President Alberto Fernández assured this Friday that Argentina “is right” in claiming sovereignty over the Falklands and was confident that the country’s arguments will prevail in the dispute with Great Britain, by providing a report to the television network of the BBC, the British state media.
“I believe that reason always wins and we are right. At some point, reason will prevail. We don’t even have the strength, we don’t have the ocean liners, we don’t have the artillery, we don’t have the planes, we don’t have the nuclear weapons that the United Kingdom brought at that time to circulate in the South Atlantic. But what we have is the reason”, insisted the head of state.
In response to a query about how the issue of the sovereignty of the islands should be resolved, the President stated that “problems are resolved through dialogue and finding points of agreement”, while maintaining that the Government’s position is that “Argentina has full sovereignty ” about the islands because “they are our lands”.
Likewise, the head of state said that he would be willing to sit down “to talk with those who usurp my land to see if I can get them to return it to me.”
“It is absolutely incomprehensible to think that these islands, which are a continuation of our Andes, which at some point submerge and re-emerge and form these islands, are not part of Argentina. Furthermore, we occupied them before the English usurped them in 1833 And since then we have been claiming them. If something is clear to me, the only thing that is clear to me is that the islands are not English, “he explained.
The President affirmed that he does not see the will for dialogue on the part of the United Kingdom in relation to the sovereignty of the islands by assuring the British “attitude” to “advance on the islands” without establishing negotiation channels.
“One of the United Kingdom’s arguments is that they have won the war and that has clearly postponed dialogue. War does not give rights,” the president stressed.
In another order, Fernández rejected that the Argentine claim regarding sovereignty is linked to an economic issue, and clarified that Argentina does not move for an economic reason, but for “the memory of the fallen.”
In this sense, he stated before the British public network that “it is clear that there is wealth in the Malvinas and that wealth is lost by Argentina and exploited by England.”
Likewise, the President reiterated the Government’s position of not including the islanders in eventual negotiations by indicating that “the usurper cannot be asked what rights he has” for the act he commits.
“If someone usurps my house and I go to a judge, and the judge says let’s first ask the usurper what he thinks about the right he has to live there. That is not the case. In legal terms, that is nonsense, in terms ethics is immoral,” stressed the Argentine president.
When asked about what the rights of the inhabitants of the islands would be, the head of state pointed out that they “continue to live on those lands and exercise the citizen rights” granted by Argentina, which are “many and very broad.”
Meanwhile, regarding the decision of the military dictatorship to try to recover the islands through the war that began in April 1982, 40 years ago, he affirmed that the armed conflict did not bring “any positive effect” for Argentina.
“It was a war declared by a dictatorship that sent a generation of brave young people, heroes, to fight in situations of great inequality with the opponent. That is why our eternal memory and our eternal respect. Those who commanded the war were genocidal, but the who died in Malvinas were heroes”, he pointed out.
Source: BBC News
Read more: 40 years of the Falklands War