertaining reading in Kenya, Rhodesia (need one go on), and as in this case, unlike the others, the trans- fer though against their will might be in their best interest, this would seem an appropriate moment to prefer the voice of reason to the vox populi. Moreover, in the case of Argentina we should be acting to please a friend and traditional trading partner of Britain.
As you mention, the islands are `somewhat inhospitable.' The Argentines are, of course, stupid to care about such a territory and so, logically, are the British: The attempt to bring this absurd pantomime to an end, so far from being 'outrageous,' is entirely honourable. The Argentines want the islands and we, surely, do not. Our only, albeit important, interest is in the welfare of the 2,500 inhabitants.
There is, then, ample room for the negotiation which seems to cause you such horror. It is surely not beyond the wit of the Foreign Office • to come to an arrangement which would pre- serve the rights of language, religion and pro- perty of the Falkland islanders, and so assuage their apparent terror of their Argentine neigh- bours. Alternatively, as you so scornfully say, they might be resettled in the Outer Hebrides or indeed elsewhere in the British Isles, where they would find the small conveniences of modern life which at present they lack.
The Argentine National Territory Of Tierra del Fuego and the Islands of the South Atlantic, of which the Falklands would form a part, is already a tariff-free zone, and so those inhabi- tants who chose to remain would be able to import goods freely from England, and would presumably continue to export their wool to England like the vast majority of Patagonian estancieros (many of whom are former, Falk. land islanders who have 'voted with their feet' for integration with Argentina).
They might even be better off as a favoured part of Argentina : Tierra del Fuego certainly displays a remarkable concentration of Mer- cedes and private aeroplanes, and the naval base which would inevitably follow Argentine occupation would certainly increase the islanders' prosperity.
On a more trivial level may one point out that the Spanish name for the islands is Islas Malvinas (a direct translation of the original French name Isles Malouines), and not as you suggest Islas Maldivas. Perhaps this is the ex- planation of the extraordinary tone of outraged virtue which was adopted in your article; an Argentine claim to the Maldives would be rather excessive. And so all those sleepless Falkland islanders can relax again; the atmo- sphere in Argentina has always struck me as admirably restful.
Mervyn Samuel Av. Luro 3201, Mar del Plata, Argentina We apologise for the misprint `Maldivas' for 'Malvinas.' We prefer 'Falklands' anyway.— Editor, SPECTATOR.
Previous page
