Argentina’s president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, has lambasted Britain for refusing to discuss her country’s long-standing claim to the Falkland Islands, calling British control of the territory as “a leftover story from the 19th century”.
Some 5 000 Argentinians braved freezing temperatures for an all-night vigil awaiting Kirchner’s speech in Ushuaia, the world’s southernmost city, to mark Monday’s 30th anniversary of the country’s failed invasion of the islands.
According to the Argentinian constitution, Ushuaia is the capital of a vast South Atlantic territory that includes Las Malvinas — the Falklands.
“I am a Malvinist president,” Fernández de Kirchner said. “It is an injustice how in the 21st century there still subsists a colonialist enclave a few hundred kilometres from our shores. It is absurd to pretend dominion 8 000 miles overseas.”
Fernández de Kirchner delivered her address before a large metal sculpture hollowed out in the shape of the islands, representing Argentina’s claim on what it considers its “absent” territory.
The Falklands have been under continuous British rule since 1833, except for the invasion by the generals of Argentina’s bloody 1976-83 dictatorship, which lasted for two months after 2 April 1982. The president also said her government has requested the Red Cross test for DNA the remains of still unidentified Argentinian and British soldiers buried on the islands. “Each one of them deserves a headstone with his name on it,” she said.
Commemorations of what is officially known in Argentina as Veterans’ Day were held at military bases and city squares all over the country, including a march by leftist groups on the British embassy in Buenos Aires.
In the Atlantic city of Mar del Plata, lyric tenor Darío Volonté, a survivor of the Belgrano, the cruiser on which 323 Argentinian sailors died after it was torpedoed by a British submarine , led a large crowd in the national anthem.
Argentina had tempered its claim following the calamitous invasion by the dictatorship. But the mood changed a few months ago when Kirchner made the islands a central theme of her self-termed “national and populist” government, declaring herself against the “de-Malvinisation” of Argentinian politics since the war.
“The battle against 19th century colonialism has to be resolved with 21st-century tools,” foreign minister Héctor Timerman said on the pro-government television programme 6-7-8 on Monday. “For the first time in the years since the war we have managed to install the Malvinas issue on the international agenda.”
Argentina has found some unexpected allies in the showbusiness world, including American actor Sean Penn and British singer Morrissey, who on tour to Argentina called for sovereignty negotiations with Britain.
But not everyone in Argentina agrees with the commemoration of the invasion’s anniversary. “On the one hand, the dictatorship is condemned, but on the other, the war is remembered and justified in a way that implies accepting it as a positive event in our history,” said a group of leading intellectuals in a statement last week.
Local luminaries, from Argentina’s top investigative journalist, Jorge Lanata, to important thinkers such as Beatriz Sarlo, severely questioned the official events.
They said the national holiday seems to condone “the painful tragedy provoked in 1982 by an unscrupulous dictatorship and exalted today by a retrograde nationalism.”. —