MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Falklands Invasion - by the Media.

Already a spate of articles and television features have begun appearing in the United Kingdom, marking the twentieth anniversary of the 1982 Argentine April invasion.

One of the latest is a long two-page feature in the Sunday Telegraph by a journalist who accompanied the British Task Force, Charles Laurence, who recently went back to the Falklands. With a headline "Goose Green Revisited", it is illustrated with a large colour photograph of a sheep farm, and with 1982 war pictures. Laurence says he found "a community transformed - yet still harbouring guilt for the loss of British lives".

Staying at the Upland Goose Hotel, he writes: "To look up and down Ross Road on the harbour front, to count the sea-beaten old cottages standing between the water and the rolling wilderness of peat-bog and crag beyond, to take the measure of commerce, government and population, is to marvel all over again at the evident absurdity of the war fought here ...There is still the bizarre sensation of travelling 8,000 miles only to land at a bread and breakfast in the Scottish Moors".

Where the Task Force landed, he writes: "The ghosts turn out to have San Carlos pretty much to themselves.....The British dead (two dozen bodies left behind in the cemetery) outnumber the living islanders at San Carlos now...The Falkland Islanders who rose from their beds to greet the British troops have mostly gone.....the (new) roads have been used mostly for one-way trips to Stanley ...Camp is dying but Stanley is booming".

Prosperous and forward-looking

The article says there are 340 people in Camp and 2,380 in town. It quotes the Governor, Donald Lamont, as saying: "These Islands are very different from 1982. When the Argentines felt they could invade, there was economic decline and a dwindling population. Now we are prosperous and forward-looking".Laurence says Falklands income is 40-million pounds a year from fishing, sheep-farming, tourism and investments. "All the old ?sheepocracy', local lore insists, have become millionaires".

Laurence writes that with the exception of defence, costing the United Kingdom 70-million pounds a year -- the islands run a subsidy-free economy. "The locals seems to think of themselves as in some way independent". He quotes Councillor Richard Cockwell as talking of the "need to get out from under the shoulder" of the Foreign Office and saying: "We run our own