Falklands – praag.org

Tensions mount over Falklands

Tensions over the Falklands/Malvinas were ratcheted up last night when Argentina and Britain summoned each other’s ambassadors. Argentina said it would sue UK oil firms, while Britain is boosting its defenses on the contested islands.

The UK’s ambassador to Buenos Aires was summoned Thursday and less than 24 hours later Alicia Castro, Argentine ambassador to Britain, was called in for a meeting at the Foreign Office.

The latest spat comes against a background of heightened tension fueled by oil, military buildups and colonial history.

As the UK general election approaches, Britain has very publicly reinforced its garrison in the contested South Atlantic archipelago over which the two countries fought a short but vicious war 33 years ago this month.

The redeployment last month of two Chinook helicopters, withdrawn in 2006, and a pledge by Defense Secretary Michael Fallon to spend £180 million over the next 10 years on upgrading the Falklands’ defenses, both come at a time when advancing UK oil exploration has become a central component of the 182-year-old colonial dispute.

The litigation centers on three UK oil exploration firms: Premier Oil, Falkland Oil and Gas and Rockhopper.

Earlier this month the firms involved reported they had discovered 27.9 meters of net-oil bearing reservoir and 18.5 meters of net gas-bearing reservoir.

The license area being explored – which lies to the north of the Falklands – is 40 percent owned by Falklands Oil and Gas, 36 percent by Premiere Oil and 24 percent by Rockhopper Exploration.

“This is a fantastic start to the 2015 Falklands drilling campaign and provides early proof of the significant remaining potential of the North Falklands Basin,” said Samuel Moody, CEO at Rockhopper, in a statement.

Tensions between the countries have waxed and waned in the three decades since Argentine forces were driven out by a British task force, but recent leaks by whistleblower Edward Snowden indicate a secret intelligence war has been waged throughout the intervening period.

The intelligence data released by Snowden suggests Britain spied on the Argentine authorities since at least 2009, preparing offensive cyber operations to change public opinion regarding the Falklands, according to the Intercept.

British spy agency GCHQ had allegedly been preparing a bold, covert plan called “Operation QUITO.” It involved the Joint Threat Research and Intelligence Group (JTRIG), a classified unit that spread misinformation.

The leaks describe the mission as a “long-running, large scale, pioneering effects operation,” with surveillance on several platforms a “high priority” task.

Falklands on high alert

Extra British troops will be stationed on the island for three to six weeks.

They are part of a force of more than 1,000 soldiers being prepared for duty in the south Atlantic and will be sent out in five tranches of 150 to 300.

They will include members of the Royal Artillery and 3 Commando, Royal Marines, with each group staying on the islands for three to six weeks.

Military chiefs are mounting a series of “high readiness reinforcement” exercises to plug a strategic gap until the Queen Elizabeth aircraft carrier is operational in 2020.

Senior military sources say the war games will be “low profile” as part of a commitment to ensure the UK can secure its overseas garrisons.

Currently the islands have a core military presence of 1,200 troops, four Typhoon fighter jets and a missile battery.

A senior source said: “The aim is to put more than 1,000 troops from five different cap badges into the islands by November but they will deploy in small groups from 150 to 300, for short tours.”

Last night the Ministry of Defence said there were “currently no plans to increase the number of troops deployed to the Falklands”.

However, the military source said the plan did not represent a “permanent increase in garrison numbers but a series of high-readiness exercises”.

Meanwhile Argentina will discuss a government-sponsored bill set to reform the Intelligence services in Congress on Friday.

New regulations will bring transparency to the country’s intelligence system the government says.

The dissolution of the Intelligence Secretariat (SI, formerly SIDE) and the creation of a new Federal Intelligence Agency (AFI), is “a major, transcendent” move, according to analysts.

The measure was first announced by President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner last Monday, a week after the mysterious death of AMIA special prosecutor Alberto Nisman.

Nisman’s death brought to the forefront issues associated with the country’s intelligence agencies.

Source: UK Express

Should Britain give the Falklands back?

Argentine leader Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner recalled that the UN Charter stipulates the right of people to self-determination, which means that this rule should be applied to all countries without any exception.

Kirchner compared the situation in Crimea with another event in modern history. The Falkland Islands also held a referendum a year ago. It was a disputed territory, claimed by both Argentina and the United Kingdom. In 1982, differences resulted in an open military conflict.

Britain then defended the Falklands by force of arms, and last March almost all the residents voted to stay a part of the UK in a plebiscite. The UN did not question the legality of the vote at that time, Kirchner said.

“Many of the major powers, which have secured the Falklands’ people right to self-determination, do not want to do the same in relation to the Crimea now. How can you call yourselves guarantors of world stability, if you do not apply the same standards for everyone? It looks like the Crimeans cannot express their will, but the residents of the Falklands can. There is zero logic in that,” she said.

