MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency
New Appointment for Falklands and British Antarctic Diplomat.
The senior Foreign Office Official with major responsibility for Falklands and Antarctic Affairs for the past four years, Mr John White, has been appointed High Commissioner to Barbados in the Caribbean, and will take up his post there in August.
He is succeeded as Head of the Overseas Territories Department and Commissioner for the British Antarctic Territory by Mr Alan Huckle, until now head of the department dealing with the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe and also the Council of Europe involved in cultural and human rights issues.
John White, aged 54, has been in charge of the Overseas Territories Department since 1998 and before that was Head of the South Atlantic and Antarctic Department. In those posts he has overseen big changes in the status of the Overseas Territories and their relationship with the United Kingdom.
He has also been involved in the radical change in relations between the Falkland Islands and Argentina resulting from the 1999 July 14 Agreement, ending the 17-year-ban on general visits by Argentines and direct flights to the Islands and providing for closer co-operation on fish conservation in the South Atlantic.
He has visited the Falkland Islands several times, and accompanied Baroness Scotland on the first ever visit by a Foreign Office Minister to the British Antarctic Territory earlier this year.
He has had a varied foreign service career, first as a planning consultant to Botswana in 1968 then as Economic Adviser to the Overseas Development Administration for fifteen years and also consultant to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation.
He was loaned to the FCO Economic Relations Department before becoming First Secretary in the British Embassy in Nigeria in 1990 and was deputy head of Mission in Tel Aviv in Israel from 1993 to 1997.
In Barbados he will also be High Commissioner to several other Caribbean Islands -- Antigua, Barbuda, Dominica, Grenada, St Kitts, Nevis, St Lucia and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines.
Harold Briley, London
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