MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Facing a Falklands' fanatic at the Fourth Committee

Chief Minister Peter Caruana and Opposition leader Joe Bossano will soon appear before the UN Fourth Committee in New York.

That committee got its name in the 1940s when the UN was founded. It was the fourth of the six original committees, and charged with decolonisation. That was a major problem then. Many native peoples were still ruled by European colonial masters, with all the abuses that this involved. The World is different now. Decolonisation has largely been achieved. The UN is different too - as a result. With so many ex-colonies now UN member countries, it has a built in anti-Western bias – and the magic word "decolonisation" still gets knee-jerk support from them. This is the context in which Spain and Argentina pursue their respective objectives – Gibraltar and the Falklands. Here "decolonisation" really means creating colonies - of unwilling people. Spain knows very well that it ceded Gibraltar in July 1713 by the Treaty of Utrecht. It is now just abusing the UN system to try to reverse that. The UN has never been a tribunal of justice. It's a tribunal of influence. So its members merely pursue their own interests as best they can, and decolonisation has always been a good gravy train too. In fact, a Special Decolonisation Committee was created in 1962 to supplement the Fourth Committee's work. Many of its member countries were totally undemocratic, and that committee behaved so unreasonably, that most developed nations soon began to ignore its findings. Strange AlliesHistorically Spain and Argentina are strange allies. Spain's empire was enormous and probably the worst for human rights since Rome. Native Indians were worked to death all over Latin America. Millions died in the mines of Potosi. In what is now Argentina, the natives around Buenos Aires were exterminated fairly early on. Some survived in the North though thanks to the Jesuits. But they were expelled from the Spanish Empire in 1767 for doing just that – they had taken a particularly strong stand against abuse of the Indians in Mexico. The Spanish empire began to collapse during the Napoleonic Wars. As a result the European settlers in Argentina were able to decolonise themselves from Spain - by armed revolution. The Revolution of May was in 1810 and independence was effectively achieved by 1816. But the independent Argentines then continued the wars against the native Indians late into the 19th Century. The "Rifle Patria"What really allowed the Argentines to finish the natives off was the arrival of the Remington breach-loading rifle in the 1870s. This was a product of the leap in firearms technology caused by the American Civil War. Armed with it, the troops of Defence Minister Julio Roca had exterminated the Indians to the South of Buenos Aires by about 1878. Their victory is commemorated on the Argentine 100 peso note. This carries a famous picture from Museo Historico in Buenos Aires of Roca's officers celebrating on the Rio Negro. They had shot their way there with the Remington, probably killing about 50,000 Indians. Roca's troops also occupied Santa Cruz in 1878, putting an end to Chilean claims to much of Patagonia. The Remington went on to be called the "Rifle Patria", because so much of the "Patria", the Fatherland, had been acquired with its use. On the strength of his victories over the Indians, Julio Roca won the 1880 election and became president. In 1884, he took the first steps towards reviving Argentina's claim to the Falklands, which had really been dropped 34 years earlier by the 1849/50 Convention of Settlement. The Second World WarPeople alive today know how the struggle continued. Over Gibraltar, Franco began harassment in the fifties following the Queen's visit in 1954. In Argentina, a private pressure group, the "Junta de Recuperacion de las Malvinas" was formed in October 1939, just after the outbreak of the Second World War. There was a lot of sympathy for the Axis cause in Argentina, and the Junta hoped to exploit Britain's wartime difficulties to take over the Falklands. By the end of the war the claim to the Falklands was government policy. Peron extended it to Britain's other South Atlantic Islands and much of Antarctica [– Argentines now refer to the Graham Land Peninsular as "Tierra de San Martin", after their liberator, or "decoloniser" from Spain. The Malvinas Observatorio – Jorge ArgüelloJorge Argüello, Permanent Representative of Argentina to the United Nations, was elected Chairman of the Fourth Committee (Special Political and Decolonization) on 4 June. Mr. Argüello was appointed as his country's Permanent Representative in June 2007. Prior to that, he was a National Congressman from 2003, during which time he served as President of the Foreign Relations Committee and President of the Parliamentary Observatory of the Malvinas Question. He was also Vice-President of the Permanent Commission on International Peace and Security with the Inter-Parliamentary Union. Jorge Arguello was a National Deputy for the party 'Frente por la Victoria' which is known as the Kirchner family's branch of Peronism. Previously, Mr. Argüello served two three-year terms as a Legislator of Buenos Aires, from 1997-2000 and 2000-2003, respectively, having become a member of the Constitutional Convention for the capital in 1996. Between 1991 and 1995, he served in the National Congress, during which time he organized the first visits by British parliamentarians after the Malvinas conflict. Mr. Argüello represented Latin America in 1994-1995 at the Parliamentarians for Global Action, a network of more than 1,300 legislators from 117 parliaments engaged in a range of action-oriented initiatives to promote democracy, peace, justice and development throughout the world. Mr. Argüello began his Government career in 1987 as a member of the City Council of Buenos Aires. He has written numerous articles and books on political and citizen participation, and holds a master's degree in public administration and policy from the Universidad de San Andrés. He was born in Buenos Aires on 20 April 1956. Compared to Argentine behaviour over the Falklands, the Spanish claim to Gibraltar has been conducted relatively intelligently – not that I agree with it. But in Argentina the claim to the Falklands reached the UN in the 1960s – as, yes, you've guessed it – decolonisation. Then there was the war in 1982. Then there was ceaseless nonsense at the UN. Decolonisation was always the main argument. But something else happened more recently. In 2006, a group called the "Malvinas Observatorio" was founded by an opportunist politician and friend of the ruling Kirchner family. It was none other than Jorge Argüello. They soon used a traditional Argentine device – brainwashing schoolchildren. The Observatory circulated a pamphlet on the Falklands to each schoolchild in several provinces. It was full of historical errors, and embarrassed the Argentine historians who knew the facts. Jorge Argüello was made Argentine ambassador to the UN last year. That embarrassed many Argentines, and Argentine diplomats, too. They didn't think he was suitable. So that Committee is now led by the strongest sympathiser Spain could have hoped for. Peter Caruana and Joe Bossano will meet him in a few days time – and know who he is. So will everyone else. by Simon Arthur(Simon Arthur is the penname of a leading Falklands public figure).