The EU countries and the US government refused to recognize the results of the referendum in the Crimea, with region’s residents voting almost unanimously for joining Russia.

The EU imposed second-tier sanctions against Russia on Monday, as a retaliation measure to the holding of a referendum in Crimea. Financial assets freezing and a visa ban on entry into the EU countries were applied to those Russian officials, who the West calls responsible for the annexation of the Crimea.

The US sanctions have affected an even higher tier – Barack Obama signed a decree that prohibits entry into the United States and seizes US assets of seven Russian officials and deputies: the Federation Council Speaker Valentina Matviyenko, Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin, Presidential Adviser Sergei Glazyev, Assistant to President Vladislav Surkov, State Duma deputies Elena Mizulina and Leonid Slutskiy, Senator Andrey Klishas.

Rejecting contacts with Russia, the West harms himself, not us, the Vzglyad newspaper states. As a response to the US and European sanctions the State Duma issued a document named “On the US and EU sanctions,” suggesting that Western leaders should extend restrictions on all Russian deputies.

‘Obama has no sense of what he wants to do in the world’

Sir Hew Strachan, an expert on the history of war, says that the US president’s strategic failures in Afghanistan and Syria have crippled America’s position in the world.

President Obama is “chronically incapable” of military strategy and falls far short of his predecessor George W. Bush, according to one of Britain’s most senior military advisors.

Sir Hew Strachan, an advisor to the Chief of the Defense Staff, told The Daily Beast that the United States and Britain were guilty of total strategic failure in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Obama’s attempts to intervene on behalf of the Syrian rebels “has left them in a far worse position than they were before.”

The extraordinary critique by a leading advisor to the United States’ closest military ally comes days after Obama was undermined by the former Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who questioned the President’s foreign policy decisions and claimed he was deeply suspicious of the military.

Strachan, a current member of the Chief of the Defense Staff’s Strategic Advisory Panel, cited the “crazy” handling of the Syrian crisis as the most egregious example of a fundamental collapse in military planning that began in the aftermath of 9/11. “If anything it’s gone backwards instead of forwards, Obama seems to be almost chronically incapable of doing this. Bush may have had totally fanciful political objectives in terms of trying to fight a global War on Terror, which was inherently astrategic, but at least he had a clear sense of what he wanted to do in the world. Obama has no sense of what he wants to do in the world,” he said.

Strachan’s book The Direction of War, which will be published next month, examines the failure of modern political leaders to use strategy to predict and account for the implications of military action. Oxford University’s Professor of the History of War says the lessons learned at the end of the 20th century proved to be damaging at the start of the next. “Using war did deliver. The wars were pretty short, the Falklands, First Gulf War, Kosovo, so people lulled themselves into an expectation that war was simply a continuation of policy and that it was successful. But it hasn’t been since 9/11,” he said.

Falklands will be under Argentina’s control ‘soon’

The Falkland Islands will be under Argentina’s control within 20 years, the country’s foreign minister told British press, claiming that the UK “has never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity to find a solution” to the issue.

Speaking to reporters from The Guardian and The Independent, Hector Timerman stressed that “not one single country in the world” supports Britain’s claims to right of rule in the Falkands, to which he referred by their Spanish name, the Malvinas.

“I don’t think it will take another 20 years,” he said, talking about re-gaining Argentine control over the islands. “I think that the world is going through a process of understanding more and more that this is a colonial issue, an issue of colonialism, and that the people living there were transferred to the islands.”

In the interview, the Argentine foreign minister ruled out military action to resolve the issue, accusing the British government of militarizing the South Atlantic region in a grab for oil and natural resources.

“Wherever there is a smell of oil, big powers start to look around and they find a reason to stay there. I think probably oil will complicate the peaceful solution that is asked for by the United Nations. I think in history that Britain has had a tendency to stay in places where there are natural resources belonging to other people.”

Timerman expressed his willingness to discuss the issue with British Foreign Secretary William Hague, who refused to meet his Argentine counterpart in London. The Foreign Office insists that such a meeting will not take place without Falklands Islands representatives present.

Meanwhile Timerman underlined that “according to the United Nations, there are only two parties to the conflict – the United Kingdom and the Republic of Argentina,” and that by insisting on the introduction of a third party, that being the Falkland Islanders, London is ignoring more than 40 UN resolutions calling on the two countries to negotiate.

“I think the fanatics are not in Buenos Aires, [but] maybe in the United Kingdom because they are 14,000 kilometers away from the islands. And I think they are using the people living in the islands for political [reasons] and to have access to oil and natural resources which belong to the Argentine people,” the top Argentine diplomat said, as quoted by The Guardian. – RT