Real story behind the Falkland Islands
The assertion that the Obama administration of “out-of-the-blue … called for Britain to negotiate with Argentina over the Falklands.” [“With friends like us …,” Opinion, April 3] is wrong.
The entire conversation is documented in the transcript of the news conference with President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner of Argentina and U.S. Secretary Hilary Clinton.
President de Kirchner suggested possible U.S. assistance in resolving the Falkland Islands sovereignty issue between Great Britain and Argentina. This was not to decide whether the Falkland Islands should be awarded to Great Britain or Argentina, but rather to permit compliance with U.N. resolutions to remedy the colonial status of those islands.
Those U.N. resolutions pertained to allowing the Falkland Islands to decide its political status, which could be independence or some form of political alignment with another country. The same resolutions apply to three U.S. territories.
This was all part of a long-standing U.N. requirement to decolonize the 16 remaining colonies in the world.
President de Kirchner, responding to a question at this news conference, clearly stated the purpose was “to get both countries to … address these negotiations within the framework of the U.N. resolutions strictly.” She and her advisers “do not want to move away from that in any letter whatsoever, any comma, of what has been stated by dozens of U.N. resolutions and resolutions by its decolonization committee.”
— Malcolm McPhee, Sequim