MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Falklands' claim and multilateralism, CK's foreign policy punch

Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner before her speech in the Congress

”We once again call on the occupying country which in international forums plays as advanced and respectful that here (in Argentina) we still have a colonial enclave”, was incoming President Cristina Kirchner's, CK, direct reference to the Falkland Islands in her inaugural speech before Congress on Monday.

Without mentioning the United Kingdom once, Cristina Kirchner insisted that the colonial enclave situation of Malvinas has been repeatedly denounced before the United Nations "and it's time to comply with the mandate of the United Nations to which we all belong (Argentina and the UK)". The reassertion of the "unbending and indeclinable" claim over the Falkland Islands, "our Malvinas" came intelligently packaged in one of the four chapters Mrs. Kirchner's administration will be based on, more precisely the "international insertion" of Argentina chapter. According to Cristina Kirchner international insertion means the imperious need to rebuild multilateralism, by opposition to unilateralism that has turned the world "into a more insecure and more unfair place", which is a direct reference to US President George Bush foreign policy, and by extension to the UK, the US main ally in Iraq. Her words imply giving the United Nations a more active role which she argues has been eroded in the battle against what she describes as "global terrorism". "We Argentines have lived in 1992 and 1994 the attacks of global terrorism" she said in reference to the terrorist bombings of the Israel embassy and the oldest Jewish community association in Buenos Aires, AMIA, which killed hundreds and remain unsolved. But she warned that fighting terrorism "should not lead us to justify for fear of global terrorism, the commitment of global violation of human rights". "I don't subscribe to that equation both by conviction and political strategy, on the contrary I think it indorses and is functional to the targets global terrorism pretends to achieve". Finally Mrs. Kirchner said that those people who are sensitive to the human condition as well as intelligent "do not adopt such ideologies that imply the violation of human rights".