MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Falklands 20th anniversary.

The 20th anniversary of the Falklands invasion has been overshadowed in the United Kingdom by the death of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, aged 101, which has dominated the newspapers and caused television and radio broadcasts to be comprehensively re-scheduled with hours and hours of coverage.

But the most ambitious and thought-provoking television documentary, Channel 4's "Falklands: When Britain went to war", had just started when the news broke and all two hours of it were shown.

With archive footage, this concentrated on what happened in the United Kingdom, and people's reactions, with interviews with political and other leading figures involved and also people from other walks of life.

Reviewers said it was fascinating to remember how the process unfolded day by day with the feeling that things would never be the same again. "It made a remarkable two hours, with our recent history coming back to slap us in the face". There was a feeling that the victory put the "Great" back into "Great Britain".

Government "folly"

There has been a spate of features in the newspapers, one of which carries the banner headline: "Labour snubs our Falklands heroes" with a picture of survivors of the bombing of the troop landing assault ship Sir Galahad.

The article complains that "the anniversary of the liberation of the Falklands will not be commemorated by the Government in any way".

As the Ministry of Defence also pointed out to Mercopress: "It is not normal to mark the 20th anniversary of events of this sort. We usually mark the 25th anniversary, the 50th and so on".

The article quotes Welsh Guardsman Simon Weston, badly burned on Sir Galahad, who, it says, has come to symbolise the bravery of soldiers in the Falklands and the horror they encountered. He says: "The people who count -- the people who fought -- will be celebrating .... the Government has committed a major folly as it will be unable to generate any kind of interest in five years -- it will have all been done".

"Remember the dead and wounded"

And a representative of the South Atlantic Medal Association, former paratrooper Dave Brown, says: "The 20th anniversary should be recognised... They should remember not only the 255 men who were killed fighting for their country, but also that around 900 were physically wounded and many more left with mental scars. It's easy for the Government to say they won't recognise the anniversary when they were not there going through what the lads did".

The media does point out t