Argentina pushed hard on Saturday for a new diplomatic offensive aimed at pressing Britain to negotiate the status of the disputed and potentially oil-rich Falkland Islands.
“Britain should sit down and have a dialogue about sovereignty to overcome this anachronistic colonial situation,” Argentine Foreign Minister Jorge Taiana said from Mexico where he was preparing for a Rio Group summit.
Though the two countries went to war over the South Atlantic islands in 1982, with Britain affirming its control, Argentina still claims ownership of the archipelago, which has been held by Britain since 1833.
“Argentina will dialogue diplomatically and peacefully,” Taiana told the state news agency Telam ahead of the summit where Argentine President Cristina Kirchner will try to rally regional support for her stand on the islands.
Argentina says Britain is skirting UN resolutions calling for dialogue on the dispute. It says UN resolutions recognize the territorial dispute and urge dialogue to settle it.
Taiana is set to meet UN chief Ban-Ki moon Wednesday to encourage talks, Argentina’s UN envoy Jorge Arguello has said.
And Argentina’s president today will ask the Rio Group of regional allies at their meeting in Mexico to condemn oil exploration Britain has approved in the Falklands, Argentine media reported on Saturday citing unnamed government sources.
About 25 Latin American and Caribbean leaders will be at the gathering near Cancun. The Rio Group in the past has backed Argentina in its territorial claim. Using the islands’ Spanish name, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez on Friday addressed Britain saying: “Give the Malvinas back to the Argentine people.”
British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said in London on Friday he was “confident” diplomacy could resolve a standoff with Argentina on the Falklands, as islanders voiced disappointment at tensions over oil drilling.
“The diplomacy between us and Argentina is one that I think will be successful,” Brown said, insisting that Britain was acting within international law. “I think the work that’s being done will avoid any tension”.
Argentina and Britain engaged in a brief but bitter war in 1982 over the archipelago.
Argentina’s defeat resulted in the collapse of the military regime that ruled the country at the time, helping usher in a return to democracy.
The latest round of verbal skirmishes were triggered by Argentina’s decree that ships traveling through its waters to the Falklands — home to 3,000 islanders, 1,000 British soldiers and 500,000 sheep — require an Argentine permit.
According to Britain’s Geological Society, oil fields around the Falklands could produce up to 60 billion barrels of oil.
Argentina says that its “jurisdictional waters” are up to 200 nautical miles (370km) off its coast.
The Falkland Islands lie 450km from the Argentine coast, beyond the 200-nautical mile limit but within a continental shelf area that Argentina claimed before the UN last year.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema