A Rock and ghost ships

April 2 is long gone from the calender and we are now bracing for June 14, the anniversary of the Argentine military surrender to end the 74-day war of 1982. Meanwhile, London and Buenos Aires are both adjusting their sights for their parting shots — stunts to prevent the ghost of the 30th anniversary (and its political exploitation in the present) from staying out of the memories and the daily lives of either the British or Argentine people for even a moment.

June 14 (or “Liberation Day,” as the British call it) will find President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner heading up the Argentine delegation at the United Nations Decolonization Committee. It will be the first presence of an Argentine head of state at that UN committee in New York. In contrast with this image of a president “stooping” to committee level to highlight the importance of the issue, Her Majesty’s Government will fly Foreign Office Minister (i.e. No.2) Jeremy Browne as master of ceremonies to the Malvinas.

Nevertheless, the Port Stanley ceremony does not claim to be just a special parade for the war dead, veterans and families on both sides of the conflict. Busy Browne (perhaps the frequent flier of the year after two swings through South America) will be accompanied by Gibraltar Labour Minister Joe Bossano. His presence will undoubtedly leave a far more symbolic (and thorny) message than the Foreign Office’s second-in-command.

Self-determination

And not just because of Bossano’s track record as a former trade unionist educated at the London School of Economics, twice Chief Minister of the “Overseas Territory” of the Rock and a member of the ruling Gibraltar Socialist Labour Party (GSLP). What Bossano most or best represents is his militantly inflexible stance against returning Gibraltar to Spain, which lays claims to the British overseas territory. “Give Spain No Hope” has been his slogan for decades now.

Whether by chance or not, as if to drive the message completely home (or rub salt even more into the wounds), Bossano will land on the disputed islands after a stopover in Ecuador. Nothing extraordinary about that prior stop in Quito, except that he will attend a seminar organized by the United Nations. Its subject? Nothing less than decolonization.

In Quito he will be sure to reaffirm Gibraltar’s right to self-determination and its veto rights over any agreement reached between Spain and the United Kingdom. This will not precisely be music in the ears of the Argentine government, which dismisses any chance of self-determination for the islanders out of hand. But nor will it sound any better for Spain, which in recent weeks, amid its financial debacle and plunging credit ratings, has seen how London stokes the flames of a fire never entirely extinguished over the Gibraltar issue.

Horses for courses

Evidence to that effect — so hot is the issue that the Mariano Rajoy government dissuaded Queen Sofía of Spain from attending the Diamond Jubilee celebrations of her cousin Queen Elizabeth II, celebrated 10 days ago in the gardens of Windsor. (That warning did not prevent current Chilean Foreign Minister Alfredo Moreno from joining the royal box in Windsor in order to see horses from his stud farm mounted by Chilean “guasos” yeomen troop by in honour of the Queen. Foreign Secretary William Hague, as keen on tweeting as his Argentine counterpart, could not resist firing off: “#Thoroughly enjoyed hosting my friend Alfredo Moreno, Foreign Minister of Chile. Chile and the UK have much in common”.)

Returning to Gibraltar, last week, at a time when the talks between London and Madrid over fishing rights off the Rock had reached deadlock, the Royal Navy ordered out of Gibraltar waters a Spanish police Guardia Civil patrol-boat escorting Spanish-flagged trawlers. Foreign Minister José Manuel García-Margallo, then visiting Brazil, applied to this episode a phrase which Itamaraty has always used for its own relationship with Argentina: “Strategic patience”. “I hope that we can continue our dialogue and negotiations (with London) as we always have done,” said the Spanish minister.

Montrose again

Turning now to the warship variety of floating vessels, they command a special chapter of their own in this 30th anniversary of the Malvinas war. On the one hand, the mise-en-scène for “Liberation Day” in Stanley will be rounded out with the visible escort of the Type 45 frigate HMS Dauntless and with the likely invisible presence of HMS Talent, a Trafalgar-class nuclear submarine. But the latter’s dispatch was not confirmed yesterday by Britain’s Ministry of Defence (“We cannot comment on our military operations,” they said) although South African media published (and photographed) the hunter-killer Talent moored in the port of Cape Town preparatory to sailing to the Malvinas at the end of the month.

Nor has the route of the frigate HMS Montrose through Pacific waters been confirmed. After this newspaper had the scoop on Peruvian President Ollanta Humala authorizing the British warship to put in at the port of El Callao in late March and after Casa Rosada pressure led to this permit to moor being lifted, the luckless Montrose continued its course due north. London calling Lima “unfriendly” and CFK thanking Humala’s U-turn in a conference call to Hugo Chávez was just so much ballast.

According to W. Alex Sánchez, a researcher at the Council Of Hemispheric Affairs (COHA) in Washington, the stormy vessel, which needed to take on fresh supplies, was afterwards given permission to dock in both Colombia and Panama. According to diplomatic sources consulted by the Herald, the Montrose mooring in Colombia in early April might have contributed to CFK’s bad mood during the Americas Summit in Cartagena a little later that month.

But in contrast, military sources add that the nomadic Montrose (almost a Flying Dutchman) never docked in at the Colombian naval base of Bahía Málaga between April 6 and 8 but was allegedly reprovisioned in the high seas via a Colombian-flagged tanker. By avoiding that Pacific port which experts describe as the “new Manta” (thus replacing the combined naval-air base the United States was forced to lift in Ecuador), a new breach in the regional solidarity over the Malvinas issue would also have been avoided for the sake of the 30th anniversary of the war.